Why Effort Scales Superlinearly with the Perceived Quality of Creative Work
Abstract claim: The act of creation is fractal exploration–exploitation under optimal feedback control. When resolution increases the portion of parameter space that doesn't make the artifact worse (acceptance volume) collapses. Verification latency and rate–distortion combine into a precision tax that scales superlinearly with perceived quality.
When I make something good, I often spend most of my time making thousands of high-precision edits on an artifact that I thought should have been finished hours ago. Previously, I called this 'last-mile edits', but that was the wrong mental image.
"Last mile" implies executing a known plan with diminishing returns but "last mile" at one level just becomes "early exploration" at higher resolution at the next level. Instead of treating exploration (idea) and exploitation (execution) as temporally separated phases, they nest recursively. That nested search is where the effort goes.
Once you commit to D minor, this scene, that argument structure you've constrained the search space and now you search again within it.
Take some of my quicker five-minute, gestural sketches below. You'd think they break this nested search dynamic but with a closer look it becomes clear that I just front-loaded my taxes by caching motor heuristics.
Figure 1: A closer look shows the same set of practiced, comfortable gestures that click with my hand shape. They gravitate toward broad, confident circular strokes and shorter straight lines, just short enough to keep them stable. I'm executing cached heuristics, not exploring. I revert to face-like abstractions and focus on having the center hold. I do not like when *The Center Does Not Hold*.
Domains and modalities differ in how wide and forgiving their basins are and how quickly you can verify the edit (feedback latency). Music timing has a narrow basin at the micro-level (±20 ms can kill a groove) but can be more forgiving higher up: key and pitch changes can be interchangeable without loss of quality, not often though. Prose has a wide basin (many phrasings work). Abstract, contemporary art has extremely wide basin, so much so that nobody with any self-respect even bothers anymore. Renaissance paintings have more constraints and less distortion tolerance.
Modality Basin Verifier Speed Text (prose) Wide Human read Minutes Code Wide (design) / Narrow (syntax) Compiler/tests ms-seconds Music timing Narrow Ear–body ~20-40ms Line drawing Narrow Eye–hand ~100ms
Let's take the following optimization landscape and assume it's for the process of writing a song. To make it simpler, let's constrain like this: We've written the lyrics and picked a BPM of 80.
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