Tanmay Khale on the decline in iconic songs over time (from my email)

https://x.com/wdavidmarx/status/1977162349107900770?s=46

A model that would explain this (which seems plausible to me for how judges generate these lists):

1. Come up with some metric for assessing works which is normalized such that the overall distribution is constant over time, usually by normalizing a metric that isn’t constant over time.

E.g. (a sports example) touchdowns scored by quarterback -> percentile of touchdowns scored by quarterback among currently active quarterbacks.

The metrics are less concrete for art, but I think people try to make similar adjustments in art as they do in sports (to make the distributions constant over time). The motivation that the judges would give for this is that one should assess each contribution based on how exceptional it was for its time.

2. Classing an achievement as “great” when it’s at least a certain percentile compared to whatever preceded it, by one of the metrics above. (“Oh wow, Johnson’s X was far more Y than anything preceding it, what an innovative work!”)

1. and 2. together will basically guarantee that you’ll have (by that definition) fewer great works over time; in the simple case where you’re looking for something that’s better than everything before it by some metric where the distribution is constant over time, the chance of observation n being better than everything preceding it is 1/n…

I don’t claim that judges are doing exactly this, but they only have to be doing some of this (e.g., their assessment criterion is 20% something like this) for it to lead to the behavior highlighted in the Twitter post!