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Is there such a thing as good taste?

paulgraham.com

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Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#231

Post by sidpatil »

CyberRabbi wrote: post #70
abernard1 wrote: post #15

For once I agree with Paul Graham. I expect his post to be surprisingly unpopular with this crowd, as it sleights a core tenet of our postmodern age. Namely, he's arguing for a form of objective truth and of "the good". A statistical derivation of this good for sure (and qualitative as opposed to a Benthamist, quantitative utilitarianism), but a good nonetheless. But I applaud PG for taking this stance. Truth is not…

While you claim to oppose the postmodern idea that there is no truth, you’ve ceded the premise to the postmodernists by framing truth in their terms of objectivity and subjectivity. The success of the postmodernists was precisely to discredit all “subjective” truths by way of distinguishing them from “objective” truths, which no common person can deny. A stronger position is one that does not require the truth to be…

I'm not sure what you mean by the universality of math. There exist different algebras which define addition differently.

In the case of 2+2=4, this is formalized by the Peano axioms [1], which define addition of natural numbers. However, in tropical geometry [2], addition returns the minimum of the numbers, not their sum.

The author of the original tweet makes this point, and I strongly agree with it: https://twitter.com/ConceptualJames/status/12889571678449623...

As for 2.4 + 2.4 = 5, I think the tweet author is being a bit sloppy there in his explanation. But consider 0.1 + 0.2. Ask a human, and they'll tell you it's 0.3. Ask a computer, and it'll likely tell you it's 0.30000000000000004. The point is that in both scenarios, 0.1, 0.2, and addition are defined differently.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axioms

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_geometry

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#233

Post by fijiaarone »

msla wrote: post #157
slibhb wrote: post #118

I had the opposite conversation with my father. I claimed "there's no accounting for taste" and my father said "that's not true, you can claim Shakespeare isn't good but you're wrong". For judgements of taste, no one is better than Kant. I recommend this essay: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetic-judgment/ In Kantian aesthetics, judgements of taste are subjective (because they differ between people) but are…

> I claimed "there's no accounting for taste" and my father said "that's not true, you can claim Shakespeare isn't good but you're wrong". So Tolstoy was wrong? https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/lear/english/e_ltf > Tolstoy begins by saying that throughout life Shakespeare has aroused in him ‘an irresistible repulsion and tedium’. Conscious that the opinion of the civilized world is against him, he has made one at…

Tolstoy is free to try and top Shakespeare. To his credit, he tried his best, and did better than most, but didn't come close.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#234

Post by TimPC »

guerrilla wrote: post #139

> If there's no such thing as good taste, then there's no such thing as good art. No problem. > So if you want to discard the concept of good taste, you also have to discard the concept of good art. And that means you have to discard the possibility of people being good at making it. This skips a step. It assumes without argument that production skill corresponds to subjective preferences. There are many people who a…

It only assumes production skill is correlated it doesn’t require a perfect correspondence. I’d argue it is hard to have a meaningful concept of production skill that is either independent of or anticorrelated to taste. Yes production skill alone does not make the piece of art. But if it contributes in any way shape or form that’s enough to establish there is such thing as taste.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#235

Post by GoblinSlayer »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #191

It amazes me when people seem to lack taste. I'm not even saying the ability to rank items in a way that agrees to some general standard. I'm saying the ability to notice that there is even a difference. I'll talk about taste in the literal sense but this extends to everything. I remember being at a Chinese restaurant with some friends where we were eating scallion pancakes. I said, boastfully, that my family makes b…

No way, Jobs created phoneposters.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#236

Post by jl6 »

anm89 wrote: post #209
hardwaregeek wrote: post #191

It amazes me when people seem to lack taste. I'm not even saying the ability to rank items in a way that agrees to some general standard. I'm saying the ability to notice that there is even a difference. I'll talk about taste in the literal sense but this extends to everything. I remember being at a Chinese restaurant with some friends where we were eating scallion pancakes. I said, boastfully, that my family makes b…

This always bothers me specifically about music. I don't claim to have some universal say on what is good and bad music, there is tons of music out there which I think is tasteful but I simply don't like. But like 10% of music let's say is absolute garbage, mostly top 40 stuff made from cosntructed bands with some models as front men, written by a team constructed by a label to create the most generically likeable mu…

Part of the answer is that such people aren’t actually listening to the music. They are getting something else out of it, like using it as background noise, or just as a beat to dance to, or as in-group signaling, or maybe access to the culture associated with the music, or perhaps they are self-medicating with it, or maybe they are ogling the performer, or perhaps it reminds them of something positive that happened when they first heard it.

None of these uses require the music to be “good”.

Actively listening to music is a somewhat rare activity.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#237

Post by FourthProtocol »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #191

It amazes me when people seem to lack taste. I'm not even saying the ability to rank items in a way that agrees to some general standard. I'm saying the ability to notice that there is even a difference. I'll talk about taste in the literal sense but this extends to everything. I remember being at a Chinese restaurant with some friends where we were eating scallion pancakes. I said, boastfully, that my family makes b…

I would extend that to include behavior. Getting spannered at a frat party is hardly in good taste, whereas a glass too many at afternoon tea is, assuming you're able to limit the effects to a giggle.

Similarly taking a bite of food, then a sip of a drink, and then chewing with a semi -open mouth is in extreme bad taste.

We aren't just the art we wear or aquire. Our tastes position us in a social heireachy.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#238

Post by fijiaarone »

mojuba wrote: post #44
ethanbond wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is in the right direction but critical that it’s not interpreted as more novel = more better. There’s some sweet spot of novelty, which I actually would say is closer to surprise . In order to surprise someone, you must first build expectation (e.g. use elements other artists have used), then violate it.

Exactly, and I think the 21st century artists have pretty much figured it out already and it's why new art created these days removes the aesthetics and focuses on the surprize alone (Damien Hurst, Jeff Koons, etc.)

But in the last quarter of the twentieth century M. Peretz Bernstein posited successfully that the element of surprise had been exhausted in his seminal dissertation "Nothing's Shocking" - paraphrasing another Jewish scholar of some dozens of centuries before, a M. Solomon Davidson who poetically stated "There is nothing new under the sun".

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#239

Post by guerrilla »

TimPC wrote: post #234
guerrilla wrote: post #139

> If there's no such thing as good taste, then there's no such thing as good art. No problem. > So if you want to discard the concept of good taste, you also have to discard the concept of good art. And that means you have to discard the possibility of people being good at making it. This skips a step. It assumes without argument that production skill corresponds to subjective preferences. There are many people who a…

It only assumes production skill is correlated it doesn’t require a perfect correspondence. I’d argue it is hard to have a meaningful concept of production skill that is either independent of or anticorrelated to taste. Yes production skill alone does not make the piece of art. But if it contributes in any way shape or form that’s enough to establish there is such thing as taste.

> It only assumes production skill is correlated it doesn’t require a perfect correspondence

This is fair. As for the rest, I don't think you made your argument and I think a massive amount of emperical evidence contradicts that. Pop music, mass produced movies, memes, etc. It's all low effort shit and people love it more than anything else and avoid high-skilled art like the plague. We have a ton of statistics on this. If you try to claim they just don't have taste then you'd just be question begging at that point.

There's really no value in this entire discussion anyway. All it does is serve to reinforce elitism and all you get out of it in the end is being able to say that you're better at liking stuff than other people are liking stuff, which is pretty much kindergarten nonsense.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#240

Post by JoeAltmaier »

FourthProtocol wrote: post #237
hardwaregeek wrote: post #191

It amazes me when people seem to lack taste. I'm not even saying the ability to rank items in a way that agrees to some general standard. I'm saying the ability to notice that there is even a difference. I'll talk about taste in the literal sense but this extends to everything. I remember being at a Chinese restaurant with some friends where we were eating scallion pancakes. I said, boastfully, that my family makes b…

I would extend that to include behavior. Getting spannered at a frat party is hardly in good taste, whereas a glass too many at afternoon tea is, assuming you're able to limit the effects to a giggle. Similarly taking a bite of food, then a sip of a drink, and then chewing with a semi -open mouth is in extreme bad taste. We aren't just the art we wear or aquire. Our tastes position us in a social heireachy.

Agreed. That immediately can be followed up with: taste depends entirely upon the particular social hierarchy?

There are a lot of them, and we each participate in more than one. School, church, family, job and on and on.

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