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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?

#371

Post by b0rsuk »

tdrdt wrote: post #88

I think Christopher Alexander has a better answer to this question. He states that anything that is designed is good when love was put into it. People can taste this love. So it's more like: when love was put into it, it tastes good.

Counterpoint: Ed Wood loved making movies. His movies are often featured in worst movie contests. People told him he had no talent, but he still loved making them.

In a weird way, his movies are watchable. There are movies which are more painful to watch. But I think he's a good example that genuine passion is NOT ENOUGH.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#372

Post by d_burfoot »

The problem of taste is philosophically deep and relates to issues in epistemology that have only recently been resolved with new ideas from information theory and machine learning.

Part of the problem is about complex inductive processes. Human knowledge has encompassed simple deduction (Aristotelian syllogism), simple induction (P values, N=200 medical studies), and complex deduction (operating systems, compilers, etc). We are comfortable with how these systems of reasoning work.

But art relates to the fourth quadrant - complex induction, with billion-parameter models trained against enormous datasets. When a human says "I think this painting is beautiful, but that one is ugly", they are expressing something about the response of their visual cortex (a multi-billion parameter learning system) to a rich stimulus (say, 1 million pixels). With the advent of research like GPT-3, we can now build these systems, though we don't understand their properties very well. There is a lot more for us to understand here, both conceptually and technically.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#373

Post by GoblinSlayer »

robofanatic wrote: post #362
guerrilla wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better is just a word that means "more good", so I've already answered this. One simply subjectively prefers some art over other art. What people prefer (i.e. think is better) does not correspond to production skill, as I already argued.

without a 3rd person to judge or an already set criteria that dictates what is "good" and whats "not so good" art it's impossible to tell who chose the better art out of those 2 people.

There's no 3rd person. It's first person judgement. The 3rd person and criteria must be judged too, so in the end it all boils down to first person judgement.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#374

Post by renlo »

Put another way, "good taste" is like universal ethics. There's no such thing as "universal taste" (as in, God did not ordain something to have the quality of "good taste"), but, most people can agree that they like a thing (an "agreement of taste"). Former doesn't exist but latter does. Tastes shift over time indicating that a "universal taste" doesn't exist.

When the term "good taste" is used though, it seems to allude to "universal taste". I don't think people mean "what everyone likes" ("agreement of taste") when they refer to "good taste", otherwise all of the "gaudy" leopard-print clothing of yesteryear would be "good taste". "Good taste" means, to most people, "rich people value this, for whatever reason"

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#375

Post by Barrin92 »

>"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 is I think the central argument of the piece and I think it is very wrong. He conflates the notion of goodness in a teleological sense with proficiency. When people talk about good or bad taste they try to make an objective claim about the purpose of art, that's to say what end a piece of art serves, or to judge the quality of what it ultimately expresses.

You can be 'good' in the sense of proficient on utterly meaningless tasks. Someone can memorize ten thousand digits of a random sequence. You can be good or bad at it, and we can objectively figure out if you are, but the task isn't objectively meaningful.

To say that there is no good or bad taste is to say there is, ultimately no non-subjective standard for a piece of art. This does not imply that any subject that produces art cannot be judged on their merits by their own standards.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#376

Post by lhorie »

JohnFen wrote: post #361
lhorie wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better-ness IMHO is a function of expectations. Playing Dream Theater as ambient music in your restaurant is arguably in "bad taste", despite the art itself being technically on virtuoso level, and often being considered "good art" outside of that context. Liking pop music is often snobbishly seen as having "bad taste" in music, even in the face of it being wildly popular, and sometimes even actually interesting from…

Things are only better or worse than other things when comparing specific attributes. Something can be better looking, better functioning in some specific way, and so forth. "Better" and "worse" overall are necessarily subjective assessments. Is that piece of garbage car worse than a high-end one? By some measures, yes. But if your criteria include "being the least expensive", then no, it's not.

Exactly. I find that using art of all things to make an argument about good taste is particularly ironic, given that historically, art has always been a vehicle for shaking the status quo.

I mean, look at Andy Warhol or Banksy or Robert Rauschenberg or Bill Watterson or any of hundreds of examples that clearly fall way outside the "Renaissance = good" bubble.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#377

Post by notpachet »

motohagiography wrote: post #205
tompccs wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is very wrong, and the foundation of modernism in art and architecture (which is to say, you are wrong in a very unoriginal way!) The Greeks used all sorts of forced perspective tricks in their architecture. Columns aren't equally spaced and lines aren't straight, but when viewed by a human observer at ground level the buildings built to Greek aesthetic rules appear "nicer" than those built to pure geome…

I replied to another comment related, but the anti- version of modernism is of course post-modernism, where nothing is real and everything is mainly its symbolic value. The conceit of that argument is that aesthetics are somehow trivial because anyone can appreciate them but very few can produce them - whereas you take anything post-modern and everyone can produce them but almost nobody can appreciate them sincerely.…

> criticism is equivalent to competence

I think we're seeing the consequences of this sort of postmodern thinking playing out "in the field" today. Everyone's an expert, so no one is. Everyone's an armchair epidemiologist. We aren't ignorant or ill-educated, we're "just asking questions".

There's something there that I can't put my finger on regarding the poisonous way we promise everyone that they can be anything. You, too, can earn $10k a month in your underwear via dropshipping. You, too, have the world's information at your fingertips, so nothing's keeping you from being an expert! You, too, can produce professional-quality video; all you need is the latest iPhone. And so on. I think it generates a lot of unspoken societal resentment towards people who are actually good at these things, because people who fail to reach that level of skill after 30 minutes are implicitly made to feel like they're doing something wrong.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#378

Post by elcamino44 »

airstrike wrote: post #303
motohagiography wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I replied to another comment related, but the anti- version of modernism is of course post-modernism, where nothing is real and everything is mainly its symbolic value. The conceit of that argument is that aesthetics are somehow trivial because anyone can appreciate them but very few can produce them - whereas you take anything post-modern and everyone can produce them but almost nobody can appreciate them sincerely.…

At the risk of simply repeating what countless others have said elsethread, I must say I thoroughly enjoyed reading your comments on this discussion. You've managed to scratch a mighty itch that's been bothering me for a long time. I finally have somewhat of a framework to think about it a little more, and I have you to thank for that. In particular, this bit is pure gold: > I think po-mo thinkers exist in a simulati…

I agree that it’s an important and persuasive point (and well made!) but I’d also argue that it’s not true that the simulation entirely disappears in those moments. There’s definitely _something_ like that going on, but sometimes once the flash of adrenaline is over the simulation returns and your aesthetic experience physical and real quickly resumes its relationship to the convoluted web or narratives and signs that are proposed to construct the world of meaning. And perhaps more and more experiences that we think should be “real” (eg: parents watching their children at play) are instead becoming further entangled in this web.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#379

Post by ryanyde »

The piece just seems to fully encapsulate Silicon Valley Hubris. It's amazing that he thinks he's settled a debate on 'quality' or 'taste' with a logical argument, and that people consider this an 'objective' answer to the question.

The rhetorical trick is one that many have pointed out: 'technically' superior is - in fact - easy to recognize. That doesn't mean that objective judgment of technique is synonymous with taste.

"Taste" in that sense becomes something more about having a pulse on how humans will ingest certain ideas. You can have an intuitive understanding of this in a given time and space (creatives get paid a great deal to do this). But that has nothing to do with 'taste' as an objective quality metric, it has to do with how humans will perceive or interact with an object.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#380

Post by jacobolus »

lexapro wrote: post #287
jacobolus wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> friend remarked that he didn't think there was any difference, that indeed all scallion pancakes were exactly alike to him. This is entirely plausible. If you are used to eating some food regularly over the course of decades, you will be able to discriminate between good vs. mediocre versions. If you have only eaten a food a few times, the most relevant comparisons will be with other types of food, and you won’t ne…

>When compared to pizza, tacos, or bagels, all scallion pancakes are pretty similar. Bad example, as most pizzas _are_ pretty similar. And in my opinion the best pizzas are not too different from average pizzas. And yes, I had a lot of pizzas in my life, in Naples and elsewhere.

I think you misunderstand me.

What I mean is: when an inexperienced person compares a scallion pancake to a pizza, or compares a scallion pancake to a taco, the two foods are obviously very different. But when an inexperienced person compares a mediocre scallion pancake to a great one, eaten on different days, it may be hard to remember the differences.

Likewise, someone has rarely eaten pizza might consider a good Neapolitan pizza to be broadly similar to a Domino's pizza, whereas someone who has pizza all the time will notice many differences between the two.

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