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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?

#161

Post by ambrozk »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #49

Go to guy on this is Bourdieu. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bourdieu#Theory_of_capi... PG may say that his father pushed him in a different direction. But I suspect - like me - PG grew up with the cultural direction of the BBC and its mission to "inform, educate, and entertain." So if you were a bright curious kid your parents wouldn't necessarily be the ultimate authorities on culture and taste. There were o…

What you say is true, but there's something missing, which is that a working-class person who was extremely fashionable by the standards of their own class would, if transplanted into the world of penthousees in SOHO, figure out quite quickly how to tastefully decorate their house, how to dress to impress, and so on. And the same would be true of the penhouse asthete if transplanted into a working-class milieu. Some people are just better than other people at figuring out aesethic systems.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#162

Post by dec0dedab0de »

We don't realize how far we'd have to go if we discarded the concept of good taste, because we don't even debate the most obvious cases. But it doesn't just mean we can't say which of two famous painters is better. It means we can't say that any painter is better than a randomly chosen eight year old.

I don't have an answer for whether or not there is a universal good taste, but this argument is fundamentally flawed because it conflates skill and expression. Of course any practiced painter is going to be better at painting, but that doesn't mean that what they paint is tasteful.

That said, did anyone else get the feeling that pg got into the mushrooms before writing this?

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#163

Post by lifeisstillgood »

My take is that taste is a complex selection of trade-offs.

It is something we see a lot in software and (proper) engineering. I might have a taste on how to shard a database or pool connections, arrange workers off a queue. All of those come together to reflect a taste on how to build a complete system.

My taste will differ from others - the more dimensions we measure the easier / harder it is to find commonality. (This might be a lesson in politics)

The point being is that taste can be "wrong" - but only when looking at the desired goal. The goal for most art is self-expression. The goal for software systems might be monthly engagement. Its a lot easier to decide if engagement goes up and so judge taste in software design.

This does lead to the interesting point that one can "teach" taste ... through following a metric and iterating. And this is often the advice - paint lots.

But it does indicate that there is Good Taste. Its the taste that gets you to your goal. There may well have been painters like Pollock in Renaissance Italy, but they just starved to death before dripping much paint. And if there was only one "Good Taste" (what the Medici's liked) then there was a way to harness the greatest skill to that subset of Taste. Da Vinci may well have preferred abstract modernism, but he also preferred to eat.

Now it is possible for more ways to align skill with different tastes. So we have more good tastes. More groupings of trade offs.

And that is something i think we are seeing in software too. Open Source is one huge trade off that influences other things. Sort of like, Perspective.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#164

Post by dogleash »

beaconstudios wrote: post #74

nice to see the comment section is criticising PG for an extremely amateur take on sociology, aesthetics and art. I don't know why, but there's a fairly strong association between being in STEM and thinking that the humanities are easy and obvious and people study them just because they don't understand STEM. Thus we get blog posts like this, about how a reductio ad absurdum thought experiment is enough to resolve a…

>I don't know why, but there's a fairly strong association between being in STEM and thinking that the humanities are easy and obvious and people study them just because they don't understand STEM.

Sampling bias. The association exists because most that don't fit the stereotype keep their yap shut.

I'd say there's also plenty of STEM people that don't think humanities are easy nor obvious, but they interpret the outward appearance as something so far up it's own ass that they're just turned off from exploration of the field. But that's a popular take among non-STEM too.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#167

Post by beaconstudios »

dogleash wrote: post #164
beaconstudios wrote: post #74

nice to see the comment section is criticising PG for an extremely amateur take on sociology, aesthetics and art. I don't know why, but there's a fairly strong association between being in STEM and thinking that the humanities are easy and obvious and people study them just because they don't understand STEM. Thus we get blog posts like this, about how a reductio ad absurdum thought experiment is enough to resolve a…

>I don't know why, but there's a fairly strong association between being in STEM and thinking that the humanities are easy and obvious and people study them just because they don't understand STEM. Sampling bias. The association exists because most that don't fit the stereotype keep their yap shut. I'd say there's also plenty of STEM people that don't think humanities are easy nor obvious, but they interpret the outw…

I think it's an extension of the cultural idea that the hard sciences are more important than the soft sciences, which itself is because hard sciences are more empirical and we culturally value what we can measure more than what we can't.

FWIW, it's a broad enough problem that it has its own term - STEMlord.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#168

Post by karaterobot »

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…

There's no accounting for taste.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#169

Post by SubuSS »

Debug_Overload wrote: post #71
timdellinger wrote: post #67

Perhaps I'm under-informed here, but hasn't this all been covered by the philosophers who concentrate in Aesthetics? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetics

It's been my experience that if you read enough content online, you will realize that it's mostly people rediscovering old debates, and chiming in with what they think is new and insightful perspective which it usually isn't.

I think that’s a software engineering dilemma spilling out to the rest of the world: how many ‘new software’ have you seen that are just a rehash of something existing already!

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#170

Post by JohnWhigham »

tartoran wrote: post #145
sombremesa wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who determines that the wine is high quality? You’ve already established taste there, regardless of the wine’s taste.

At least ones that give you headaches could arguably be placed in the lower quality bucket? Or the ones that taste like vinnegar? But once the low hanging fruit is done with it becomes a subjective experience and the price becomes the differentiator.

And yet sommeliers can be regularly fooled in blind taste tests.
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