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David_Gerard comments on Attempt to explain Bayes without much maths, please review - Less Wrong
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I'm intrigued because, for the past year or so, I've been thinking a lot about how to better define subjective aesthetic experiences. For example, I think that many times when someone says a piece of art is "good," they may be making a statement about its potential for enhancing their ingroup status, rather than about its potential for enhancing human well-being (by telling a difficult truth in a nuanced, complex way).
The meaning of "good" would be just the sort of thing I'd like to get from this. Not necessary the kind of good, but something that let me do something with how I feel about a given text's utility for a particular purpose. ("Text" in the PM jargon sense of "any subject matter whatsoever".)
I have vague ideas of turning star ratings (one to five stars) into numbers (say, 0.1 to 0.9). So three stars would mean 0.5, i.e. "I have literally no idea if this is good or not." Except that my prior for the value of any random record is 0.1-0.2, i.e. most music is rubbish. So this leads me to be wary of premature arithmetism - just because you have a system that lets you put a number on something in no way implies that you have any idea what the hell you're talking about. On the other hand, trying some numerical systems and seeing if any of them feel useful will obviously be necessary. While reminding myself that any given system may be completely full of shit. Welcome to the rabbit hole!
For some reason, it seems to me that music and the 2D arts have less low-hanging fruit in this regard. I suspect storytelling (novels, TV, movies) have more potential for an objective "good" standard, being that they have more of specific task to achieve. But even then, there are a lot of useful post-modern (two words I never thought I'd place back to back) ways of messing with the status quo. So maybe the question becomes "If you want to do X, here are some really reliable guidelines for achieving X." I'm not sure how much sense I'm making. Hmm. An example might be: The Wire and Law & Order are vaguely similar shows with different goals, but one could argue that the goal of The Wire is more nourishing for human beings. Like a salad made from veggies you grew yourself versus a fried Twinkie. Of course, a fried Twinkie has its post-modern perks, but ultimately it isnt good for you.