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GabrielDuquette comments on Things you are supposed to like - Less Wrong
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Aesthetic judgment has no truth value in the sense that if I like something, it is not meaningful for someone else to say "You are wrong to like it." It may be meaningful for someone else to say "You think you like it, but you're wrong, you actually don't" -- which I think captures the dynamic you're concerned about in this post in some respects, and I think it's quite appropriate to be concerned about that and to want to avoid getting railroaded into thinking you like something that you really don't. But when I genuinely like something, there's just not any sense in which there is a truth or falsity condition to my liking. It's like our emotions -- there are always factual beliefs that condition our emotions, but various emotional states may all be reasonable responses to the same set of facts, because of the personal, individual element.
This is all somewhat distinct from the sense in which some things are widely and predictably liked by a lot of people. We say that someone has good taste when their judgment is a good predictor of others' judgment. These kinds of preference-clusters around some objects are about the closest we can get to saying that personal aesthetic judgments can be right or wrong. Nevertheless, the ultimate seat of aesthetic judgment is in the individual -- i.e., the brain that experiences an aesthetic object and determines whether I like it or not is my own, with whatever states and inputs it possesses that make up the judgment -- so I do say that actual aesthetic preference is neither true nor false.
I don't think I have "better" musical taste than anyone. I like a lot of music that lots of other people like, and I also like some music that very few people like and hate a pretty great deal of music that a lot of people like. None of this qualifies me to tell other people that they are right or wrong to like anything. Neither does my training in music performance and scholarship. When I perform music, I try to do it in ways that other people will like, and sometimes I get it right and sometimes I get it wrong, often hilariously wrong.
Musicology as a scholarly discipline has little or nothing to do with making aesthetic judgments, although most musicologists are guided to some degree by their aesthetic judgments in choosing what they'll work on. What distinguishes the profession is knowledge about music (its history, technique, and so on). I wrote a quick sketch of the kind of things academic musicologists do here, just a couple of days ago.
Initially I couldn't understand why you had such a low opinion of the "trainwreck" you linked to. But I think I've figured it out. Is it not so much that you can't use musicological data to create music that hits it intended mark, but that it's crude to lump all that mark-hitting into the category "good?"
To reply to this and your other comment at once, yes, this is one reason why I think it is so bad. A related idea is that I think that this obsession with a hypothetical ratability (however computationally intractable) of music fails to recognize that music is enormously wrapped up in culture. I'll try to explain why I think that's a fatal error. You and I agree that there are preference clusters around some pieces of music, but we interpret the existence of those clusters differently. To you, they suggest a kind of groping toward some as-yet-unseen aesthetic truth -- what we would like if we were like we are now, only better (coherent extrapolated aesthetic preferences?). To me, they are limited in their (even hypothetical) extent by both individual difference and by cultural difference -- preference clusters only crop up reliably among people who are relatively similar to one another and share a lot of cultural common ground. In my view, even if we were much, much better, smarter versions of ourselves, aesthetic judgment would continue to vary as widely as the combined variance of human cultures and the traits of individuals.
Another way of saying this is that music is a phenomenon created by so many aspects of culture and individual psychology, in such eclectic ways, that I don't think a mathematical model of our responses to music can be very much less complex than a complete mathematical model of the human mind, biology, and culture. When I see people pursuing approaches to music who see it as much simpler than that (like the aforementioned trainwreck), it's a dead giveaway that they don't know what they're talking about.
Even if we were much, much smarter versions of ourselves, intellectual judgment would continue to vary widely.
But there wouldn't be creationists.
Yes there would. Much, much smarter != freed from cognitive biases.
Granted there would be religious people, I do not think there would be creationists. Granted for the sake of argument a few people sufficiently smart are now creationists, were everyone that smart, the community of creationists might shrink until having such opinions about biology would be as isolating as analogous literalist Biblical opinions about the "four corners of the Earth". Absent a supporting community, only seriously deluded smart people, such as might also think themselves Napoleon, would be creationists.