Comment on Making History Available

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 05:48:45 GMT

It can be derived with the additional assumption that the only reason a person would have for explicitly comparing things as different as "classical masterpieces" and Weird AI would be that aesthetic enjoyment is held by the person to be fixed-sum and uncompartmentalizable (i.e. they in effect had no choice but to make a comparison to Y when expressing enthusiasm for X). An assumption which in turn follows from the assumption that the person understands the signaling value of explicit aesthetic comparisons, and wouldn't want to send such a signal unless logically forced.

I suppose in retrospect the great-grandparent could be interpreted as a denial of the latter assumption. Alas.

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