Can you give me an example of a work that is loved by 95% of the population but which you think might be arguably "bad" on a technical level?
Not really - genuinely terrible-all-round stuff doesn't get popular. Harry Potter is known for not having great prose but good story, Fate Stay Night has terrible prose but good story, Higurashi had terrible art until they remade it (look it up if you're interested) but good story etc. I'm mostly pointing out that 'technical skill' is not a good indicator of popularity and therefore of 'goodness' by my lights beyond a base level.
By my own definition, I don't think something almost universally beloved can be bad. The idea that one can 'snooker' people into liking something that is actually bad seems like a confusion of terms to me. Of course, if one says something like, "Potter's plot is great, everyone loves the plot" then we are in a fully circular realm.
When you conflate bauhaus and brutalism with immigration, you kind of lose me. Bauhaus and brutalism are not to my tastes but I've seen works of both that I thought were pretty good and I am unconvinced they are some deliberate construct imposed on the masses by the same elites who do all the other social things you disapprove of.
Did you read that one famous debate between architects where the Bauhaus guy basically said, "I love disharmony, I love that I can put it in the middle of the city, and if the vast majority of people find it uncomfortable that is their problem not mine"? On immigration, my brother has a genuine preference for both brutalist architecture and the parts of London that I find extremely culturally uncomfortable, he actively enjoys the strong non-Britishness of it all. I'm genuinely trying to take his expressed preferences and those of @Primaprimaprima and Ozy seriously and at face value.
I tried to be clear that I wasn't writing a polemic or positing a malevolent conspiracy, it's just that the people broadly in control of the culture genuinely have preferences that can't be publicly satisfied without making lots of other people unhappy as a side effect. There's other stuff going on, economics and technological changes and so on, but I believe that the taste incompatibility is a hugely understated influence on what has become the Culture War and it's why these questions have been bubbling up with increasing frequency lately. Scott's essays, the failed efforts by both the UK conservatives (Build Back Better) and Trump to enforce building styles that are popular against furious institutional resistance, and so on. I'll also say that the idea that much of this stuff arises from an unfortunate incompatibility is much, much more charitable than the position I held when I started thinking about this a decade ago.
I do think to some degree there is such a thing as "objectively" good and bad art, but that is mostly in the realm of technical skill, and perhaps to a lesser degree, does it accomplish what it intended?
How do you feel about popularity? As a very simple toy model, say that society's tastes as judged by 'this is bad', 'this is good' boil down to a predictable 95%/5% split of obligate normie vs. obligate edgy. Lots of room for individual preferences within that, but basically two clusters of markedly disproportionate sizes.
Would you accede to the proposition that a work of art which is loved by much or most of the 95% is 'objectively good' and one which disgusts and repels them is 'objectively bad'? To my mind, whether a given work will delight the vast majority of people seems like a far better indication of its quality than technical skill or whether it accomplished what the artist wanted.
Personally, I've enjoyed lots of things that were technically bad - everyone dunks on Rowling's prose, the art for Higurashi is genuinely terrible, etc. And I have relatively little interest in whether the artist succeeded in his wish to discomfort and repel me (tragedy is a bit more complicated) vs. failing to please me if the result is repellent.
it's telling that most of the critique seems to come not from a genuine analysis of the work, or even a particular dislike of the style, but because of culture war reads.
I think you have this exactly backwards. This is the Culture War. It's the beating core of the culture war, far deeper in many ways than immigration or politics. For complex reasons, in the West a group of extremely unrepresentative people rose to control of the beating organs of our society including but not limited to the arts and the universities. They enjoy disharmony, extreme novelty, and 'modernism' for lack of a better word, and their tastes are broadly genuine but anti-correlated with the tastes of the vast majority of the population. To please and delight themselves, they acted in a semi-coordinated way to move society towards what pleased them, aided by the cultural and literal razing of the two world wars. The built environment (bauhaus and brutalism), the social environment (immigration, the more culturally dissimilar the better), etc. This wasn't necessarily malevolent in intent, though it was sometimes selfish. Often they thought of themselves as uplifting the normies, albeit by force. However, they completely overlooked or even applauded the long term psychic damage it did to the normies who were forced to live in their world and to bow to their tastes thanks to their control of the institutions.
Contrast with Japan, which has certainly changed over the last 150 years but in which normies remain firmly in charge, and with even the very early Marxists. (Marx himself once said that the point of Marxism was to give every man the privilege of being a hunting, shooting, fat, happy aristocrat.)
TL;DR: The binary of objective vs. subjective obscures that you can have a 'subjective' question where 99.9% of people agree. It's not objective in the way that 'the sky is blue' is objective, one can perfectly well hold the opposing opinion without being mad or evil. Nevertheless, it doesn't seem to me to be particularly subjective in the, 'what's better? no way to say, really...' way where we have to abandon audience reaction and go for something explicitly relativistic like 'is the author skilled at doing this thing that almost everyone hates?'.
Corvos
20hr ago
Right, but at the moment it's largely funded with public money for the edification (theoretically) of the public. Especially if you go beyond visual art to the other inbred arts (theatre, poetry, literature as opposed to bestsellers, much architecture).
I broadly agree with your diagnosis - I've watched e.g. Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation go from having relatable, good recommendations to really much more of 'does this reanimate some spark of life in my breast' and he even disavowed many of his original recommendations that were too normie because he thought they were dull in retrospect. But the weirdos need to be given their own private space to work and we need to acknowledge that they're weird and shouldn't be doing things for the general public.
Corvos
23hr ago
Market-Dominant Minority iirc. Basically locally economically successful despite being politically and literally a niche group.
Corvos
2d ago
I think usually, “if it still hurts in a couple of days, or if you can’t move it properly (not because it’s stiff)”.
Primary might be better than sole, but I'd still add bonding and pleasure into the top 3 of the telos of sex. And I think there is ample historical and anthropological evidence to support that being the case throughout history and cultures.
Sure, though different cultures would certainly dispute the circumstances under which that bonding and pleasure are intended to apply.
With respect, you seem to be flattening a perfectly sensible argument, viz. "sex fairly regularly makes babies, if you are terrified of having babies then don't do the thing that regularly makes babies" into "Ha! Don't you see you're identifying biology with morality?! And if you don't accept this arbitrary list of repugnant conclusions that I have drawn up, then you must be a hypocrite."
Sex fairly regularly produces foetuses ->
Foetuses regularly develop into babies absent molestation ->
At some point in this process - opinions vary on which point - everyone agrees they acquire rights that must be taken into consideration alongside yours ->
Therefore if you are really determined to protect your freedoms, you would be best advised not to begin this chain.
One doesn't have to be a hypocrite or to swallow a dozen repugnant conclusions to see this, only able to accept the basic nature of cause and effect. From where I am standing, the only real reason I can see to deny some level of personal responsibility is a firm conviction that complete sexual freedom is such an important and wonderful thing that nothing must ever cloud or impinge it in the slightest.
If you're interested in discussing how we trade off the rights of the unborn at various ages, the pleasure and freedoms of people having sex, etc. etc. I've given some thoughts elsewhere but we certainly can.
It's being forced to participate in a blatant, obvious lie that literally every human being in history except 5 weird tribes in the middle of nowhere would recognise as a lie.
If it were publicly sayable and reified that trans people are insane and think they're the wrong gender, the existence of trans people in the vicinity would be broadly okay. One would feel sorry for them, but not necessarily feel compelled to say so to their face. The fact that there has been a vast activist-indoctrination effort to punish people who don't play along is what people find uncomfortable.
I've discussed before elsewhere but it's incredibly unpleasant to interact closely with a trans person in a Blue workplace, consciously choosing every day to lie because you're a coward who's afraid to be thrown out of the program you've invested years of work into, dreading the day when you slip up and absent-mindedly call the squeaky-voiced 5ft person who was a girl six months ago 'her'.
That may be true for many other fetishes but I've literally never heard any guy express a desire for that kind of play. Every time you hear about it, it's always the girl pushing for it. I think society finds this awkward so it gets blamed on the men.
Corvos
3d ago
More than some, less than others, I don’t know. Personally I think that foetuses are pretty human by the end of the second trimester and consider it broadly more appropriate for abortion to stop somewhere around the end of the first trimester.
You asked the more specific question of whether pregnancy can be considered the primary telos of sex from any viewpoint other than a Christian one and I’m just saying that as a biologist it seems very obvious to me and did long before abortion flared up as a public flashpoint (which it mostly still hasn’t in the UK).
Corvos
3d ago
Any biologist? Yes, sex in humans doesn't result in pregnancy literally every time, but it's the regular natural outcome and the prime evolutionary purpose of its existence. It takes considerable contrivance in terms of decades of biochemistry and materials science to prevent regular sex resulting in pregnancy, and sometimes even then sometimes that contrivance fails.
It's like exploring flooded caves or BASE jumping off buildings - it's not meant to go wrong, but everyone knows it sometimes does, and the only reason you're at risk is because you enjoy the activity enough to put aside the possibility of failure. Most people don't want such high risk and consequently don't do those activities.
No, she’s saying, “how far did we fall, that the right to kill your own baby in the womb on demand is considered to be the most important right a woman needs, the main thing that distinguishes women from chattel?”.
You may disagree with the framing, of course. Personally, I am more sympathetic to the pro-abortion side than Here and think the Euros (but not the UK or Anglo countries) have it broadly correct. First 8 weeks or so it’s not really human in any meaningful biological way IMO. After that period is ended the right to abort should, aha, terminate.
In anglo countries we seem to have got into this weird maximalist position where if you can’t kill a baby a month before birth then you are a slave, the baby has no rights until literally the moment it’s squeezed out of the vagina, and the whole thing is celebrated and glorified in a way that is very weird from the outside - a miscarriage is a tragedy but a late stage abortion is a beautiful assertion of the right to one’s body. I get the reasoning but it’s a bit much.
Corvos
5d ago
What I mean is that as a semi-advanced Japanese learner, it sounds like the best way to play is in Japanese where translation quality is not an issue and you have to go by real cultural nuance / in-depth understanding to figure out the answers. It's very rare to find something that is a) not targeted at (beginner) learners, b) not novels and novels worth of text as in an RPG, c) requires specific attention to the language at a level deeper than 'can I work out vaguely what is going on', and d) provides feedback about whether you got it right.
In theory it sounds great for an intermediate to advanced learner. Do you actually get any feedback, or do you have to do all 3000 and pray?
Corvos
5d ago
Now THAT's a Japanese learning game!
Is 'masochism game' a generally used term? It made me think of Viscera Cleanup Detail.
Corvos
5d ago
Nothing, I guess, if they really do have that ability. I would dispute equating "conducting a sneak-assassination of the entire leadership plus an extended bombing campaign, aimed at some combination of overturning the country's government + preventing them from developing weapons that might actually hurt their attackers" with "getting into a scrap". But yes, if India did that and Pakistan succeeded in closing the Strait of Hormuz, I would naturally blame India.
is this the first known instance of Nobel Disease developing in someone who didn't win a Nobel prize?
No, I think this is a different phenomenon. Humans anthropomorphise, and for various reasons LLMs have been made very easy to anthropomorphise. The Turing Test basically gets at what a normal person's definition of 'human' is, and LLMs basically pass it, so as a response people have started splitting into one of a few groups:
- People who interact closely with LLMs on a technical level and see the increasingly small gaps in the models themselves, or see the gaps in the simpler versions of the models and extrapolate up.
- People who interact closely with them on a less-technical level and bond with them.
- People who see something that has many of the qualities who traditionally consider human and ascribe all of the qualities we consider human.
- People who pattern-match to sci-fi narratives about 'robots becoming human', either in a positive way or a negative way.
- 'AI will not replace us, nerds are thieves who make inferior copies of us' people who will never assign intelligence to an AI no matter what.
All of this will only get more complex as discussion about AI continues to feed back into the training data for AI. It was a pretty notion but I'd like to slap the guy who thought SOUL.md was a good place to begin making AI workers.
TL;DR: Dawkins is saying this because he's gone normie, not because he's gone weird.
Corvos
6d ago
The point is that forcing somebody to do something and then blaming them for doing it is petty and sadistic.
If somebody controls an important pass, and you slaughter their family and make it clear that you will continue to slaughter until you get unconditional obedience, then closing off the pass is the obvious and natural response.
Some Americans seem to have got so fed up with being criticised unreasonably that they have lost the capacity to see when they are being criticised reasonably. Others seem to believe that Red Americans (as opposed to the hated Blues) can do no wrong and should be acclaimed throughout the world as the righteous God-Kings they obviously are - or else.
Corvos
6d ago
She also broadly abandoned him once she got rich and powerful, if memory serves.
Corvos
6d ago
People like Nerd Fitness regularly try. The problem with gameification is that games themselves have to be at least a little bit fun, especially if you want people to play them long-term. This is much harder to do for things that are (broadly) inherently dull and painful such as tax returns* or learning theoretical physics than for things like shooting monsters or looting dungeons. See for instance the game made by the guy who just tried to kill Trump - to the extent that it accurately represents and tries to teach particle physics, it's much less fun than another game would be using similar mechanics without the baggage.
There are other issues - gamified approaches have to put aside lots of extra time for the 'game' part so they aren't very efficient. If you have to play a periodic table board game for a week's worth of evenings where you could get the most important bits of info from a slide, a 30 minute lecture and a test, that's not necessarily an improvement.
*yes, I know about the XKCD.
Corvos
7d ago
I mentioned your description of the KV-2 to my Dad the WW2 enthusiast and he suggested you look up the French Char B1 bis at the Battle of Stonne, which took 140 hits defending a chokepoint and destroyed 13 Panzers and 2 anti-tank guns.
Corvos
8d ago
Your Two Minutes Hate quote from Nabokov is great. I've noticed myself that I often prefer the clunkier fan translations of Japanese visual novels to the elegant modern localisations, especially that of Fate Stay Night where the writing is fairly execrable at least in English. Lots of repetition, fragments, and clunky sentences - "People die when they are killed." - but there's an interest to it that gets lost in the polished remake.
Corvos
8d ago
Democrats who could convincingly project moderate positions on these social issues -- that are not assumed to be covers for more extreme positions -- would be popular. This would give Democrats lots of room to push their economic agenda, which is broadly popular. Democrats could have healthcare, tariffs, and infrastructure. This is basically what someone like Josh Shapiro did. A national platform along these lines would probably be very successful. In fact, I think if Democrats had adopted something like this all along they would never have lost to Trump in the first place.
This is basically the Tony Blair approach to government, and indeed it worked gangbusters for 15 years.
Perhaps I'm still not expressing myself well, but I would also ask you to read a little more charitably. I am not talking about 'the Left'. The Left is maybe 30%, 40% of society. It comprises people who believe in socialist economic theory, people who believe that social hierarchies need to be rejigged, unionists, feminists, ethnic minorities, all sorts of people who have a reason to want society to change in certain ways that they believe are good in general or good for them in particular. Lately it also includes a certain number of temperamental conservatives, because certain left-wing causes have been causes long enough to become the status quo, as in Scott's essay "Gay Rights are Civil Rites".
I am talking about a much smaller group of people, perhaps 5-10%, who seem to have tastes that are broadly anti-correlated with the majority of people. That does not mean that the defining characteristic of their tastes is "upsets people". I'm not really equipped to say what the defining characteristic of their tastes are, because I don't share them and I don't have the right equipment to pick up what they pick up. If you haven't, please do read Ozy's essay, where she explains her viewpoint much better than I can. Just in case, I will quote:
This cluster of people have, for the last hundred years or so, clustered on the Left and been disproportionately represented at the top of cultural institutions. They are clustered at the top of cultural institutions because their tastes have broadly become the marker of what culture is, and they have historically been clustered on the Left partly because 'changing things' is what you want to do when your aesthetics are unpopular and not established, and when you have a far-greater-than-normal hunger for novelty. Partly also because their aesthetics have generally dictated the aesthetics of the Left in the non-Soviet countries, and therefore the Left is the champion of their aesthetics. Chicken, egg; egg, chicken.
To some degree, the affiliation with the Left may change, because the Left has got rather more boring as it's got more powerful and more established, which is why you see some of the 'obligate edgy' like perhaps Walt Bismark moving to the alt-right. I don't think that will take, long term, but I don't know for sure.
The reason I bring up immigration is because there while are a lot of economic arguments and non-aesthetic on the pro- side, as someone who has spent a lot of time in university towns and known a lot of pro-immigration people, there is also a deep, fundamental hunger for new, different culture on your doorstep. Often this coincides with a boredom and a certain repulsion towards the culture of their birth. Take the recent Iran and Palestine rallies for example. I know some people who don't really express a strong opinion on the issues but they love that they're happening. It's historical! You can go and watch people shouting and yelling in Arabic and it's like being in a different country. So I note in various different fields a strong desire for alien-ness and I believe it's a very underappreciated driver of the cultural conflicts that have been happening over the last 100 years.
EDIT: just to quickly address your other point.
Yes. I don't think 'technical goodness' beyond a base level, as measured by technical experts, is very predictive of popularity. Indeed, I think in many areas it's smuggling popularity through a back door. What makes Harry Potter's plot so good? Well, the characters are written in a way that makes people care for them, and events are written in a way that excites people...
In something like poetry, where people supposedly have much finer sensibilities for technical skill, we find that the most lauded poets are generally considered execrable by the majority of people while Britain's favourite poem is 'If' by Kipling who is regarded by those in the know as a hack.
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