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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   45539 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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I have to ask myself; was I, in turn, being pandered to in the previous eras of scifi in the same way that different demographics are being pandered to now? Am I just primed to like things featuring men or manly women set in space, or that feature nanotech and computers at the expense of character development or good writing? And honestly, the answer is probably yes. There probably is some cosmic Ginsbergian justice to Woke sci-fi taking over traditional awards ceremonies.

No. I think you can only reach this conclusion by essentially obliterating the notion of "quality" when it comes to fiction. This is something implicitly supported by woke fiction producers/critics who explicitly use "(imagined) downstream effects on how humans behave in society" as the measure of quality, but I don't think this is a reasonable position. There's no objective measure of "quality" in fiction, but it doesn't then follow that it's completely subjective and merely a question of who's being pandered to.

I would say that if there is no objective measure of quality, it does necessarily follow that quality is subjective. That's how the definitions of the words work, really.

I would say that if there is no objective measure of quality, it does necessarily follow that quality is subjective.

No—there are plenty of things for which there exists no adequate measure, but that are still objective facts. We can't objectively measure the size of the universe—it's way, way beyond our capacity, light cones notwithstanding—but it is still an obvious objective fact that it's really big.

Likewise it's pretty obvious that, say, 'clarity of writing' or 'passion' can't be objectively measured in any way that makes sense, but they do objectively exist. To deny this is to be philosophically lost in something like moral relativism. And while I admit that it's completely valid to say that meaning and quality are entirely subjective, I don't think it's true nor is it a particularly interesting worldview.

but it doesn't then follow that it's completely subjective and merely a question of who's being pandered to.

"completely subjective" is redundant. A thing is either objective or subjective. There's no such thing as "partially objective", that makes it subjective.

OK, I want to understand your perspective a little better. At this point, it's completely uncontroversially established science that speed is fundamentally subjective. Albert Einstein theorized as such, and experiment after experiment has proven him right on this point. According to your perspective, does it then follow that speed is completely subjective and, as such, whether or not a cheetah is faster than me when running on an African prairie is a completely subjective matter, one open to interpretation with no objectivity whatsoever?

To get away from a question of science, it's also pretty well established that "quality in being a soccer player" is subjective. We can use stats to get close to objectivity, but those stats are also largely determined by the player's teammates and opponents that stats can't get us all the way there. Does it then follow that the question of who is better at soccer, Lionel Messi or 07mk, a completely subjective one, with no way of determining a right answer other than just what answer appeals to whom the most?

I'm pretty sure this isn't true. If it is true, I'm pretty sure it would imply that objectivity doesn't exist, which isn't exactly helpful since it seems to collapse the whole discussion into an argument over semantics.

Why would it imply that objectivity doesn't exist?

because perfect objectivity doesn't seem accessable to humans. Anything that passes through our brains picks up subjectivity along the way. At the same time, people can be more or less objective in their thinking, and the two seem like they can mix in a great many ways. If you use subjective judgement to select objective elements, or vice versa, what do you have?

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