whnay.'s good taste thread - Page 248

When you know you are losing, you alway snark with "blah blah blah" and the like. I do honestly think it is a character defect to be this stubbornly argumentative in a losing, and worthless, cause. You have not only never admitted you might have been wrong about anything. You can't even concede that anyone else may have a point.

I’m going to make this very simple. Let’s leave out art and stick with biology, since it’s very close to universal and much less affected by subjectivity.

Physical attraction to members of the opposite sex is something that is hard-wired into around 96-97% of the population. Staying just with males, they are strikingly consistent in what they want from a potential mate. 1,000 men given any number of photographs of women to rate will rank them with amazing consistency. That is the strongest evidence for “objective aesthetics” there is that I know of.

Let’s define “ugly girl”—objectively aesthetically bad—as a 5 or below. Of those 1,000 men, chances are not one will rank such a girl in the top quintile or even top 3rd. Owing to variations in taste, some might be smitten by the occasional ugly girl, but that still doesn’t make her objectively pretty. Similarly, I sometimes see supermodels who do nothing for me but whom I have to concede are objectively pretty and whom I know that the vast majority of those 1,000 men will find pretty. But those models just aren’t to my taste.

The thing in itself is thus both subjective and objective at the same time. It’s subjective because there is no external measure beyond man’s response. The only measure of intrinsically pretty is the response of the crowd, the generality. But it’s also objective because the vast majority of men see it the same way.

It is therefore impossible that something can be objectively aesthetically bad but seen to be such by only one person. There is no other metric for objective aesthetics than what mankind generally finds attractive and unattractive.