aesthetics

[rpm]

this is a thread where i attempt to lure wuf in to to explain to me why he claims aesthetic judgement/preference is remotely objective, without derailing the thread in which he said it. because i'm interested in the topic. anybody else is most welcome to chime in on the topic or tell me i'm a loser because this topic is for losers or because i didn't provide a hilarious picture from the internet in one of the popular internet funny picture formats

[wufwugy]

If aesthetics was 100% subjective, it would mean that there are no commonalities. It would mean Linda Cardellini isn't hotter than Kathy Bates because everybody would have an opinion that is completely their own and samples of opinions wouldn't present significant sensibilities beyond others.

But this is clearly not the case. There are clearly many ways in which humans agree on aesthetics. Everything from sensibilities on facial patterns to nature scenes, from theatrical presentations to literary illustrations. The entire ~2500 year history of theatrical entertainment has more similarities in aesthetic qualities than differences, irrespective of medium differences from stage to cinema. Oedipus The King and The Wire are both Greek tragedies, yet were created 2500 years apart in vastly different cultures using as different of media forms as have existed in civilization, but they both play by the same principles of plot, character, theme, music, etc. They share more commonalities of aesthetics than they do differences.

The question is to what degree and in what ways aesthetics is objective/subjective. When I say that the Batmans have shitty female characters, it's because the Batmans have demonstrably shitty female characters according to how well the female characters evoke any array of emotional and intellectual responses from the audience. I'm not even arguing for unrealistic portrayals of female characters being aesthetically bad. The comic genre demands that female characters fit a certain archetype and phenotype, and comic writers that have strayed from them have learned why they can't stray from them and remain successful. But within the genre's sensibilities towards female characters, there is still great aesthetic potential. They play pivotal roles and elicit specific and strong reactions from the audiences. But the Batman women didn't do this. Not only were they not good characters according to what comics think of as good female characters, but they were even worse characters according to what other genres think of as good characters. The Batman women were nothing other than the Hollywoodized embellishment of flashy spectacle, vapid attributes and motivations catering to male audiences stuck in a society drenched by sexual puritanism.

This doesn't mean that people aren't allowed to like them and think they're good. People are capable of thinking The Wire sucked, but they're also capable of being wrong. The confusion is that people think aesthetics is simply opinion, but the truth is that aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with what beauty is

Kaylee had more reason to be who she was in the world of Firefly in just one episode than Maranda, Cabbagepatch Face, and Batchick had in the entire trilogy.

[eugmac]

things like the golden ratio seems to imply a universal concept of beauty as well. the ratio also happens to occur often in nature. also related is how different musical intervals (the distance between one pitch and another) evokes universal emotional responses regardless of cultural background. major chord is associated with happy, minor with sad. tritones are dissonant and cause tension.... and this can be explained through physics and how the waves interact with one another. fascinating topic.

[boost]

Objective Aesthetic Fact: Earthworm Jim should be made into a rated R movie.

[Vi-Zer0Skill]

you've read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance right? I think the concept of Quality applies to our individual aesthetic preferences (i.e. there exists some universal criteria for determining that something is aesthetically pleasing)

[rpm]

@eug, im singling out your example because i'm music-minded and particularly un-knowledged (and coincidentally currently quite drunk) about the majority of modern pop culture. so. i certainly agree that i could ascribe certain qualities or feelings to certain intervals or chords. obvious ones are the ones you mentioned. but i'm not convinced that the "happiness" i hear in a major triad compared to a minor is actually inherent in the distance between those 3 pitches and not just conditioned in me because i grew up in a modern western culture in which music revolves around these shapes. elaborating, if i was having this conversation 300 years ago i would find the tritone interval to be the most unpleasing combination of sounds imaginable (because it's satan's interval blah blah etc). however, many of my favourite musicians use, often abuse, tritones and dissonant (hope that's the right word, don't know a great deal of theory) sounding chords/phrases which i think sound great. seems to me it's culturally relative (hence subjective).

i guess there's a difference between sounding happy/nice and sounding aesthetically pelasing. i cant refute the fact that the intervals you mentioned evoke the responses you mentioned, though i'm completely unaware of the physics you referred to. however, i've heard terrible pieces of music using only I IV and V chords and i've heard pieces of music i really like which use some horrendous and sometimes discomforting sounds. and vice versa. i'm not sure how to explain or understand this distinction between sounding "nice" and being aesthetically pleasing.

@wuf. i'm not ignoring your post im just drunk enough not to be able to pay attention to posts that long and referring actresses i don't know anything about at the moment.

[rpm]

@wuf, ok after reading your post it seems we agree a lot more than i anticipated, except i still cant get my head around the part where you say people's personal tastes can be proven right or wrong. you seem to accept at least to some degree that it is an entirely culturally-relevant and dependent phenomenon (implies subjectivity to me but i could be wrong) and then you go on to say that something can be objectively defined as good or bad by how well it fits the mould of what it's viewers define as "good" or "bad" aesthetics (in your example where you attempt to determine the objective quality of the portrayal of some female character)?

that's as best as i could understand your post in my current state. i'll definitely come back to it later. feel free to pick that apart and tell me where i'm misunderstanding or why i cant seem to get that you (seem to, i'm probably misinterpreting) imply complete cultural relativity in your example of what is good or bad aesthetics, and yet claim it is factual and that someone can have an opinion different to yours, but they'd be wrong.

ps hope that post doesn't come across as personal criticism or some claim to knowledge of the truth behind this matter. certainly not intended to be

[eugmac]

true, happy/sad has nothing per se to do with whether the result is beautiful. just saying, certain objectively measurable things like distances between notes or proportions of sides of rectangles seem to carry inherent qualities that evoke the same response in most people. anyway aesthetics isn't just what is beautiful - art can be ugly and grotesque and still be gripping and have an artistic purpose. so, what i'm saying is that such elements that have inherent pretty/ugly/happy/sad/exciting/dreamy/etc characteristics are tools to be used to express whatever an artist is trying to convey.

true, dissonances like tritones were at the beginning of european musical tradition basically banned because it's so dissonant, but gradually it became a tool to express things like pathos or whatever, and of course there is plenty of post-tonal music that does away with all emotional ties to harmonic or intervallic relationships that is still, to me anyway, beautiful.

One example I can cite is the pentatonic scale, which is unique in its "harmoniousness" - you can mash together any of those 5 notes together and you won't end up with any hard dissonances anywhere, so it's easy as hell to make pleasing sounding melodies out of it. (NB. Try this at home if you have a piano or keyboard: just randomly play a sequence of tones only using black keys. that's the pentatonic scale, and you'll be "composing" tunes in no time.) I think it's not coincidental that that scale is found in many cultures from asia to northern europe (think scottish tunes like auld lang syne) because it was somehow a path of least resistance to compose melodies.

So far we've only talked about pitch - tempo and rhythm relationships are perhaps even more universal. There is not a single upbeat fast lullaby in the world - in fact I remember somebody telling me about an analysis of lullabies sung around the world in various different cultures and traditions, and they all fulfilled very similar musical characteristics, despite differences in the types of scales or tonalities used.

[eugmac]

And when it comes to beauty of human faces, it seems we just prefer the average:
Average Faces From Around The World

Cliffnotes: People took photos of men and women from various nationalities and averaged them out using software, and basically the end result is a good-looking face.

[boost]

[spoonitnow]

you've read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance right? I think the concept of Quality applies to our individual aesthetic preferences (i.e. there exists some universal criteria for determining that something is aesthetically pleasing)

The MOQ suggests that aesthetics is the application of quality to objective and subjective measurements. This conflicts with the view shown in this thread by certain users that quality is only present in objective measurements (ie the argument that if most people find A to be better than B, then A must be objectively better than B).

[wufwugy]

boost thats the greatest thing ive ever seen

[wufwugy]

@wuf, ok after reading your post it seems we agree a lot more than i anticipated, except i still cant get my head around the part where you say people's personal tastes can be proven right or wrong. you seem to accept at least to some degree that it is an entirely culturally-relevant and dependent phenomenon (implies subjectivity to me but i could be wrong) and then you go on to say that something can be objectively defined as good or bad by how well it fits the mould of what it's viewers define as "good" or "bad" aesthetics (in your example where you attempt to determine the objective quality of the portrayal of some female character)?

that's as best as i could understand your post in my current state. i'll definitely come back to it later. feel free to pick that apart and tell me where i'm misunderstanding or why i cant seem to get that you (seem to, i'm probably misinterpreting) imply complete cultural relativity in your example of what is good or bad aesthetics, and yet claim it is factual and that someone can have an opinion different to yours, but they'd be wrong.

ps hope that post doesn't come across as personal criticism or some claim to knowledge of the truth behind this matter. certainly not intended to be

Understanding of aesthetics is in such infancy and is subjective enough that simply discussing it with people who don't agree with you will make you more attuned to it. The person whose opinion I respect the most on cinema only strongly agrees with me on about 10% of the material and strongly disagrees on about 40%.

I think we can look at the argument from this simple dichotomy: on one end people have their opinions and stick to those opinions based upon how they feel and reaffirmations of those opinions. On the other end people have opinions and try to make sense of what those opinions are. The former are people who watch stuff like Transformers and Two and a Half Men and claim that those programs are as good as they think they are because it's all just opinion anyways. The latter are people who subject their opinions to criticism and thus invariably end up preferring stuff like Arrested Development and Inglourious Basterds. And the reason for the difference is in the skill of story, character, theme, music, etc construction.

If you like mundane and single-minded jokes being repetitively presented to you like you're a child, it's not because your opinion is subjective but that your opinion is lazy.

Another example is one that comes to mind of recent in The Walking Dead where all the antagonists are constructed as being overtly sinister for no apparent reason. Contrast Stringer Bell from The Wire to Shane from TWD. Without giving details, the former is unique and complex and interesting while being realistic and understandable; the latter was confusing, purposeless, and a caricature of what a bad guy is supposed to be. String is a more well-constructed antagonist in every way, and people who do not think so are not appealing to their reasoning for aesthetics but their laziness

[surviva316]

If aesthetics was 100% subjective . . .

The biggest problem with this post is that it uses a very very loose definition of objectivity, and it makes the common problem of lumping inherent value in with intrinsic value (even though they're closer to being opposites than they are to being the same thing).

I'll start by saying that opening with a comparison of hotness in women in a post primarily about movie aesthetics is a really bad place to start. There are very obvious reasons why there is a lot of inherent value in things like women's beauty and cuisine and so forth--namely, humans' main hard-wiring throughout the course of evolution has been honed by fucking women who are good at baring children and eating food that gives you enough energy to stave starvation. The drive to have sex and to eat sugary/fatty foods are extremely different from the drive of being entertained, intellectually stimulated and emotionally affected--namely, the former drive is much more independent from subjectivity. Having sex with healthy women, with fewer discernible physical flaws, with big mammary glands, and hips that can sustain child baring is much more of a science than an art. Hell, screwing the right women could be optimized through statistical analysis and would be more-or-less independent of compatibility with given subjects.

Anyway, I know that your only point was to demonstrate that there is at least some objectivity to aesthetics (which is a complete logical fallacy to get to your eventual conclusion, but whatever I'll let that slide for now), but even that fails. This gets to the difference between inherent value and intrinsic value. The value of screwing healthy women is first-level instrumental, but it's still instrumental: we want to screw healthy women BECAUSE it is instrumental to perpetuating your genetic thread through bearing healthy children. It's not a value unto itself; it's just useful to us, so a lot of people share that value. It is still subjective, though, because I can't imagine that ants give a shit whether they're crawling across Kathy Bates or Linda Cardellini. This may seems like a mere technicality or something because who cares what ants/aliens/inanimate objects/etc. like and don't like, but it becomes important when we're dealing with inherent values that have varying priorities. Again, this is why comparing to women's beauty is bad because every human holds the values of sex and food as top priorities, but the values we get out of movies is vastly more variable from human to human).

While we're on the subject, it might as well be pointed out that even female beauty is in the eye of the beholder from culture-to-culture in a lot of ways. Shakespeare's sonnets include a lot of “universally” good traits like fair skin and round figures, whereas our society prefers tanned and angular features in a face. And that's just comparing one Western culture to basically the same Western culture a couple centuries later. China loved to bind women's feet and the entire East loved pocket-sized women. I know that your only point was to say that it's at least somewhat non-subjective, but all of the commonalities basically boil down to the inherent value of not having sex with lepers.

I know I just spent a lot of time on something that was only meant to be a setup for larger point, but I think that breaking down the differences sets up the discussion for movie aesthetics well. I'll put everything else in a different post because this is getting long.

[wufwugy]

I used the hot/ugly woman example as an obvious point that demonstrates objectivity in aesthetics exists

[spoonitnow]

Also, Stringer got capped too early. I was really hoping he would last longer than Avon.

[surviva316]

I'll start by saying that all of the arts work differently, and though this is just my own unpublished, semi-academic opinion that I've written about a lot, I'll put it forth here because I think it works really well. I find that the different art genres operate differently (especially in terms of innovation) on three bases:

1) Cost: If it takes massive investments to produce, distribute, etc a certain art genre, then it's going to move glacially, very few risks are going to be taken, etc. Music is maybe the cheapest of the genres these days, which is why (even though it ranks very very poorly in the other two categories), you find genres all over the map, innovations happen very quickly and why you find a lot more subjectivity in what gets ranked as the best (even among popular publications, Rolling Stones is gonna be completely different from Pitchfork is gonna be completely different from VH1, etc). The modern situations with movies (especially Hollywood movies) is obviously like holy crap in terms of how much it takes to produce and distribute and it has MASSIVE effects on how different everything is. Even the history of movie-like things (namely, stage performances) is expensive; though it wasn't always the most expensive genre, it still took a financier. I don't know how much I need to get into how this effects innovation and static perceptions of quality in the genre because it seems so obvious. Basically all movies that anyone watches come out of Hollywood from the same few production companies, except for a few movies that are made in NYC (OMG how underground! Lol), and then there are independent films which a) still take multi-million dollar investments to make it on the map and b) don't affect Batman all that much.

2) Social-aspect: This is a very important aspect when I go on to talk about the aesthetic value drawn from movies because a) it's evolutionary, which is the hardest facts we can talk about when we're dealing with aesthetics and b) this really really affects movies specifically. Basically, people watch movies in groups (nobody even goes to independent films alone, and people generally get things on Netflix/OnDemand to watch with their girlfriend/friends/family/etc.), and people talk about movies a lot. This reason alone is why Jar Jar Banks exists. Just think about how huge that is when comparing it to genres like literature (though, the social aspect of successful literature is REALLY underrated because a lot of revenue comes from book clubs and the way that books go viral is through word of mouth because people like to talk about the latest good books they've read, and even with literature, a lot of draw comes from being potentially taught in classrooms and even though discussion there is deeper, it's still socializing and it still behooves you to not have something that doesn't appeal to both sexes, and even literature becomes popular through hipster word of mouth, which even though it is “deeper” it still has to be easy to put into words what makes it good).

This is an especially big deal in the US. Since I'm talking to wufwugy, I think I can get away with this comment without much explanation: our culture is lazy and loves Joe Schmoe and it likes things bite-sized and easy to understand. If you go to a movie that has a non-traditional ending with 3 of your friends, then at least someone's gonna be pissed off at how it was just trying to be edgy by not having the good guys win. And then that word gets out and then when you want to see a movie with 3 of your friends, you have to get something that everyone agrees on, and at least someone's going to be like “I heard that movie's weird, can't we go to something we can all agree on?” Waaaaay less people end up seeing things that try new things, that aren't idiotically easy to understand and etc.

Also, drive to your nearest movie theater on a Friday night, and what do you see? A sea full of 13-year-olds. It's no secret that you make your massive investment back of producing a film by appealing to the dumbest, shallowest group of people in the universe: young teenagers. All of these things combine to make movies naturally shallow in nature, very bite-sized and it makes innovation glacial (maybe even backwards? Lol) in this genre.

3) Popularity: I spent a lot of time on the other two things, so I'll type less words here. Movies aren't nearly the most popular art genre (ranking well below TV and music), but it's obviously on the popular side (well above literature, stage, poetry, etc.). When you're appealing to the masses, then it behooves you to cast actors that people have heard of, to take recognizable story threads and to not get bogged down in specifics and nuances of character. The goal is to make (cringe) agreeable art (which might be an oxymoron by some definitions of the word art).

You can actually break each of these categories down by genres within genres, and you'll get different results, especially for music. Club music is far more social (there's no setting more social than the club/bar) and far more popular than electronic, so what you get is the club music scene FINALLY catching up to the decade-old pop act of Daft Punk, which was already hilariously derivative of the decade-old underground electronic acts. So things move really slowly for the genres at the top of these categories. Blockbuster action films rank near the top, even within the larger genre of movies, in terms of cost, social-aspect and popularity.

When you talk about something like poetry, the entire genre is the underground, so the entire genre moves at the friggin speed of light when it comes to innovations and the entire genre is impossible to rank on any consistent basis, as the appeal is insanely subject-dependent. Like, inSANEly subject-dependent. We who spend our days watching Hollywood movies and reading genre fiction and listening to classic rock take for granted just how easy it is to compare different movies and bands and books, but poetry often appeals to such niche audiences that merely not being a minority female between the ages of 28 and 35, preferably from a Northeaster city who likes to be confused and intellectually challenged by the things they read and is less concerned about being entertained by the things they read and who is most emotionally effected by relatable characters dealing with mundane tribulations instead of exaggerated characters/dramatic circumstances/etc. then there is practically a 0% chance that you will think that a certain poet is all that good. You might be able to appreciate them, but it won't necessarily do much for you.

[surviva316]

All of that is to say that I'm not surprised that Batman is still doing what has been done in the West for 2500 years (I would like to say that this is a misleading stat because Greek theater and Aristotelian conceptions of objective aesthetics got lost and then found again, so that by the time the renaissance came around, we were basically back where we had started. I think that innovation in the arts should date back no earlier than 1500 (late 1500s for theater, which is the predecessor to movies. Okay, that's still ~500 years, which still sounds impressive, but I digress). However, if you so much as fly across the pond to the East, then you will find that the Greek epic is NOT AT ALL the standard.

Even the most pop of Japanese theater and movies are extremely confusing and indirect compared to how we do things in the West. These things still cost just as much, are just as popular, and are just as much socially-dependent, but just the mere fact that people have different kinds of conversations (are more patient with things that they don't understand, don't think that there is a right or wrong answer for everything [I could get into all sorts of studies that show how the East hates multiple choice tests and things like that to show how they conceive black and white things very differently], value intellect a lot more than American culture, etc.) makes movies structured entirely differently. There is no exposition like we understand over here, conflicts are resolved at more random junctures of the films, and resolution is much more “uhhhh wtf?” to any American watching the film.

There does seem to be strong inherent value (but lol we're still only talking about inherent value) throughout all the genres in having movements from dissonance->consonance and movements from conflict->resolution, but beyond that, most of the things you get into are low-level instrumental values, and you've barely scratched the surface of how these things will affect people of any kind of varying cultural/sexual/generational/etc background. Just the mere trait of sticking to tradition is a low level instrumental value that helps facilitate the social aspect of film going: you can simply drive home from the movie without awkwardly being like “omg they killed the bad guy like halfway through the movie instead of 4/5s of the way through the movie. You're not supposed to do that.” The fact that the women are Hollywoodized, flashy, shallow characters is a bad instrumental-value for what you value most: depth, intellectualization, congruity with reality, innovation (or at least, non-mass-reproducedness), yet is of high instrumental value to anyone who values things like not being confused by what they're watching, or seeing a sexy lady who doesn't distract them by making them think much, or feeling comfortable by feeling like you're watching the same sort of things you've watched before, or being able to have a conversation with your friends about explosions and sexiness and such instead of being bogged down by things like, “yeah, but that one part didn't make sense because ______.”

I understand that there are people on one side (false dichotomy, but just roll with it) who think that these qualities are “shallow,” but this side isn't intrinsically correct. The other side who thinks that drastic departures from standards are “hipster” or “emo” or anything like that find at least as much negative value in these things for reasons that can't really be right or wrong. Sure, intellectualism is nice and all, but so is being able to socialize with people about normal things.

Conclusion: Can you really prove that the things that you find important are actually better than easy entertainment, having non-combative discussions with fellow humans, escapism, etc? Some of those things have different connotative values (lololol) and some other things even have demonstrable instrumental value to a certain society (maybe even the one we're currently living in) and some other of those things might have evolutionary implications (still inherent value), but none of them are intrinsically quantitative.

Maybe a good example is how I love music like glitch and drone and things that are kinda shapeless and have a lot of unresolved dissonance and things like that in it. I have anxiety issues, and this music is really cathartic for me, and I listen to it a lot while I write, which really helps facilitate the environment of stress and conflict I like to be in when I write and all of that fun stuff. My girlfriend hates this stuff. I mean, who the fuck wants to be stressed out by the music they listen to? Hell, this music might even (probably does) stress her out more than it stresses me out, so she gets the same exact instrumental value out of the music as I do. The problem with instrumental value being objective is that it is not. It is instrumental for something that is simultaneously good for me and horrifying for my girlfriend.

So when it comes to pretty much anything other than eating and sexing, instrumental value is not objective—it's not even static among something as specific as the human race (which is extremely specific on the metaphysical-scale). Some people like being challenged and others do not. Being social is a near-crucial aspect of our survival, and we all still value it differently. Some are entertained through escaping reality and others are entertained by seeing it through a different lens, but that's not even what I'm talking about because I'm talking about how not everyone even cares as much about entertainment as others do. Some think being made to be sad/stressed/happy/callous/etc are good things all to completely different degrees.

[surviva316]

I used the hot/ugly woman example as an obvious point that demonstrates objectivity in aesthetics exists

I addressed that, in fact using that almost word-for-word wording:

Anyway, I know that your only point was to demonstrate that there is at least some objectivity to aesthetics (which is a complete logical fallacy to get to your eventual conclusion, but whatever I'll let that slide for now), but even that fails. This gets to the difference between inherent value and intrinsic value. The value of screwing healthy women is first-level instrumental, but it's still instrumental: we want to screw healthy women BECAUSE it is instrumental to perpetuating your genetic thread through bearing healthy children. It's not a value unto itself; it's just useful to us, so a lot of people share that value. It is still subjective, though, because I can't imagine that ants give a shit whether they're crawling across Kathy Bates or Linda Cardellini. This may seems like a mere technicality or something because who cares what ants/aliens/inanimate objects/etc. like and don't like, but it becomes important when we're dealing with inherent values that have varying priorities. Again, this is why comparing to women's beauty is bad because every human holds the values of sex and food as top priorities, but the values we get out of movies is vastly more variable from human to human).

[wufwugy]

Also, Stringer got capped too early. I was really hoping he would last longer than Avon.

Agreed, but it was acceptable due to coming from Omar. If it had been anybody else, it would have sucked

Unless he died from bowel perforation from Bunk hauling him out to the garage and bending him over a patrol car...

[surviva316]

things like the golden ratio seems to imply a universal concept of beauty as well. the ratio also happens to occur often in nature. also related is how different musical intervals (the distance between one pitch and another) evokes universal emotional responses regardless of cultural background. major chord is associated with happy, minor with sad. tritones are dissonant and cause tension.... and this can be explained through physics and how the waves interact with one another. fascinating topic.

Yes, science has found a lot more inherent value found in music than I know of for plot-based arts, and it is all very interesting. It is very very important to keep in mind with these sorts of things that they are all proof of inherent value, not intrinsic value. In fact, some of these common responses to music can be the result of societal cues, which might seem unimportant, but the further you get away from the fact that it's caused by the fact that we're human, the further we get away from universal human value.

Anyway, as I demonstrated in other posts, intrinsic value is still an instrumental value, so even if Mozart is objectively relaxing and objectively in-sync with our brain waves which objectively increases function in certain areas, every human still holds a different value to relaxation, in-syncness with brain waves and increased functionality in doing crossword puzzles. This is exceedingly problematic when we want to talk about something being "good" or "bad" or tastes being "right" or "wrong" because you can't really demonstrate how being entertained quantitatively compares with being relaxed.

Also, this starts to get into the fallacy I alluded to in Wuf's post about how the fact that some level of objectivity exists in aesthetics means that ultimate determinations of good and bad can be objectively veracious. I could probably turn this into a poker analogy of how there are some aspects of poker decisions that are situationally-independent, but that does not prove that any decision is correct regardless of situation. I won't though. Either you get that sentence or you don't; I've typed enough for one day lol.

Anyway, they can find a large handful of aspects of music that boil down to things that are universal among the human race, and some people take this as some sort of hope that even more things will be found and this will end up dominating the study of music, but I have my sincere doubts. I think that far too much of even the music genre comes down to things that are culturally-dependent (for example), so these will be neat little caveats in the study of music but will always be overwhelmed by other things.

[spoonitnow]

Agreed, but it was acceptable due to coming from Omar. If it had been anybody else, it would have sucked

Unless he died from bowel perforation from Bunk hauling him out to the garage and bending him over a patrol car...

I agree about it being okay since it was Omar, but I felt like it came too early. Omar against Marlo didn't have the same intimacy as Omar against Stringer/Avon because of the death/torture of Brandon.

[surviva316]

And when it comes to beauty of human faces, it seems we just prefer the average:
Average Faces From Around The World

lol Irish women are da uggz

[surviva316]

The MOQ suggests that aesthetics is the application of quality to objective and subjective measurements. This conflicts with the view shown in this thread by certain users that quality is only present in objective measurements (ie the argument that if most people find A to be better than B, then A must be objectively better than B).

So much awesomeness in such few words.

[wufwugy]

I agree about it being okay since it was Omar, but I felt like it came too early. Omar against Marlo didn't have the same intimacy as Omar against Stringer/Avon because of the death/torture of Brandon.

I honestly felt the same way and wasn't ever that enthralled by Marlo

[surviva316]

If you like mundane and single-minded jokes being repetitively presented to you like you're a child, it's not because your opinion is subjective but that your opinion is lazy.

This is the closest we've come to agreeing on this subject, but it's still problematic. The attribute of being easy to get a joke is still pretty much a GOOD thing. It's a BAD thing that I feel miserable upon first listen to my Oneohtrix Point Never albums; it's a BAD thing that Arrested Development isn't that funny to me when I watch it while I'm tired or distracted; it's a BAD thing that the movie Brick is a shitty movie if you watch with a group of 5 talkative friends; it's a BAD thing that people who are less mentally nimble than you and I are can't keep up with David Mitchell's hilarious rants.

I understand that these difficulties are (more or less) necessary in order to achieve the full potential (will probably regret wording it like this) of awesomeness that art can provide for those who are smart, patient, able to pick up on subtlety, have conversations with people who are also smart, able to disagree with you, etc. But they are negatives nonetheless and those negatives are dealbreakers for some people (can't really quantitatively argue with that) and the payoff will not be worth it for some people (can't really quantitatively argue with that).

There is something to be said for the fact that everyone knows, understands, likes, talks about, etc etc etc etc The Beatles and A Christmas Story. These are actually cornerstones for why these things are ranked so highly.

Anyway, the fact that Jersey Shore is only better than Arrested Development insofar as you could turn it on at a party where no one is really paying attention and people will still get a kick out of it, that fact doesn't really appeal to ME or to YOU or to the mass readership of Rotten Tomatoes, etc, etc, etc, but it's hard to argue that it's more or less universally important than the things that make Arrested Development awesome.

Maybe this is how we can find a middle ground. We can assume that when you talk about things that are lolobviously better among us FTRers, that you mean that it is better in ways that are important to Wufwugy. That's like lol the definition of subjective value, though.

[surviva316]

^ purposefully oversimplified words like "good" and "bad" for the purpose of this post. I didn't actually mean that pretty much anything that I mentioned is even inherently good or bad. I gotta limit word count somewhere lol.

BTW: if you're going to read only one post, just read that one. It most succinctly gets to my point whereas everything else does a lot of setting up of my general perception on aesthetics.

[wufwugy]

Those are really good posts surviva. I normally make a lot of the same arguments, but part of my point of contention that originally brought this discussion about had to do with ways in which it can be reasonably said something is good or bad. But this means that the goal has to be based on many assumptions

So one example we could use is when the film's authors construct a world where Deus ex machina would be inappropriate, it then can be claimed to be bad aesthetics when it's used. But of course that depends on if it's deemed inappropriate. Sometimes the line would be very vague and we couldn't know, but sometimes that isn't the case. For example, if The Godfather used deus ex machina, it would be bad and I would get to call them bad for it.

It's okay to be simple or complex or anything in between. Art can be anything, but it can't be contrived, unless it's contrived enough that the contrivances do not have contrived consequences. However, if the audiences sensibilities are that deus ex machina is desired, then making Godfather-like films and using the tactic wouldn't be a problem. But it's still dependent upon the sensibilities of the culture. It's why Japan and America can have entirely different sensibilities in ways.

When I say the Batman chicks sucked it's because they were contrived even according to cultural standards, and I contend that those who don't think so are intellectually lazy. And being lazy about aesthetics is not an excuse for thinking it's all just subjective

If I'm watching a movie and thinking "okay they're constructing a plot where the female lead needs to not be vapid," when that female character shows up and is vapid, I have opportunity to claim the film was aesthetically inefficient in this regard.

I think a good example could Batgirl and the chick Alba played in Sin City. It has been a long ass time since I watched Sin City, so I could be wrong, but I'll try. I also only watched TDKR once. Anyways, the Sin City chick was supposed to be the damsel in distress who doesn't really have any personality other than being hot and weak and needing a man to save her. This is pretty much what all comics need out of their women too. And it worked. But in Batman, Batgirl was constructed as being somebody who needed a deeper personality and stronger motivations, yet she didn't have them. Her entire existence was contrived in a drawing room where one guy said "yeah so we dont have a female lead and we need one that can appear strong and weak at the same time and appear hot but also tough and is conflicted but like also not conflicted and has an inconsequential backstory and really no reason to be in this and blah blah blah blah blah..."

[wufwugy]

it's a BAD thing that the movie Brick is a shitty movie if you watch with a group of 5 talkative friends

Both Rambo (the 08 one) and Transformers are better for this purpose than Brick, but that doesn't mean that Transformers can compare to Rambo within the genre, and it doesn't mean that it can compare to Brick within a broader cross-genre contrast.

Anyway, the fact that Jersey Shore is only better than Arrested Development insofar as you could turn it on at a party where no one is really paying attention and people will still get a kick out of it, that fact doesn't really appeal to ME or to YOU or to the mass readership of Rotten Tomatoes, etc, etc, etc, but it's hard to argue that it's more or less universally important than the things that make Arrested Development awesome.

This is what aesthetics is. On the list of pros and cons, you have one pro for JS and a million cons, while a million pros for AD and just a couple cons. The fact that JS appeals better in some instances or to some people still doesn't make it a wash in comparison to AD. Within our groundwork assumptions of what the study of aesthetics is, we can most assuredly say that AD mops the floor with JS.

Maybe this is how we can find a middle ground. We can assume that when you talk about things that are lolobviously better among us FTRers, that you mean that it is better in ways that are important to Wufwugy. That's like lol the definition of subjective value, though.

I do that in some ways, but honestly not as much as it may seem. One of the main things I think of when analyzing film is "what kind of story and theme are they trying to tell?" If I see them try to make a Godfather but then end it with deus ex machina and alien spaceships, I get to call them idiots. But then if they pull a Magnolia, the highly peculiar ending actually worked within the story they told.

Brick was an awesome movie, but if the main character was Stifler from American Pie, it would have sucked despite the fact that some people would have thought it was better that way

[surviva316]

Yes, I think we've reached the middle ground that I talked about in my last post. I'm certainly not saying that no true statement (value or otherwise) could ever be made about a piece of art, but I was arguing that their truth value is dependent on a lot of assumptions.

I am completely fine with you enthymematically saying that the women in TDKR are crappy characters, and we can all assume that this means "assuming that you're not 13-years-old and have an intellect that you prefer to use, you will find these characters less engaging than what you should reasonably expect from a movie that we are placing in this certain level of regard."

The most recent movie opinion I had was that the movie Babel fails on a really important level: it's constructed around a strong motif (that everyone speaks different languages) that ends up being completely pointless. The def Japanese schoolgirl is the only plot thread where language barriers matter at all whatsoever, and it lends to awesome thematic and plot implications, but this only highlights how flat the motif falls in the other threads. It just ends up being a flat, masturbatory piece of cool movie structuring. This is unlike Crash (the Best-Picture-winning movie by the same director) where the EVERYTHING (thematically, conflict-wise, etc) centers on the fact that everyone is different races.

I bring this up because notice how many (safe) assumptions this relies on. That the fact that the movie is called Babel is important (both that movie goers place importance on titles, and that the cultural allusion to the Bible which is a really important book in our cultural will make us think of the conflict caused by language barriers). That it's non-standard for "us" to watch movies where like 7 seemingly disparate plot-lines of like 20 seemingly unrelated people weave in and out of each other and that this means that a focus will be placed on this and that this will lend to the expectation that something comes of it. That it somehow matters what this director has previously done and that it will create expectations in the viewer watching future films. That only having 1 out of 7 threads realize their full potential is batting below average for a film that includes the talents that it includes. Etc.

All of these things go unspoken, and so it doesn't really cheapen the conclusions you're coming to. HOWEVER, the fact that these assumptions are necessary to conclude that the movie's characteristic is "bad" is relevant to this conversation on subjectivity of value in aesthetics.

Long story short: yes, you can say things that are conditionally true about aesthetics providing a bunch of assumptions, many of which are safe assumptions based on context. However, since the OP of this thread was getting into whether or not aesthetics are subjective, the fact that these statements are conditional on so many things demonstrates the subjectivity of our valuations and thus is where I went with my post.

Your focus was on demonstrating that the things you said about Batman can be true, so you went in a different direction.

[surviva316]

This is what aesthetics is. On the list of pros and cons, you have one pro for JS and a million cons, while a million pros for AD and just a couple cons. The fact that JS appeals better in some instances or to some people still doesn't make it a wash in comparison to AD. Within our groundwork assumptions of what the study of aesthetics is, we can most assuredly say that AD mops the floor with JS.

But we're talking about whether or not aesthetics are subjective. If you are an idiot with a short attention span, then JS is unequivocally better than AD. If you are smart, then it is the other way around. The value of the two shows is subject-dependent. The aesthetic valuation of the two can be said to be subjective.

[wufwugy]

But we're talking about whether or not aesthetics are subjective. If you are an idiot with a short attention span, then JS is unequivocally better than AD. If you are smart, then it is the other way around. The value of the two shows is subject-dependent. The aesthetic valuation of the two can be said to be subjective.

I'm working on the assumption that beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder. The entire entertainment and art industry and amateur work is based upon the notion that beauty is not exclusively in the eye of the beholder.

I think the confusion comes because we're not designating aesthetics as the branch of philosophy it is. One could say that Of Mice and Men and what little Timmy wrote on notebook paper are equally as aesthetically pleasing to them, but we couldn't say that when we're approaching the topic academically.

[surviva316]

I'm working on the assumption that beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder. The entire entertainment and art industry and amateur work is based upon the notion that beauty is not exclusively in the eye of the beholder.

I think the confusion comes because we're not designating aesthetics as the branch of philosophy it is. One could say that Of Mice and Men and what little Timmy wrote on notebook paper are equally as aesthetically pleasing to them, but we couldn't say that when we're approaching the topic academically.

It's not exclusively in the eye of the beholder, but it is in the eye of the beholder in a lot of important ways. I have a terminal degree in English, and I have much more interest in reading what little Timmy wrote in his notebook than I do in reading The Grapes of Wrath cover-to-cover (which I have done) or reading Moby Dick cover-to-cover (which I have not done). I have ADHD, and I live in the 21st century and I already understand much of thematic and innovational importance to those two things without actually reading them and appreciating "impressive" literature takes a backseat for me to reading about what's on our current kids' minds.

So for me, Timmy's journal would very likely be better. The value of the two is situationally and subjectively dependent. It can be said that the value of the two is subjective.

[supa]

I really haven't read the thread so sorry if I'm saying something already said.

Reading the OP I first couldn't understand why this is a thread. I though it all came down to the fact that there are things that a majority of people agree look aesthetically pleasing making it objective. However, not everyone like everything everyone else likes making it also subjective.

The kicker comes in definition. Looking it up the word Aesthetic is derived from the greek 'aisthanomai' meaning 'I perceive' with the 'I' making everything completely subjective.

[boost]

surviva, I've enjoyed reading your dissertation, but I have one small bone to pick. Your argument seems to rely on the idea that this or that cannot be quantitatively measured, which may be true, but you seem to be treading in the argument from ignorance territory. If these things simply haven't been measured, yet could be measured, then there could be ways to know their relative value against each other without actually measuring them.

That being said, I feel like I've stumbled into some sort of strange reverse post modernism.

[spoonitnow]

I honestly felt the same way and wasn't ever that enthralled by Marlo

I also found it interesting that none of the main characters who were cops died.

[boost]

I also found it interesting that none of the main characters who were cops died.

That was very much on purpose. They were essentially the gods of Greek mythology. There was tragedy and triumph among them, and in their interactions with the "mortals", but they were all together above the mortals. They influenced the game (in good and bad ways), but they were not in the game.

[wufwugy]

It's not exclusively in the eye of the beholder, but it is in the eye of the beholder in a lot of important ways. I have a terminal degree in English, and I have much more interest in reading what little Timmy wrote in his notebook than I do in reading The Grapes of Wrath cover-to-cover (which I have done) or reading Moby Dick cover-to-cover (which I have not done). I have ADHD, and I live in the 21st century and I already understand much of thematic and innovational importance to those two things without actually reading them and appreciating "impressive" literature takes a backseat for me to reading about what's on our current kids' minds.

So for me, Timmy's journal would very likely be better. The value of the two is situationally and subjectively dependent. It can be said that the value of the two is subjective.

To be clear, I'm not referring to something's value, but to its artistic merit

[wufwugy]

That was very much on purpose. They were essentially the gods of Greek mythology. There was tragedy and triumph among them, and in their interactions with the "mortals", but they were all together above the mortals. They influenced the game (in good and bad ways), but they were not in the game.

so it's not all in the game?

[surviva316]

Your argument seems to rely on the idea that this or that cannot be quantitatively measured, which may be true, but you seem to be treading in the argument from ignorance territory. If these things simply haven't been measured, yet could be measured, then there could be ways to know their relative value against each other without actually measuring them.

I'm glad so many people have read that lol. I was borderline surprised that even Wuf waded through all of that.

Anyway, I don't mean to make it sound that we simply aren't able to measure the values quantitatively because it's beyond our understanding, technology, current techniques, etc. I mean that the value of a joke that is difficult to find funny is completely situationally and subjectively dependent. It simply holds a different value from subject to subject, from situation to situation, from culture to culture, and there is no way to represent these differences on a universal scale.

It is vastly less impossible (though it is impossible lol) that you could qualitatively measure each instrumental value on its own, and then you could measure the relative importance of each of these qualities to any given subject and be able to scientifically predict which pieces of art would be how valuable to what people. Putting aside all the reasons how this is still impossible even if less impossible, this is still subjective value. It's unavoidable that the second you give different intelligence quotients and different preferences for different aspects of art and all of those things, that those values will change.

spoonitnow alluded to how people intuitively consider value objectively for art by taking some sort of median measurement of how good most people think something is, but this is flawed. We might be able to measure something based on maximum potential (assuming that it lined up perfectly with someone's taste, which piece of art would be the most effectual?), but I don't think this would properly represent what people mean when they say something is good. Besides, maximum potential would be flawed because the dialogue in Jersey Shore would be much better if it reached its maximum potential to where we lived in a world where the phrase "Cab's here" means "I think there for I am" and that this statement was made in a society where this idea hadn't already been put forth or something crazy like that. This logistical problem may be avoidable, though, (I don't know really) so this point may not be as strong as the one I already made.

Cliffnotes: I don't at all doubt that many things about aesthetic value can be quantitatively measured, and the basis for my argument isn't simply that these measurements have logistical difficulties that are beyond our current understanding. I am actually arguing that these measurements would never ever ever lend to anything that is universal. It will ALWAYS be dependent on how much value any individual holds (at any given time, in any given circumstance, etc.) on the different values that differing art pieces are instrumental in evoking.

For this, you can see my point on me and my girlfriend's differing tastes in music. Experimental glitch electronica may have a very real quotient (let's just assume for now that that quotient is universal) for how much it stresses out its listener, but this quotient does not have any objective value. It has one value to me and it has a different value to my girlfriend. That value is wholly subjective.

[surviva316]

To be clear, I'm not referring to something's value, but to its artistic merit

Eh, I'll have to think about this one. It feels to me like it's just moving the goal posts (just using a term that's much more semantically slippery), but I certainly see how it dissolutes my point about Moby Dick versus Timmy's journal. I'll have to give this one a good, hard think.

[rpm]

dear wuf, you have gone to a lot a of effort to describe ITT what you like in films, and what you think certain characters roles should be in a plot, and whose attempts at these roles have sucked/been good. but you have done nothing which proves why these things are objective or factual. it honestly feels like we are discussing a different topic or something. we all get it. you think art can be put in a calculator and given an x/100 score. and we all (now) know alot about how you've programmed your own calculator which does this - what criteria, what order etc. however, nothing you've written ITT has convinced me that
A - this rating system of yours reflects anything more than your own nuanced version of your popular culture's understanding of what is pleasing to watch in a film (and don't say that complexity MEANS quality, or, for that matter, that all art should be stimulating and make you want to "solve" or "understand" it, as you seem to think regarding films)
B - this calculator can, or should, exist

i honestly feel like we are discussing a different topic or have fundamentally different understandings of the definitions of "aesthetics" or "subjectivity/objectivity"

[rpm]

holy fuck there were ~6 posts made between me opening and reading this thread, and then responding

[rpm]

To be clear, I'm not referring to something's value, but to its artistic merit

I THINK I'VE FOUND OUR DIFFERENCE!

edit: please define each. i'm thinking my focus is heavily on a metaphysical kind of conception of what, if anything, "quality" is (which is what i'm inferring from your use of "value") and your focus is on how well the artist does (insert your definition of artistic merit here)

[wufwugy]

dear wuf, you have gone to a lot a of effort to describe ITT what you like in films, and what you think certain characters roles should be in a plot, and whose attempts at these roles have sucked/been good. but you have done nothing which proves why these things are objective or factual. it honestly feels like we are discussing a different topic or something. we all get it. you think art can be put in a calculator and given an x/100 score. and we all (now) know alot about how you've programmed your own calculator which does this - what criteria, what order etc. however, nothing you've written ITT has convinced me that
A - this rating system of yours reflects anything more than your own nuanced version of your popular culture's understanding of what is pleasing to watch in a film (and don't say that complexity MEANS quality, or, for that matter, that all art should be stimulating and make you want to "solve" or "understand" it, as you seem to think regarding films)
B - this calculator can, or should, exist

i honestly feel like we are discussing a different topic or have fundamentally different understandings of the definitions of "aesthetics" or "subjectivity/objectivity"

I honestly tend to despise complexity. I'm probably a minimalist, but not sure.

The way I look at it is how well each part of the material complements the others and the overall product. For example, when you compare the motivations of the chick in Rambo with the motivations of Miranda in Batman, you'll find the former is well-structured storytelling and characterization and the latter is simply amateur

[wufwugy]

I THINK I'VE FOUND OUR DIFFERENCE!

edit: please define each. i'm thinking my focus is heavily on a metaphysical kind of conception of what, if anything, "quality" is (which is what i'm inferring from your use of "value") and your focus is on how well the artist does (insert your definition of artistic merit here)

Value means anything. Artistic merit is how well the material does what it sets out to do while being compared to contemporary material and within certain purposes. That sounds complicated, but what it means that you can't create something meant to distract and call it good art because it distracts super well. Art has always been about stuff that enchants and makes you think about things differently.

IMO a big reason why we even question this is because we're so inundated with art and entertainment in our culture that we have replaced the appreciation for art with superficial sensory stimuli and opinions therein. The telling of stories by professionals use to be a big fucking deal, but now we see it everywhere and anywhere that people confuse themselves into thinking that whatever they happen to enjoy is good. So then when somebody else (like me) comes along and points out any of the flaws that shouldn't fly according to aesthetic sensibilities, they say "it's all subjective man!"

[boost]

random aside:

The reason I tend to argue against a relativist view of aesthetics is because I really despise post-modernist nonsense. Even if we can't truly know anything, there is no point in believing it, because you can't know that we can't know anything if we can't know anything. So I'm essentially employing Pascal's Wager in a way that isn't idiotic and horribly flawed.

[surviva316]

So then when somebody else (like me) comes along and points out any of the flaws that shouldn't fly according to aesthetic sensibilities, they say "it's all subjective man!"

Wuf, I may have to think for several days about the change of focus from value to "artistic merit," but I can reply to a couple of things in the meantime.

It seems like much of your angst with the subjectivity of art comes down to the fact that people twist this into a false equivalency. I think a near-perfect analogy would be that I often here religious people say, "Well you can't be 100% certain that science is correct either." The problem isn't that they're wrong (just like the problem with someone screaming "ART IS SUBJECTIVE" isn't that they're wrong); the problem is the emthymematic fallacy they're mindlessly spouting off: they're trying to imply that religion is JUST AS legitimate as science simply because there's a 1 in a trillion chance that we live in the matrix and that everything we experience empirically is an illusion meant to mislead us and all of that crap. Well, no, relying on our senses isn't infallible, but it is certainly going to get us closer to the right answer than relying on what some bearded maniac said in a desert several millennia ago.

In the same way, yes, the value of Arrested Development and Jersey Shore is largely dependent on the qualities of the person/society/etc that is watching those shows, but that does not make their values the same thing. Jersey Shore is only more valuable for people who are stupid, lazy, shallow, etc. This is a massive oversimplification and it will fail when you compare any two pieces of art that aren't on complete opposite sides of the spectrum in terms of quality to you and me, but you get my point.

I mean, you've probably gathered forever ago that I'm "on your side" when it comes to me hating much of corporatized popular culture (though not all of it) and in finding merit in intellectual sentimentalities. So we are only likely to end up disagreeing on the nitty gritty of the mechanics of objectivity and the semantics of "artistic merit" and such; I don't think we're going to end up disagreeing on anything mind-blowing like that critics suck and should let me go on listening to the radio without them pointing out that it is possible that music that I've never heard of before might also be good.

Though I do find much more merit in a lot of aspects of popular culture and much less merit in classics than basically every single one of my MFA classmates, so there may be more meat to our disagreement.

[wufwugy]

In the same way, yes, the value of Arrested Development and Jersey Shore is largely dependent on the qualities of the person/society/etc that is watching those shows, but that does not make their values the same thing. Jersey Shore is only more valuable for people who are stupid, lazy, shallow, etc. This is a massive oversimplification and it will fail when you compare any two pieces of art that aren't on complete opposite sides of the spectrum in terms of quality to you and me, but you get my point.

I would contend that by definition (or perhaps only by connotation), art is the opposite of stupid, lazy, and shallow. So I have little sympathy for sentiments that argue for why Jersey Shore compares to Arrested Development or Sunny in Philly or Spaceballs

Though I do find much more merit in a lot of aspects of popular culture and much less merit in classics than basically every single one of my MFA classmates, so there may be more meat to our disagreement.

I'm not a classics person either. I'm not sure why I would explain that is, but I do see a TON of refinement over time to the point that I might argue that on his worst day, Eminem is a better poet than any of the Classics were. Obviously, he wouldn't be inherently more astute, but that the media evolved in ways that makes the product more aesthetically sensible. That is a different issue and one I'm not as firm on though.

Also recently read some prose by Aristotle. Shit was awful, couldn't even follow it. Refinement of style has come a long way

[surviva316]

dunno what happened here

{edited by a500lbgorilla}

[boost]

Wish I had more to add, but I pretty much agree. My gripe is just with post-modernism being a sort of ideology for the artistically inclined and intellectually lazy (not to say that artistically inclined people are intellectually lazy, but some certainly find a respite for their laziness in the forgiving artistic community) which they like to interject into potentially interesting and stimulating discussions.

*Hopefully it doesn't come off as racist that I'm talking about Batman and Moby Dick with Wuf, and am talking about hip hop with you lol. I swear it's mere coincidence that that was the best way I could describe my point of a great representation altering personae. And now pointing it out and defending myself probably makes me seem even sillier lolol.

ha.

[wufwugy]

Hi, call me wufwugy

[surviva316]

So I'm essentially employing Pascal's Wager in a way that isn't idiotic and horribly flawed.

I forgot to reply to this part of the post. I think you are absolutely correct to go with something that seems like a leap of faith in a (seemingly) uncertain world. I disagree that you get there by Pascal's Wager, though. Also, I more commonly apply this to ethics than I do to this conversation, so I use a different example below.

There are two ways you can get there:

Deductive Logic:

I tried to do this for a while, but it's been way too long since I've taken a class on deductive logic, and it took way too much googling of different axioms and such, so I gave up. I'll move on to the next proof.

Probability:

Either we can trust the things we know about this world are sound or the things we know about this world are unsound. Then to determine if something is moral or immoral, we would do kx + (1-x)(y1+y2+ . . . ), where x is the probability that we can trust the things we know about this world, k is the constant value of our understanding of a given action and y are all of the different possible values for how ethical an action could be in a world where we know nothing about ethics (my major was the exact opposite of math, so sorry if I'm not applying this terminology perfectly, but I promise the conclusion makes sense). We will compare this number to zero, and if it is less than zero the action is immoral and if it is greater than zero than the action is moral. 0<x<1.00, obviously.

Let's say that we do this analysis for killing another human for a petty personal gain, and it is known that this action has a badness quotient of negative a million, well then -1,000,000x + (1-x)(y1+y2+ . . . ). We can assume that all of the different y possibilities have a net value of zero since a complete unknown that has any possibility whatsoever is EXACTLY as likely to be good as it is to be bad. This means that -1,000,000x + (1-x)*0, which simplifies to -1000000x. Since we established that x is always greater than zero, then we can conclude that killing another human for a petty personal gain is ALWAYS has a negative expectation (this doesn't mean that it will always have negative ethical results, but since you are a poker player, I assume that you find this sufficient to conclude that going with known ethics is always our "best bet").

This differs from Pascal's Wager. The point of Pascal's Wager is to have a reason for believing in Christianity IN THE ABSENCE OF any probabilistic preference for the possibility that Christianity is correct. In other words, Pascal's Wager tries to demonstrate that it's advantageous to believe in Christianity even if there's no more reason to believe that Christianity is correct than there is reason to believe that the exact opposite of Christianity (believing in Jesus Christ as your Lord and savior is your only path to NOT being saved from an eternity of hellfire and torment), and this fails on a logical basis. If there were proof for Christianity to go hand-in-hand with Pascal's Wager (if there were a reason to believe that it's more likely that Christianity will save you from hellfire and torment than it is that any other belief in the world is true), then Pascal's Wager would be moot. It would properly demonstrate how important it is to believe in the proof supporting Christianity, but ultimately, the reason for believing in Christianity rests on the proof--it rests on the reasoning for why Christianity's any more likely then any other belief.

To put it simply, Pascal's Wager is like a multiplicant, but if the proof for Christianity is zero, then the multiplicant is irrelevant because the result will be zero regardless.

The assumption is that this is different from taking the leap of faith on the uncertainty that the things we believe about the world are trustworthy. There is at least a non-zero chance that the correlation between observed reality and reality is representative of the fact that our observations can be trusted, so betting on this non-zero chance will always give us our best bet, even if the uncertainty adds a variable that reduces the probabilistic return on this bet.

[surviva316]

My gripe is just with post-modernism being a sort of ideology for the artistically inclined and intellectually lazy (not to say that artistically inclined people are intellectually lazy, but some certainly find a respite for their laziness in the forgiving artistic community) which they like to interject into potentially interesting and stimulating discussions.

I think I know what you're talking about, and I think that I agree. When you say things like "It depends" and "We can't know for sure" then there's a lot of room for stupid ass humans (ie: all humans) to be intellectually lazy and just gloss over it all with false equivalencies. I've had very smart, very talented, artistically-inclined people make false equivalency statements that make me want to choke them out. One of my brilliant professors counts as one of the millions of times that I heard the argument about how "scientists pretend to know what they're talking about, but they've been wrong before and a hundred years from now they could be saying that they were wrong about the big bang" as if this somehow makes it more likely that goblins exist.

I think the same false equivalency is made in discussions on aesthetic values a lot of times, but I can't come up with a specific example right now.

[boost]

The example you are looking for is probably this:

"How can you judge this artist? While X was alive and producing his work his contemporaries ostracized him, yet after death he was found to be an artistic genius!"