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On the topic of taste, I think of this quote in Susan Sontag's "Notes On 'Camp'" often: “For taste governs every free — as opposed to rote — human response. No
by hellojomp 1mo ago
On the topic of taste, I think of this quote in Susan Sontag's "Notes On 'Camp'" often:
“For taste governs every free — as opposed to rote — human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion — and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. (One of the facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.)
Taste has no system and no proofs. But there is something like a logic of taste: the consistent sensibility which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste. A sensibility is almost, but not quite, ineffable. Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer a sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea..."
- notashelf 1mo agoThis is an incredibly insightful comment, thank you. I had not read "Notes On 'Camp'" at the time of writing (and nor do much reading for the post in particular) but it seems very intriguing from what I can find on the internet.
- dbtc 1mo ago"Consistent sensibility" is a tasty little phrase. I think taste is developed from a combination of sensual attunement (clarity of perception and focus) and experience (exposure to relevant, high quality 'stuff'), but the catalyst is joy, or at least some kind of pleasure.
- psadri 1mo agoThis is an awesome thread. I agree - the catalyst is joy, in a broad sense of the word. One is lucky to find joy in something that can take you deep.
- relativeadv 1mo agoi'd completely forgotten about notes on camp, had to read that in modernist criticism class. good stuff. i see parallels to zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance as well, who's whole thesis if i can recall is something like, "quality cannot be put into words." Its a pre-rational thing that, try as you might, can't be pinned down.
- ulrikrasmussen 1mo agoAn important feature of taste is also that it is highly variable between people, and because there is no system or proof of good taste, we cannot really say that one person's taste is objectively better than another's. This is what causes one person to build a large software system in a classical OOP language while another builds almost the same system in a typed functional language, each following their own internal logic of what is good taste. In the end we learn something from it, and maybe someone who worked on both projects refine their taste and starts preferring something that lies in between the two paradigms and comes up with a new interesting programming language. One thing I fear is going to happen when more and more people use LLM's for coding is that they will default to the "average taste" of the LLM, and we will stop getting new interesting ideas about how to build things.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- altmanaltman 1mo ago> One thing I fear is going to happen when more and more people use LLM's for coding is that they will default to the "average taste" of the LLM, and we will stop getting new interesting ideas about how to build things. It is a possibility. But I also think we're underestimating the human need to create cool, unique things. Like yes most of the projects in this situation will have "average taste" but most of the projects out there today already do. Very few people have true taste and I don't think we're just going to see them disappear or be satisfied with LLMs feeding them "average taste." They will either likely stop using LLMs if that is the case or find ways around it to make it do things the way they want to, hence preserving their taste. But I think it is a bit of an overblown fear that LLMs will just kill creativity and innovation in coding. Hackers will be hackin
- ulrikrasmussen 1mo agoI also don't think it will kill creativity in the space, although my phrasing might have suggested that, just that it might diminish it and make implementation styles more conformative. On the other hand, we might trade that for creativity in other more high level designs where things like coding style is an unimportant detail for the experiment. For example, I have started playing around with microcontrollers because I can have the LLM generate the software while I focus on learning how to solder and think about how to modularize my hobby automation system. That's creativity and taste at a higher level which I didn't have access to before because I didn't want to invest my precious free time in learning the software ecosystem.
- KurSix 1mo agoYeah once taste can be fully reduced to rules, it stops being taste and becomes something you can optimize for
- ghtbircshotbe 1mo agoI'm a little confused. She follows describing people with good/bad taste immediately with the statement that there is no system for taste. If it is all relative, then how is she determining that someone has good or bad taste? Is there anything between moral relativism and mathematical proof? Just your own ineffable belief that you are right?
- customguy 1mo agowell yes, you can't help but have your own taste, and like the taste of others according to your taste of taste(s?). And I think taste is subjective by definition, it doesn't compete with "objective taste" because that makes no sense.
- jmbwell 1mo agoSomeone with questions about this excerpt of Sontag on taste would do well to read the rest of the work, which does a fuller job of drawing distinctions between sensibilities like taste, and systematic ideas like good/bad, morality, relativism, mathematics, proofs, and wrong/right.
- MichaelZuo 1mo agoThis seems to be circular. Wouldn’t anyone need some reading “taste” in the first place to decide to read more. And if they already have it, why would they need to read it? If it’s all relative there can be no globally valid, or fixed, reference points by definition.
- ghtbircshotbe 1mo agoIt looks like it's only 15 pages and I do like camp, so I think I may have a go at it
- jhbadger 1mo agoEven if something is relative, you can compare it to what other people believe. If most people who know person X think X has "good taste" (that is, that their tastes more or less agree, or at least that they aspire to having similar taste like how more people admire those who like classical music than listen to it themselves) then it is reasonable to say that person X has "good taste".
- thrawa8387336 1mo agoNonsense
- manlymuppet 1mo ago"Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passion" David Hume I like this quote because it's so blunt. Hume isn't saying we should give in to hedonistic excess, but he isn't shirking the impression either because it deserves to be said strongly.
- hellojomp 1mo ago“The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.” - Pascal I like this quote because sooner or later, one discovers it for themselves
- kyle-rb 1mo agoWow a lot of emdashes, are we sure she didn't use Claude?
- MajorTakeaway 1mo agoYou sure you know what syntax is?