Ubuntu 11.10 makes Unity compulsory

[David Gerard]

On 6 April 2011 13:53, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:

> There is no right answer to who was better, Blur or Oasis, the Stones
> or the Beatles. People's opinions vary. That's fair enough. (Me, I'd
> say Blur and the Stones, no question, but others differ.)


This is in fact false. To resolve a dangling comparative ("better"),
you need to ask the question: "what's it for?"

What is art for? It's for an audience.

(The answer to "What's the best operating system?" is "What's it for?")

If no art was better or worse than any other, art wouldn't be a thing
in human experience.

Thus: the fallacy you have tripped over here is to assume that a lack
of agreed numerical measurement makes comparatives meaningless, which
is not the case. Fuzzy human subjects are annoying because humans are
annoying.

Paul Graham has an essay that tries to explain this point to geeks:
http://www.paulgraham.com/goodart.html

The term for this sort of thing is "intersubjective", where things are
a mix of objective and subjective. If you don't understand how this
applies to art, compare it to languages, which are an excellent
example people have some understanding of. This is why word meanings
are not arbitrary - any use of a word has an audience - but not
entirely fixed - humans can push meanings in communication.

By the way, this also means postmodernism and critical theory aren't
meaningless either. Rant:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/4sn/costs_and_benefits_of_scholarship/3qls


- d.