Ubuntu 11.10 makes Unity compulsory

[Samuel Thurston]

On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 6:52 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>


This is by far the most informative, insightful comment i have ever
read on this list. Are you sure you didn't mean this for some other,
more intelligent discussion? :)