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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14003 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026

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The thing that gets me about this is, the innate subjectivity of something like taste doesn't prevent us from making objective measurements and coming to objective conclusions.

E.g. with something like beauty standards, it's possible to ask and answer the question objectively: "If a bunch of universities make a bunch of grad students research the patterns of beauty standards throughout different cultures in society, what, if any, is the conclusion that comes out about what beauty standards different human cultures have in common when they all publish their papers and argue with each other through peer review?"

My answer is that you aren't talking about "true objectivity" but something that is about as close as we can get in practice.

When you that kind of study on aesthetic standards, what does emerge is not some kind of agent-independent, viewpoint neutral fact. What you have you established is a fact about the very subjective people and cultures you've studied.

(Assuming the statistics was done correctly, which does not happen as often as anyone would like in sociology or anthropology.)

It is an "objective" fact that X beauty standard is the most popular for Y (most humans, assuming your sampling was representative). That does not make it truly universal. Language is imprecise, so I will say that have found out an empirical truth about the specific subset of entities you have surveyed. In the same manner as we normally talk about truth, of course.

In other words:

Let's say we did a survey and found out that the majority of humans think blue is the best color. Then we can be confident in the claim "the majority of humans prefer the color blue over all other colors tested". That is not the same as blue being the "objectively" best color. You have a frame of reference, just a reasonably well specified one. An alien would possibly disagree, or the people who are colorblind and simply can't see blue. What you have won is a popularity contest (done scientifically), and not one about ontology.

You can't dodge this metaphysical headache, but most of the time, it can be ignored from a pragmatic point of view. If the NIST clock has the endorsement of the best physicists, if it predicts temporal events with better accuracy, if it matches the consensus of other clocks better? Then I will say it's the best clock, without worrying too hard about the fact that I can't help smuggling in my own preferences about what it means to be a better clock or even the importance of telling time.

Let's say we did a survey and found out that the majority of humans think blue is the best color. Then we can be confident in the claim "the majority of humans prefer the color blue over all other colors tested". That is not the same as blue being the "objectively" best color.

Right, and my point is, if we were to answer that question I asked previously, it wouldn't establish the "objectively correct beauty standards" or whatever, just "beauty standards that are shared among cultures in the world, as measured by [the people involved]." This will forever be intrinsically subjective, and we will never have any access to some sort of "objective" beauty standard unless God comes down and proves His existence and then declares it So. But the point of an "objective" beauty standard, like any standard, isn't to be some sort of invariant Truth about our world that we can write down onto some tablets to shoot out into space or whatever, it's a tool against which to measure other things when trying to decide how to categorize those things for use in our real life. And we can certainly discuss how useful the objective standard I came up with is for those - the judgment on how useful that is compared to other objective metrics one could come up with is also inescapably subjective and context-dependent. But we can still argue about which ones are the best and then come to a conclusion that we decide is useful enough for accomplishing our goals.

I would argue with God if he tried this, or at least I'd ask for reasons to believe in objectivity beyond the fact that he's God and thus could be expected to know better. So would I if he claimed that 1 = 2 (without definitional trickery). Of course, I don't think such a perfectly neutral observer exists in the first place, which makes the whole thing moot.

I've already been writing a detailed essay about the topic, and this is something I will address in more depth. Otherwise I agree with the rest of your arguments and their implications.

Of course, I don't think such a perfectly neutral observer exists in the first place, which makes the whole thing moot.

I think the same, but I assume that omnipotence includes the ability to convince people like you or me that we are wrong about this, without resorting to hypnosis or mind control or whatever.

Perhaps and (probably yes), but just because an argument is compelling or the person making it rhetorically sophisticated beyond my ability to parse does not make it actually true. I'd say it's cheating, but I doubt an actually omnipotent being would care what I think if it was trying to make me believe false things on purpose.

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