1) This paper by Juergen Schmidhuber was very helpful in un-confusing me about a lot of aesthetic things. But in particular, it accounts for things like subjectivity of preference and the way you can learn to like things with continual exposure. Whether you want to learn to appreciate a piece of art seems like a matter of preference, in general it doesn’t seem like there should be any reason to get normative about it.
2) Like most people, I have experienced things that I was supposed to like and actually liked them, and things that I was supposed to like that I didn’t end up actually liking. I see no reason to find this surprising. So when people say things like “if you don’t like this then you MUST (have no taste|have no attention span|be a moron|etc), I feel confident in saying that these people are making the mistakes discussed in Generalizing from one exmaple, or doing related things we discuss on LW, like simulating me in their brain and jumping to conclusions based on the implicit assumption that we are virtually identical. In fact, I tend to do this with any statement of the form “you have opinion X, therefore you must have trait Y”.
3) I think it’s perfectly fine to see that something is praised highly and use that as evidence that you should at least check it out. From your post, it looks like the opposite might be true for you (that is, once praise surpasses a certain level, you can heuristically assume that you actually won’t like it), but it works okay for me and many others. And in particular, I see no reason not to treat it as typical Bayesian evidence: If recommendations from Source A tend to correlate with your own judgements, use them, otherwise do not.
4) I don’t think there’s any absolute truth of “Great Art”-ness. We can dissolve the question down to things like “Is it enjoyable?” or “Is it historically significant?”, but “Great” seems like one of those dangling, orphaned categories to me. Feels real, but probably isn’t.
5) I see no reason that learning to like something is a bad thing, so long as you end up actually liking it. That is, if you will look back on it and be glad that you gave it a 2nd (or nth) chance, then this is probably something you should do. If you think you’ll look back on it and still feel confused about why you occasionally decide to put this piece of music on, yet you’ll feel pressured to continue doing so, then don’t bother.
Just a couple of thoughts about this:
1) This paper by Juergen Schmidhuber was very helpful in un-confusing me about a lot of aesthetic things. But in particular, it accounts for things like subjectivity of preference and the way you can learn to like things with continual exposure. Whether you want to learn to appreciate a piece of art seems like a matter of preference, in general it doesn’t seem like there should be any reason to get normative about it.
2) Like most people, I have experienced things that I was supposed to like and actually liked them, and things that I was supposed to like that I didn’t end up actually liking. I see no reason to find this surprising. So when people say things like “if you don’t like this then you MUST (have no taste|have no attention span|be a moron|etc), I feel confident in saying that these people are making the mistakes discussed in Generalizing from one exmaple, or doing related things we discuss on LW, like simulating me in their brain and jumping to conclusions based on the implicit assumption that we are virtually identical. In fact, I tend to do this with any statement of the form “you have opinion X, therefore you must have trait Y”.
3) I think it’s perfectly fine to see that something is praised highly and use that as evidence that you should at least check it out. From your post, it looks like the opposite might be true for you (that is, once praise surpasses a certain level, you can heuristically assume that you actually won’t like it), but it works okay for me and many others. And in particular, I see no reason not to treat it as typical Bayesian evidence: If recommendations from Source A tend to correlate with your own judgements, use them, otherwise do not.
4) I don’t think there’s any absolute truth of “Great Art”-ness. We can dissolve the question down to things like “Is it enjoyable?” or “Is it historically significant?”, but “Great” seems like one of those dangling, orphaned categories to me. Feels real, but probably isn’t.
5) I see no reason that learning to like something is a bad thing, so long as you end up actually liking it. That is, if you will look back on it and be glad that you gave it a 2nd (or nth) chance, then this is probably something you should do. If you think you’ll look back on it and still feel confused about why you occasionally decide to put this piece of music on, yet you’ll feel pressured to continue doing so, then don’t bother.