Such methods were introduced about a 100 year ago by less scientific minded and more spiritual communities such as theosophists, I remember one guru categorically forbidding non-subjective statements to his students. This is good and all that, but can also lead to the other extreme, a form of intellectual laziness where we just agree to disagree that everybody has different tastes and viewpoints and basically thing kind of post-modern laziness, “no truth just different narratives” kind.
My point: put a HEAVY emphasis on the explore-whys. Suppose we want to know what makes books liked. “I like this book, you not, that is okay, tastes are different” type of pomo lazy stuff are IMHO even more useless for this purpose than a categorical “this book is good”. At least that leads to “why?” while too much subjectivity not.
I would modify your advice as “move things towards the more subjective or the more objective based on which one seems to lead to more and better whys”. Sometimes it requires moving towards the more subjective, sometimes towards the more objective, such as “let’s not agree to have different tastes but try to compare what objective quality of the book may have hit us differently?”
Such methods were introduced about a 100 year ago by less scientific minded and more spiritual communities such as theosophists, I remember one guru categorically forbidding non-subjective statements to his students. This is good and all that, but can also lead to the other extreme, a form of intellectual laziness where we just agree to disagree that everybody has different tastes and viewpoints and basically thing kind of post-modern laziness, “no truth just different narratives” kind.
My point: put a HEAVY emphasis on the explore-whys. Suppose we want to know what makes books liked. “I like this book, you not, that is okay, tastes are different” type of pomo lazy stuff are IMHO even more useless for this purpose than a categorical “this book is good”. At least that leads to “why?” while too much subjectivity not.
I would modify your advice as “move things towards the more subjective or the more objective based on which one seems to lead to more and better whys”. Sometimes it requires moving towards the more subjective, sometimes towards the more objective, such as “let’s not agree to have different tastes but try to compare what objective quality of the book may have hit us differently?”