I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the problem this post is trying to address. Are you trying to resolve disagreements between people about ‘aesthetics’ as you’ve defined them in this post?
When you say:
But this all left me with a nagging, frustrated sense that something important and beautiful being lost. I want to live in a world where people help each other out in small ways. It’s the particular kind of beauty that a small town in a Miyazaki movie embodies. It feels important to me.
I think that something that you value is being lost, because you want to live in a world where people help each other in small ways. The cost of doing that might outweigh the benefits. For instance, if the community exists to serve some downstream purpose, and so everything must be optimized for efficiency. There’s nothing wrong with noticing that comes at a cost.
Under what circumstances should I change how I feel about that?
Approximating humans as “rational agents”, the same times it makes sense for an agent to modify it’s utility function. For instance, if you’re being offered a deal where changing your values will end up giving you more of what you currently value. Generally though, as long as your beliefs about reality are accurate, I think it’s a mistake to change the way you feel about it, since that seems dangerously like ignoring you’re own preferences.
It seems to me that a persons preferences for a thing should be factored into what they value and their beliefs about that thing. I can see two parties coming to an agreement about the reality of a thing. I can see them coming to an agreement about what each of them finds valuable. I can’t see them coming to a consensus about whether a thing is beautiful/ugly, good/bad, or tasteful/distasteful.
I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the problem this post is trying to address. Are you trying to resolve disagreements between people about ‘aesthetics’ as you’ve defined them in this post?
When you say:
I think that something that you value is being lost, because you want to live in a world where people help each other in small ways. The cost of doing that might outweigh the benefits. For instance, if the community exists to serve some downstream purpose, and so everything must be optimized for efficiency. There’s nothing wrong with noticing that comes at a cost.
Approximating humans as “rational agents”, the same times it makes sense for an agent to modify it’s utility function. For instance, if you’re being offered a deal where changing your values will end up giving you more of what you currently value. Generally though, as long as your beliefs about reality are accurate, I think it’s a mistake to change the way you feel about it, since that seems dangerously like ignoring you’re own preferences.
It seems to me that a persons preferences for a thing should be factored into what they value and their beliefs about that thing. I can see two parties coming to an agreement about the reality of a thing. I can see them coming to an agreement about what each of them finds valuable. I can’t see them coming to a consensus about whether a thing is beautiful/ugly, good/bad, or tasteful/distasteful.