Humans have been trying to parse out the hidden variables in the word “good” for millennia—plausibly since before the dawn of writing. We’ve made progress—a lot of it—but that doesn’t stop the remaining problem from being very hard, because yes, the word is something like an abstraction of an approximation of a loose cloud of ideas. We can parse out and taboo variables 1-9, and come to agree on them, and still caught off guard by variable 184 when it interacts with variables 125 and 4437, each of which is irrelevant (or an unchanging background) to most people in most contexts to the point we’ve never bothered to consciously notice them.
You talked about thermometers. You’re right, but consider that it took centuries to go from “We want to measure how hot or cold things are,” to “here’s the actual physical definition of temperature.” Even still it’s unintuitive, there’s no single instrument that works to measure it in all cases, and it doesn’t quite align with what every user of the word wants out of the concept. “Good” is a lot more complicated than “temperature.”
In other words, yes, of course, let’s keep doing this, more and better! But let’s be honest about it being actually hard and complicated.
Humans have been trying to parse out the hidden variables in the word “good” for millennia—plausibly since before the dawn of writing. We’ve made progress—a lot of it—but that doesn’t stop the remaining problem from being very hard, because yes, the word is something like an abstraction of an approximation of a loose cloud of ideas. We can parse out and taboo variables 1-9, and come to agree on them, and still caught off guard by variable 184 when it interacts with variables 125 and 4437, each of which is irrelevant (or an unchanging background) to most people in most contexts to the point we’ve never bothered to consciously notice them.
You talked about thermometers. You’re right, but consider that it took centuries to go from “We want to measure how hot or cold things are,” to “here’s the actual physical definition of temperature.” Even still it’s unintuitive, there’s no single instrument that works to measure it in all cases, and it doesn’t quite align with what every user of the word wants out of the concept. “Good” is a lot more complicated than “temperature.”
In other words, yes, of course, let’s keep doing this, more and better! But let’s be honest about it being actually hard and complicated.