Something I’ve been thinking about lately is the concept of Aesthetic Pathology. The idea that our trauma’s and beliefs can shape what we allow ourselves to see as beautiful or ugly.
Take for instance the broad aesthetic of order, or chaos. Depending on what we’ve been punished or admired for, we may find one or the other aesthetic beautiful.
This can then bleed into influencing our actual beliefs, we may think that someone who keeps order is “good” if we have the order aesthetic, or have the belief that “in order to get things done we must maintain order”.
The counter to this is to begin to develop what you could call Aesthetic Nuance—Recognizing that different things can be beautiful or ugly for different situations.
Chaos can in fact have it’s own beauty, once we realize that, that can bleed through in our beliefs, and we can realize that in this situation, in order to act fast enough to get things done, we must embrace the beauty of chaos.
I’ve seen this show up in the Postrationality community—many were traumatized by the rationality aesthetic. They develop an Aesthetic Pathology for the unexplainable.
The aesthetic nuance here is—The innefable is beautiful, as is the explained from different perspectives in different situations.
Similarly, for a long time I’ve had an Aesthetic Pathology related to growth. I find stagnation abhorrent. However, as I begin to develop Aesthetic Nuance for stagnation, I can see the beauty in the eternal and unchanging.
I tend to model aesthetics as more deeply entwined with other preferences and heuristics. Whether caused by trauma, early or late training, genetic or environmental predilection, or whatever, there are many elements of each individual’s utility function that are somewhat resistant to introspection.
Your proposed causality (trauma, and punished/rewarded framework) is generally applicable—not only to things generally in the aesthetic realm, but also in the policy-preference, social-interaction, and many other topics where “belief” mostly means “more trusted models” rather than “concrete probabilities of propositional future experiences”.
As you note, it’s not fully resistant to introspection—you can train yourself to notice and enjoy (or to notice and disprefer) things differently than your past. Sometimes a partial explanation of causality for your belief can help. Sometimes it’s a non-explanation just-so story, giving you permission to change. And sometimes you can change just by deciding that you’ll meet your considered goals more easily if you let go of those particular heuristics.
Something I’ve been thinking about lately is the concept of Aesthetic Pathology. The idea that our trauma’s and beliefs can shape what we allow ourselves to see as beautiful or ugly.
Take for instance the broad aesthetic of order, or chaos. Depending on what we’ve been punished or admired for, we may find one or the other aesthetic beautiful.
This can then bleed into influencing our actual beliefs, we may think that someone who keeps order is “good” if we have the order aesthetic, or have the belief that “in order to get things done we must maintain order”.
The counter to this is to begin to develop what you could call Aesthetic Nuance—Recognizing that different things can be beautiful or ugly for different situations.
Chaos can in fact have it’s own beauty, once we realize that, that can bleed through in our beliefs, and we can realize that in this situation, in order to act fast enough to get things done, we must embrace the beauty of chaos.
I’ve seen this show up in the Postrationality community—many were traumatized by the rationality aesthetic. They develop an Aesthetic Pathology for the unexplainable.
The aesthetic nuance here is—The innefable is beautiful, as is the explained from different perspectives in different situations.
Similarly, for a long time I’ve had an Aesthetic Pathology related to growth. I find stagnation abhorrent. However, as I begin to develop Aesthetic Nuance for stagnation, I can see the beauty in the eternal and unchanging.
I tend to model aesthetics as more deeply entwined with other preferences and heuristics. Whether caused by trauma, early or late training, genetic or environmental predilection, or whatever, there are many elements of each individual’s utility function that are somewhat resistant to introspection.
Your proposed causality (trauma, and punished/rewarded framework) is generally applicable—not only to things generally in the aesthetic realm, but also in the policy-preference, social-interaction, and many other topics where “belief” mostly means “more trusted models” rather than “concrete probabilities of propositional future experiences”.
As you note, it’s not fully resistant to introspection—you can train yourself to notice and enjoy (or to notice and disprefer) things differently than your past. Sometimes a partial explanation of causality for your belief can help. Sometimes it’s a non-explanation just-so story, giving you permission to change. And sometimes you can change just by deciding that you’ll meet your considered goals more easily if you let go of those particular heuristics.