I think it’s just elliptic rather than fallacious.
Paul Graham basically argues for artistic quality as something people have a natural instinct to recognize. The sexual attractiveness of bodies might be a more obvious example of this kind of thing. If you ask 100 people to rank pictures another 100 people of the opposite sex by hotness, the ranks will correlate very highly even if the rankers don’t get to communicate. So there is something they are all picking up on, but it isn’t a single property. (Symmetry might come closest but not really close, i.e. it explains more than any other factor but not most of the phenomenon.)
Paul Graham basically thinks artistic quality works the same way. Then taste is talent at picking up on it. For in-metaphor comparison, perhaps a professional photographer has an intuitive appreciation of how a tired woman would look awake, can adjust for halo effects, etc., so he has a less confounded appreciation of the actual beauty factor than I do. Likewise someone with good taste would be less confounded about artistic quality than someone with bad taste.
That’s his basic argument for taste being a thing and it doesn’t need a precise definition, in fact it would suggest giving a precise definition is probably AI-complete.
Now the contempt thing is not a definition, it is a suggested heuristic for identifying confounders. To look at my metaphor again, if I wanted to learn about beauty-confounders, tricks people use to make people they have no respect for think woman are hotter than they are (in other words porn methods) would be a good place to start.
This really isn’t about the thing (beuty/artistic quality) per se, more about the delta between the thing and the average person’s perception of it. And that actually is quite dependent on how much respect the artist/”artist” has for his audience.
I think it’s just elliptic rather than fallacious.
Paul Graham basically argues for artistic quality as something people have a natural instinct to recognize. The sexual attractiveness of bodies might be a more obvious example of this kind of thing. If you ask 100 people to rank pictures another 100 people of the opposite sex by hotness, the ranks will correlate very highly even if the rankers don’t get to communicate. So there is something they are all picking up on, but it isn’t a single property. (Symmetry might come closest but not really close, i.e. it explains more than any other factor but not most of the phenomenon.)
Paul Graham basically thinks artistic quality works the same way. Then taste is talent at picking up on it. For in-metaphor comparison, perhaps a professional photographer has an intuitive appreciation of how a tired woman would look awake, can adjust for halo effects, etc., so he has a less confounded appreciation of the actual beauty factor than I do. Likewise someone with good taste would be less confounded about artistic quality than someone with bad taste.
That’s his basic argument for taste being a thing and it doesn’t need a precise definition, in fact it would suggest giving a precise definition is probably AI-complete.
Now the contempt thing is not a definition, it is a suggested heuristic for identifying confounders. To look at my metaphor again, if I wanted to learn about beauty-confounders, tricks people use to make people they have no respect for think woman are hotter than they are (in other words porn methods) would be a good place to start.
This really isn’t about the thing (beuty/artistic quality) per se, more about the delta between the thing and the average person’s perception of it. And that actually is quite dependent on how much respect the artist/”artist” has for his audience.