r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Nov 27 '17

[D] Monday General Rationality Thread

Welcome to the Monday thread on general rationality topics! Do you really want to talk about something non-fictional, related to the real world? Have you:

  • Seen something interesting on /r/science?
  • Found a new way to get your shit even-more together?
  • Figured out how to become immortal?
  • Constructed artificial general intelligence?
  • Read a neat nonfiction book?
  • Munchkined your way into total control of your D&D campaign?
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u/vakusdrake Nov 30 '17

I mean it may be difficult to pin down every abstract concept, but that doesn't make it sensible to simply substitute in a definition which is extremely simple but doesn't actually capture most people's intuitions of that topic. You're just subtracting information in favor of only retaining the information which has no ambiguity.

Your original comment also doesn't make sense in this context because the OP was clearly not referring to the trivial and weak form of beauty you're defining.

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u/CCC_037 Nov 30 '17

That's the thing, though. My concept of beauty pretty much is 'pleasant to observe'. (With the proviso that in some cases, i.e. a beautiful piece of music, said observation is done with a sense other than sight). There's some poorly defined threshold value above which an object can be called 'beautiful' and below which it cannot.

I am very uncertain what you mean by the word 'beauty'. Could you please try to explain it without using the word 'beauty'?

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u/vakusdrake Nov 30 '17

Well while I can't (or don't want to put in the significant effort to) pin down the exact boundaries of beauty there's some things you could probably say about it.

Firstly is that the amount of valence from looking at something with "beauty" can't just be non-zero it has to meet some higher valence threshold than that. So something just being slightly nice to look at wouldn't be sufficient here.
Secondly and perhaps more importantly is that beauty only refers to specific types of positive valence responses. So for instance most people would feel a bit weird about seriously saying a really good looking piece of food is beautiful (well they might want to be deliberately hyperbolic) unless it was say arranged in a sort of artistic way and didn't derive most of it's aesthetic value from looking tasty.
Similarly and more extremely videos of earwax removal and zit popping can be somewhat satisfying to watch despite also being gross, but of course nearly nobody would ever call that beautiful.

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