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not the parent poster but I think I agree with your perspective here. The alternative is that some individuals' taste or sense of aesthetics is somehow innate and unmoored from the statistics of the things they experience. There may be something to this, but for most practical purposes I would agree with your point.



Another alternative is that taste is something you can only learn through experience and mentorship, where memorizing simple rules and heuristics is not sufficient. Taste is an example of tacit knowledge[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge


Perhaps this is where I disagree -- I believe while difficult, all tacit knowledge can be made explicit, but is just hard to do so

This may be because I'm not good at picking up on social cues, so had to learn things more consciously

But ofc I could also be wrong and maybe there are things the subconscious can learn that the conscious cannot


There’s another argument though that some taste is genetically programmed, like our affinity for campfires or sweeping views. Those don’t seem to be learned as they seem to be entirely cross cultural and innate. Those aren’t examples of art of course but make the point that some sense of aesthetics may not be learned.




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