Essays
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- Programming Bottom-Up - Страница 1
- Lisp for Web-Based Applications - Страница 3
- Beating the Averages - Страница 6
- Java's Cover - Страница 12
- Being Popular - Страница 14
- Five Questions about Language Design - Страница 24
- The Roots of Lisp - Страница 28
- The Other Road Ahead - Страница 29
- What Made Lisp Different - Страница 44
- Why Arc Isn't Especially Object-Oriented - Страница 45
- Taste for Makers - Страница 46
- What Languages Fix - Страница 52
- Succinctness is Power - Страница 53
- Revenge of the Nerds - Страница 57
- A Plan for Spam - Страница 65
- Design and Research - Страница 72
- Better Bayesian Filtering - Страница 76
- Why Nerds are Unpopular - Страница 82
- The Hundred-Year Language - Страница 90
- If Lisp is So Great - Страница 97
- Hackers and Painters - Страница 98
- Filters that Fight Back - Страница 105
- What You Can't Say - Страница 107
- The Word "Hacker" - Страница 114
- The Python Paradox - Страница 117
- Great Hackers - Страница 118
- The Age of the Essay - Страница 125
- What the Bubble Got Right - Страница 131
- Bradley's Ghost - Страница 136
- Made in USA - Страница 137
- What You'll Wish You'd Known - Страница 140
- How to Start a Startup - Страница 147
- A Unified Theory of VC Suckagepad - Страница 159
- Undergraduation - Страница 161
- Writing, Briefly - Страница 166
- Return of the Mac - Страница 167
- Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas - Страница 169
- The Submarine - Страница 173
- Hiring is Obsolete - Страница 177
- What Business Can Learn from Open Source - Страница 183
- After the Ladder - Страница 189
- Inequality and Risk - Страница 190
- What I Did this Summer - Страница 194
- Ideas for Startups - Страница 198
- The Venture Capital Squeeze - Страница 203
- How to Fund a Startup - Страница 205
- Web 2.0 - Страница 217
- How to Make Wealth - Страница 222
- Good and Bad Procrastination - Страница 233
- How to Do What You Love - Страница 236
- Are Software Patents Evil? - Страница 242
- The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn - Страница 248
- How to Be Silicon Valley - Страница 255
- Why Startups Condense in America - Страница 260
- The Power of the Marginal - Страница 267
- The Island Test - Страница 275
- Copy What You Like - Страница 276
- How to Present to Investors - Страница 278
- A Student's Guide to Startups - Страница 282
- The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups - Страница 290
- Mind the Gap - Страница 297
- How Art Can Be Good - Страница 305
- Learning from Founders - Страница 310
- Is It Worth Being Wise? - Страница 311
- Why to Not Not Start a Startup - Страница 316
- Microsoft is Dead - Страница 324
- Two Kinds of Judgement - Страница 326
- The Hacker's Guide to Investors - Страница 327
- An Alternative Theory of Unions - Страница 336
- The Equity Equation - Страница 337
- Stuff - Страница 339
- Holding a Program in One's Head - Страница 341
- How Not to Die - Страница 344
- News from the Front - Страница 347
- How to Do Philosophy - Страница 350
- The Future of Web Startups - Страница 357
- Why to Move to a Startup Hub - Страница 362
- Six Principles for Making New Things - Страница 364
- Trolls - Страница 366
- A New Venture Animal - Страница 368
- You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss - Страница 371
We can, however, approach our goal from another direction, by using ourselves as guinea pigs. You're human. If you want to know what the basic human reaction to a piece of art would be, you can at least approach that by getting rid of the sources of error in your own judgements.
For example, while anyone's reaction to a famous painting will be warped at first by its fame, there are ways to decrease its effects. One is to come back to the painting over and over. After a few days the fame wears off, and you can start to see it as a painting. Another is to stand close. A painting familiar from reproductions looks more familiar from ten feet away; close in you see details that get lost in reproductions, and which you're therefore seeing for the first time.
There are two main kinds of error that get in the way of seeing a work of art: biases you bring from your own circumstances, and tricks played by the artist. Tricks are straightforward to correct for. Merely being aware of them usually prevents them from working. For example, when I was ten I used to be very impressed by airbrushed lettering that looked like shiny metal. But once you study how it's done, you see that it's a pretty cheesy trick—one of the sort that relies on pushing a few visual buttons really hard to temporarily overwhelm the viewer. It's like trying to convince someone by shouting at them.
The way not to be vulnerable to tricks is to explicitly seek out and catalog them. When you notice a whiff of dishonesty coming from some kind of art, stop and figure out what's going on. When someone is obviously pandering to an audience that's easily fooled, whether it's someone making shiny stuff to impress ten year olds, or someone making conspicuously avant-garde stuff to impress would-be intellectuals, learn how they do it. Once you've seen enough examples of specific types of tricks, you start to become a connoisseur of trickery in general, just as professional magicians are.
What counts as a trick? Roughly, it's something done with contempt for the audience. For example, the guys designing Ferraris in the 1950s were probably designing cars that they themselves admired. Whereas I suspect over at General Motors the marketing people are telling the designers, "Most people who buy SUVs do it to seem manly, not to drive off-road. So don't worry about the suspension; just make that sucker as big and tough-looking as you can." [6]
I think with some effort you can make yourself nearly immune to tricks. It's harder to escape the influence of your own circumstances, but you can at least move in that direction. The way to do it is to travel widely, in both time and space. If you go and see all the different kinds of things people like in other cultures, and learn about all the different things people have liked in the past, you'll probably find it changes what you like. I doubt you could ever make yourself into a completely universal person, if only because you can only travel in one direction in time. But if you find a work of art that would appeal equally to your friends, to people in Nepal, and to the ancient Greeks, you're probably onto something.
My main point here is not how to have good taste, but that there can even be such a thing. And I think I've shown that. There is such a thing as good art. It's art that interests its human audience, and since humans have a lot in common, what interests them is not random. Since there's such a thing as good art, there's also such a thing as good taste, which is the ability to recognize it.
If we were talking about the taste of apples, I'd agree that taste is just personal preference. Some people like certain kinds of apples and others like other kinds, but how can you say that one is right and the other wrong? [7]
The thing is, art isn't apples. Art is man-made. It comes with a lot of cultural baggage, and in addition the people who make it often try to trick us. Most people's judgement of art is dominated by these extraneous factors; they're like someone trying to judge the taste of apples in a dish made of equal parts apples and jalapeno peppers. All they're tasting is the peppers. So it turns out you can pick out some people and say that they have better taste than others: they're the ones who actually taste art like apples.
Or to put it more prosaically, they're the people who (a) are hard to trick, and (b) don't just like whatever they grew up with. If you could find people who'd eliminated all such influences on their judgement, you'd probably still see variation in what they liked. But because humans have so much in common, you'd also find they agreed on a lot. They'd nearly all prefer the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to a blank canvas.
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