What’s most unappealing to me about modern, commercialized aesthetics is the degree to which the bandwidth is forced to be extremely high—something I’d call the standardization of aesthetics. When I walk down the street in the financial district of SF, there’s not much variety to be found in people’s visual styles. Sure, everything looks really nice, but I can’t say that it doesn’t get boring after a while. It’s clear that a lot of information is being packed into people’s outfits, so I should be able to infer a huge amount about someone just by looking at them. Same thing with websites. There’s really only one website design. Can it truly be said that there is something inherently optimal about these designs? I strongly suspect no. There are more forces at play that guarantee convergence that don’t depend on optimality.
Part of it might be the extremely high cost of defection. As aesthetics is a type of signalling mechanism, most of what Robin Hanson says applies here. It’s just usually not worth it to be an iconoclast or truly original. And at some point we just start believing the signals are inherently meaningful, because they’ve been there for so long. But all it takes is to look at the different types of beauty produced by other cultures or at different points in human history to see that this is not the case. The color orange, in silicon valley, might represent “innovation” or “ingenuity” (look at Tensorflow’s color scheme), but the orange robes of Buddhist monks evoke serenity, peace and compassion (but of course the color was originally dependent on the dyes that were available). However, one can also observe that there is little variety within each culture as well, suggesting that the same forces pushing towards aesthetic convergence are at play.
The sum of the evidence suggests to me that I am getting an infinitesimal fraction of the possible pleasant aesthetic experiences which could feasibly be created by someone given that they were not subject to signalling constraints. This seems deeply disappointing.
What’s most unappealing to me about modern, commercialized aesthetics is the degree to which the bandwidth is forced to be extremely high—something I’d call the standardization of aesthetics. When I walk down the street in the financial district of SF, there’s not much variety to be found in people’s visual styles. Sure, everything looks really nice, but I can’t say that it doesn’t get boring after a while. It’s clear that a lot of information is being packed into people’s outfits, so I should be able to infer a huge amount about someone just by looking at them. Same thing with websites. There’s really only one website design. Can it truly be said that there is something inherently optimal about these designs? I strongly suspect no. There are more forces at play that guarantee convergence that don’t depend on optimality.
Part of it might be the extremely high cost of defection. As aesthetics is a type of signalling mechanism, most of what Robin Hanson says applies here. It’s just usually not worth it to be an iconoclast or truly original. And at some point we just start believing the signals are inherently meaningful, because they’ve been there for so long. But all it takes is to look at the different types of beauty produced by other cultures or at different points in human history to see that this is not the case. The color orange, in silicon valley, might represent “innovation” or “ingenuity” (look at Tensorflow’s color scheme), but the orange robes of Buddhist monks evoke serenity, peace and compassion (but of course the color was originally dependent on the dyes that were available). However, one can also observe that there is little variety within each culture as well, suggesting that the same forces pushing towards aesthetic convergence are at play.
The sum of the evidence suggests to me that I am getting an infinitesimal fraction of the possible pleasant aesthetic experiences which could feasibly be created by someone given that they were not subject to signalling constraints. This seems deeply disappointing.
Which one is that?
I think he’s talking about minimalist websites.
Surely there’s more than one way to design a website in a ‘minimalist’ way?