The general point you’re making might be true, but 2/3rds of your examples are working against you.
It depends on exactly how young the ‘smart kid’ is, of course, but I think (and have seen in practice) that a reasonably smart and tech-savvy 14-year-old can build a functional, pleasing-to-the-eye website in a week, especially if they have a lot of free time. To play any instrument well takes a certain amount of dedicated effort, but I think a lot of high-achieving kids start learning one early, especially if their parents push it on them.
Meanwhile, a lot of the world’s most popular websites are noisy, buggy, and full of ads. And pop music, even when it sounds good, is not very melodically complicated; that “simple piece on the piano” might be more interesting, even if it doesn’t have the juicy bass or whatever. Depending on what kinds of aesthetic judgements you’re making, I think it’s absolutely true that an individual smart kid can make something “better” than the public SOTA, without trying very hard, in either of those two categories. Honestly, I suspect this is true regardless of how smart the kid in question is.
That’s not to say it’s because everyone else is stupid. Mass-deployed websites are operating under a lot of constraints that a hobbyist Neocities page doesn’t need to worry about, so their job is a lot harder. And pop musicians are actively optimizing for something kinda basic, because that’s what reaches the widest audience. But these nuances might not be obvious to the kid in the scenario, and especially not if you just look at the product on its own. From the kid’s perspective, just looking at the things around us might give a sense that they’re surprisingly badly made, relative to what the kid could do (with a little effort).
Not sure about the chair, though. Maybe those really are surprisingly well made.
The general point you’re making might be true, but 2/3rds of your examples are working against you.
It depends on exactly how young the ‘smart kid’ is, of course, but I think (and have seen in practice) that a reasonably smart and tech-savvy 14-year-old can build a functional, pleasing-to-the-eye website in a week, especially if they have a lot of free time. To play any instrument well takes a certain amount of dedicated effort, but I think a lot of high-achieving kids start learning one early, especially if their parents push it on them.
Meanwhile, a lot of the world’s most popular websites are noisy, buggy, and full of ads. And pop music, even when it sounds good, is not very melodically complicated; that “simple piece on the piano” might be more interesting, even if it doesn’t have the juicy bass or whatever. Depending on what kinds of aesthetic judgements you’re making, I think it’s absolutely true that an individual smart kid can make something “better” than the public SOTA, without trying very hard, in either of those two categories. Honestly, I suspect this is true regardless of how smart the kid in question is.
That’s not to say it’s because everyone else is stupid. Mass-deployed websites are operating under a lot of constraints that a hobbyist Neocities page doesn’t need to worry about, so their job is a lot harder. And pop musicians are actively optimizing for something kinda basic, because that’s what reaches the widest audience. But these nuances might not be obvious to the kid in the scenario, and especially not if you just look at the product on its own. From the kid’s perspective, just looking at the things around us might give a sense that they’re surprisingly badly made, relative to what the kid could do (with a little effort).
Not sure about the chair, though. Maybe those really are surprisingly well made.
I made a wooden chair in a week from some planks when I was a teenager. Granted, this was for GCSE Design & Technology class.