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I once sat in a room with a bunch of machine learning folks who were developing creative artificial intelligence to make 'good art.' I asked one researcher about the training [...]

We are often confronted with attempts to debunk our aesthetic tastes, like: "You only like jazz because you're a pretentious hipster," or, "Your love of the Western canon is just colonialism speaking." Such debunking arguments often try to give a socio-historical accounting, intended to de-legitimize our tastes by showing that they arise from processes uninterested in real aesthetic value. One common version is the Art Populist debunk: that claims of aesthetic expertise in esoteric arts are really just elitist gatekeeping. Then we have its mirror twin, the Art Expert debunk: that the populist love of simple arts serves the interests of profiteering entertainment corporations dispensing simplified slop. Suppose we accept one of these debunking arguments. How are we supposed to get on? Are we supposed to not like the things we like, or force ourselves to choke down food we don't enjoy? And suppose we accept both of these debunking arguments — what then? Are we supposed to simply give up our grip on beauty altogether? This is hard to imagine. Aesthetic debunking arguments have a harder time getting a grip on us, because aesthetic life involves a distinctively tight relationship between our felt aesthetic phenomena and our aesthetic judgments. Aesthetic life gives us phenomenal resistance to debunking arguments, when our felt loves lag behind our endorsed beliefs. I suggest a way through that offers a livable accommodation. We may be able to treat such debunking arguments, not as targeting the positive content of our taste, but as targeting the boundaries and limitations on our taste. That is, a Populist may not be able to debunk my deep felt love of opera, but they may be able to debunk my dismissal of dance-pop. In this case, we can take onboard both the Art Expert's and the Art Populist's debunking arguments, as targeting different varieties of narrowness and dismissal. These debunkings, then, move us, not towards aesthetic nihilism, but aesthetic expansionism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the concept of "value capture" and its impact on decision-making processes. It discusses how external values or metrics can dominate an individual's choices, using examples such as Fitbits and law school rankings. The article argues that value capture can limit individual autonomy and hinder the ability to tailor values to one's own context. It also examines the challenges of balancing standardized metrics in institutions with the desire for personalized values. Additionally, the article discusses the tension between large-scale and small-scale values and the importance of maintaining a variety of differently-scaled values. [Extracted from the article]

Patridge takes it as morally better that the transparent game-player with social ends will constantly monitor the other players and adjust their play-style to match. For such players, we may only able to detect the difference between striving players and achievement players in their extra-game behavior. I want to give novice players a chance to stretch their legs and figure out how the game works without hamstringing them at the first move.[1] So if opaquely layered striving players really were incapable of such adaptation, that would show that striving play lacked a capacity for a certain kind of social grace. Currie's example only makes sense if achievement players play with a more deathly grip on the win, and striving players play more lightheartedly. For example, Patridge worries that the transparent game-player will be able to adjust themselves mid-play to suit the social purpose (Patridge, 374-6). [Extracted from the article]

In our life with science, we trust experts; we form judgements by inference from past evidence. We conduct ourselves very differently in the aesthetic domain. We avoid deferring to aesthetic experts. We form our judgements through direct perception of particulars rather than through inference. Why the difference? I suggest that we avoid aesthetic testimony and aesthetic inference, not because they're unusable, but because we have adopted social norms to avoid them. Aesthetic appreciation turns out to be something like a game. We have laid down certain rules and restrictions in order to shape a kind of activity we cherish. And aesthetic properties turn out to be a kind of social construct. Much like the goal of a game, they are constituted in part by our obedience to certain rules. The norms of aesthetic life are different from those of science because our purposes are different. We engage in science to get the right answers; we engage in aesthetic appreciation to be absorbed in the activity of the sensuous perception of particulars. Our aesthetic practices are a constructed shelter from science; they restore to us a small domain where we may once again engage in our own sensuous perception of particulars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her BBC Reith Lectures on Trust, Onora O'Neill offers a short, but biting, criticism of transparency. People think that trust and transparency go together but in reality, says O'Neill, they are deeply opposed. Transparency forces people to conceal their actual reasons for action and invent different ones for public consumption. Transparency forces deception. I work out the details of her argument and worsen her conclusion. I focus on public transparency – that is, transparency to the public over expert domains. I offer two versions of the criticism. First, the epistemic intrusion argument: The drive to transparency forces experts to explain their reasoning to non‐experts. But expert reasons are, by their nature, often inaccessible to non‐experts. So the demand for transparency can pressure experts to act only in those ways for which they can offer public justification. Second, the intimate reasons argument: In many cases of practical deliberation, the relevant reasons are intimate to a community and not easily explicable to those who lack a particular shared background. The demand for transparency, then, pressures community members to abandon the special understanding and sensitivity that arises from their particular experiences. Transparency, it turns out, is a form of surveillance. By forcing reasoning into the explicit and public sphere, transparency roots out corruption — but it also inhibits the full application of expert skill, sensitivity, and subtle shared understandings. The difficulty here arises from the basic fact that human knowledge vastly outstrips any individual's capacities. We all depend on experts, which makes us vulnerable to their biases and corruption. But if we try to wholly secure our trust — if we leash groups of experts to pursuing only the goals and taking only the actions that can be justified to the non‐expert public — then we will undermine their expertise. We need both trust and transparency, but they are in essential tension. This is a deep practical dilemma; it admits of no neat resolution, but only painful compromise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Games have a complex, and seemingly paradoxical structure: they are both competitive and cooperative, and the competitive element is required for the cooperative element to work out. They are mechanisms for transforming competition into cooperation. Several contemporary philosophers of sport have located the primary mechanism of conversion in the mental attitudes of the players. I argue that these views cannot capture the phenomenological complexity of game-play, nor the difficulty and moral complexity of achieving cooperation through game-play. In this paper, I present a different account of the relationship between competition and cooperation. My view is adistributedview of the conversion: success depends on a large number of features. First, the players must achieve the right motivational state: playing for the sake of the struggle, rather than to win. Second, successful transformation depends on a large number of extra-mental features, including good game design, and social and institutional features. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the article, the author discusses the engagement account of aesthetic value and the aesthetic judgments through inference. Other topics include the metaphysics of aesthetic properties, how aesthetic appreciation can become a constructed social practice to establish a particular kind of activity, how aesthetic appreciation is a constructed social practice that avoid the use of inference and testimony, the engagement account of aesthetic value, and how aesthetic appreciation can have similar motivational structure to a game.