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No. Absolutely not. There is no objective study of humor, or of interesting. You can't manufacture it. Different people find different things funny for differen

by unalone 18y ago

No. Absolutely not. There is no objective study of humor, or of interesting. You can't manufacture it. Different people find different things funny for different reasons. I've taken classes in stand-up comedy, improv comedy, and in general dramatics, and this is the big thing that we learn. While humor can be analyzed, and while there's a craft inherent in modeling a joke, that doesn't make humor objective. And it's the same thing with interest. Some people find things interesting that aren't interesting whatsoever to me. The same is true in reverse. I mean, thanks for agreeing with me, but from what you're saying here I think that you're saying something pretty nonsensical. "Interest" and "insight" aren't objective standards. It's entirely subjective, through-and-through. If you don't like reading because you don't find it interesting, then it's not interesting to you. It's not objectively interesting whatsoever. And usually, insight and interest are matched. If something's saying something new, then it's both insightful and interesting, precisely for the "different" argument that I made before.

astine 18y ago
I don't know, while I might agree that what qualifies as 'interesting' probably is subjective, I think that insight is concrete enough so that you could objectively state whether some was or not with relation to the author or the audiance.
- unalone 18y ago
  relation to the author or the audiance But that makes it subjective, doesn't it?
  - Alex3917 18y ago
    No, because insightful isn't relative to a person's innate aesthetic preferences, but rather it's relative to the cognitive models they use to understand the world. In the same way that one mathematical object can objectively be larger than another mathematical object, one mental object can be objectively insightful in relation to another mental object.
    - unalone 18y ago
      The difference is that there's a physical reality to size. Insight is subjective by default. Even if you make a standard for monitoring it, your standard is going to be subjective.
  - astine 18y ago
    Yes, but it can be objectively subjective; or rather, it is subjective, but in a different sense. To illustrate, the phrases "The audience finds this interesting," and "The audience finds this insightful," are both subjective in the sense that their truth-value is dependent on the subject (different speakers likely would have different perspectives,) but they are objective in that, given a particular subject, they are either true or false. So: ojective in the particular, and subjective in the universal. The difference is that the later can depend on factors that are external to the subject, are objective and can be shared. A phrase (or whatever) can be insightful with respect to a particular context if it adds something that was not previoulsy present in that context. So an analysis of Hitler (for example) revealing him to be a raving ego-maniac would have been insightful in the early thirties when most people had rather more benign opinions of the Nazi party. Released today, the same analysis would be rather less insightful. Given that when people use the word 'insightful,' they usually are speaking from a particular context (usually shared with the listener), the word can be said to be used objectively.
    - unalone 18y ago
      Okay. So, objectively when regarding a large mass of people. My only objection to that would be that again, an audience can vary wildly in different conditions. My professor gave an "enlightening" lesson on Delicious to my class, that the audience (college freshmen) on a whole found insight from. But the same lesson to, say Hacker News, would be far less insightful. You could get two different objective readings for the same material. Or am I missing something in what you said?
      - astine 18y ago
        No, that's about it. I just annoyed when people are too quick to insist that something is 'subjective' as a means of dismissing it's relavence or importance, so I tend to be picky about it.
        unalone 18y ago
        That's fair enough. I only did it in this case because the argument is so specifically about objectivity.
- Alex3917 18y ago
  "I might agree that what qualifies as 'interesting' probably is subjective" Baillargeon, R. (1994) How do infants learn about the physical world? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 3, 133-140.
Alex3917 18y ago
"There is no objective study of humor, or of interesting." From Paul McGhee's paper Cognitive Development and Children's Comprehension of Humor: This study investigated the relationship between children's level of cognitive functioning (according to Piaget's theoretical framework) and their comprehension and appreciation of humor based on violation of cognitive expectancies. A distinction was drawn between novelty and incongruity humor, differing in the nature of expectancy violation represented. [...] Analyses of age differences indicated consistent significant increases in comprehension with increasing age for all humor stimuli. Similar analyses for humor appreciation yielded no significant age differences. This was done in 1971, when we didn't know nearly as much as we do now about the validity of Piaget's framework. If this research was redone today with more modern techniques and cognitive development theories the results would be even more telling. And if you look at the prior research this paper cites, it's clear that there is an objective basis for humor and it's been carefully studied.
- unalone 18y ago
  The problem, as I stated before, is that the idea of "humor" is in itself subjective. There's an objective basis for "cognitive expectancies," but that isn't the only aspect of humor as we define it with language. For instance, there's slapstick humor, which derives from being over-the-top. There's absurdist humor, which relies on the unexpected. There's clever humor, which is funny because it requires effort to understand it, and so there's a congratulatory aspect to it. There's dark humor, which - at points - doesn't trigger any laughter at all, but which still must be included under the umbrella. I'm certain that you can measure certain parts of humor. But at the same time, while there's a physical part of us that derives humor, that does not make humor itself objective. The fact that every single person has different objective reactions makes humor inherently subjective, even if there's a physical element to be studied and torn apart. It's like - I said this in another thread - the testers who try to analyze creativity. There are certain ways that you can identify a creative person. The problem is, none of those ways are perfect and all of them are thwarted by different studies. While you can test creativity and create an objective model, you'd only be fooling yourself.
  - 18y ago

by unalone 18y ago

astine 18y ago

I don't know, while I might agree that what qualifies as 'interesting' probably is subjective, I think that insight is concrete enough so that you could objectively state whether some was or not with relation to the author or the audiance.

unalone 18y ago
relation to the author or the audiance But that makes it subjective, doesn't it?
- Alex3917 18y ago
  No, because insightful isn't relative to a person's innate aesthetic preferences, but rather it's relative to the cognitive models they use to understand the world. In the same way that one mathematical object can objectively be larger than another mathematical object, one mental object can be objectively insightful in relation to another mental object.
  - unalone 18y ago
    The difference is that there's a physical reality to size. Insight is subjective by default. Even if you make a standard for monitoring it, your standard is going to be subjective.
- astine 18y ago
  Yes, but it can be objectively subjective; or rather, it is subjective, but in a different sense. To illustrate, the phrases "The audience finds this interesting," and "The audience finds this insightful," are both subjective in the sense that their truth-value is dependent on the subject (different speakers likely would have different perspectives,) but they are objective in that, given a particular subject, they are either true or false. So: ojective in the particular, and subjective in the universal. The difference is that the later can depend on factors that are external to the subject, are objective and can be shared. A phrase (or whatever) can be insightful with respect to a particular context if it adds something that was not previoulsy present in that context. So an analysis of Hitler (for example) revealing him to be a raving ego-maniac would have been insightful in the early thirties when most people had rather more benign opinions of the Nazi party. Released today, the same analysis would be rather less insightful. Given that when people use the word 'insightful,' they usually are speaking from a particular context (usually shared with the listener), the word can be said to be used objectively.
  - unalone 18y ago
    Okay. So, objectively when regarding a large mass of people. My only objection to that would be that again, an audience can vary wildly in different conditions. My professor gave an "enlightening" lesson on Delicious to my class, that the audience (college freshmen) on a whole found insight from. But the same lesson to, say Hacker News, would be far less insightful. You could get two different objective readings for the same material. Or am I missing something in what you said?
    - astine 18y ago
      No, that's about it. I just annoyed when people are too quick to insist that something is 'subjective' as a means of dismissing it's relavence or importance, so I tend to be picky about it.
      - unalone 18y ago
        That's fair enough. I only did it in this case because the argument is so specifically about objectivity.
Alex3917 18y ago
"I might agree that what qualifies as 'interesting' probably is subjective" Baillargeon, R. (1994) How do infants learn about the physical world? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 3, 133-140.

Alex3917 18y ago

"There is no objective study of humor, or of interesting." From Paul McGhee's paper Cognitive Development and Children's Comprehension of Humor: This study investigated the relationship between children's level of cognitive functioning (according to Piaget's theoretical framework) and their comprehension and appreciation of humor based on violation of cognitive expectancies. A distinction was drawn between novelty and incongruity humor, differing in the nature of expectancy violation represented. [...] Analyses of age differences indicated consistent significant increases in comprehension with increasing age for all humor stimuli. Similar analyses for humor appreciation yielded no significant age differences. This was done in 1971, when we didn't know nearly as much as we do now about the validity of Piaget's framework. If this research was redone today with more modern techniques and cognitive development theories the results would be even more telling. And if you look at the prior research this paper cites, it's clear that there is an objective basis for humor and it's been carefully studied.

unalone 18y ago
The problem, as I stated before, is that the idea of "humor" is in itself subjective. There's an objective basis for "cognitive expectancies," but that isn't the only aspect of humor as we define it with language. For instance, there's slapstick humor, which derives from being over-the-top. There's absurdist humor, which relies on the unexpected. There's clever humor, which is funny because it requires effort to understand it, and so there's a congratulatory aspect to it. There's dark humor, which - at points - doesn't trigger any laughter at all, but which still must be included under the umbrella. I'm certain that you can measure certain parts of humor. But at the same time, while there's a physical part of us that derives humor, that does not make humor itself objective. The fact that every single person has different objective reactions makes humor inherently subjective, even if there's a physical element to be studied and torn apart. It's like - I said this in another thread - the testers who try to analyze creativity. There are certain ways that you can identify a creative person. The problem is, none of those ways are perfect and all of them are thwarted by different studies. While you can test creativity and create an objective model, you'd only be fooling yourself.
- 18y ago