Fuck, Lend. Do you even read what I write?
A world class figure skater, if he goes out and does a great routine, you may have some subjective disagreement on the EXACT numbers (Like our 70% medication)...But in general the scores will all be decently high. And guess what? Any figure skating routine that gets high scores, for even a layman watching? Will look pretty good, even if you don't understand figure skating at all.
Understand how something like art in the Olympics came to look good even to laymen. Even to people who do not know shit about how to "judge" the sport. A bunch of early figure skaters found out X and Y and Z things were appealing (people clapped when they did them!). So they made rules to judge the art based on those things. The artists know those rules too, and developed routines to exploit them and getting better scores by doing those appealing things BETTER. Now, how 'good' someone does it? That's subjective, yes. But the basics of WHAT figure skating is? That's not, a judge can objectively say "no, fuck off, that's not figure skating".
Understand? There is a subjective RANGE of APPLICATION of objective rules. Those objective rules are what makes figure skating, figure skating. And on the subjective end? Because the rules offer restrictions on HOW judges can judge (Like you can't watch someone do a triple jump and say 'that was shit' without giving a reason, your judgement can be judged because the rules are there)? You can be assured that if someone gets a high score in figure skating, then even someone who doesn't know shit about the 'sport' will find the routine pretty pleasing, because its ALL based off of those universal things that the community realized were pleasing to everyone.
Which is what you said, its the predictability (Reproducability) of engaging the audience. If I make rules to judge a triple jump really high, and more people add triple jumps, the audience likes it more--I know how to add rules now that have a HIGH correlation to engagement. Why? Because at the start of my 'art' I found patterns that were pretty elemental in nature and that nearly everyone enjoyed (So we can assume those patterns have some deeper structure, not saying biological, but something fundamental that if we encourage them, it will produce good work most of the time. Again, this is like medicine, we experiment with a variety of variables to find the pattern.)
So you are saying that this is not figure skating?
Because it is figure skating, just a horrible one and gets a score of 0.1 for not falling.
this is also figure skating, just the bad kind.
we can have a broad agreement about what something is good, and that agreement still be subjective one.
It is just the sum of our collective opinions on a topic. Something does NOT become objective, simply because we all poll out personal opinions into the sum of something. That is the point of my argument.
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