D&D 5E 5e and the Cheesecake Factory: Explaining Good Enough

Ovinomancer · Feb 20, 2021

fearsomepirate said:
Well, I'm not saying things that aren't made for the mass market are bad. I'm saying saying the ultimate judge of whether something is fit for its purpose and does the job well is the person who uses it. So the first question is really what the purpose of something is, and whom it's for.

I recently had a painting framed. The frame cost close to a thousand dollars. It's a high-quality frame. The lady who framed it is fairly well-known and regarded as a producer of high-quality frames. Her frames are anything but mass-market products. Who the hell pays a grand for a rectangle of wood?

Yup, this is the core of my point of utility vs quality.

Dausuul · Feb 20, 2021

Paul Farquhar said:
Not talking about logical fallacy. This is a philosophical point, not a logical one. Opinion is inseparable from character. If someone cites someone of dubious character that dubiousness reflects on the citer.

What? No. That's insane.

Manbearcat · Feb 20, 2021

Paul Farquhar said:
I would argue that that is truth, not fallacy.

By citing someone, you are showing support for that person. If Hitler wrote a book about fishkeeping, and you cite it as a source for fishkeeping, you are implicitly saying "Hitler is an authority people should pay attention to".

Paul Farquhar said:
My point is that being that being horrible in any area taints everything a person does. Maybe what they said about something was right, maybe it was wrong, but either way we should disregard it and look for a different source.

Wait, what?

Let me get this straight.

If we found out tomorrow that Jenner or Einstein committed heresies of x moral norm (you can put whatever value to that you wish) that Vaccines and Relativity should be binned (in the same place we put Geocentrism and Flat Earth Hypothesis)?

1633ish?

Maxperson · Feb 20, 2021

fearsomepirate said:
Well, I'm not saying things that aren't made for the mass market are bad. I'm saying saying the ultimate judge of whether something is fit for its purpose and does the job well is the person who uses it. So the first question is really what the purpose of something is, and whom it's for.

I recently had a painting framed. The frame cost close to a thousand dollars. It's a high-quality frame. The lady who framed it is fairly well-known and regarded as a producer of high-quality frames. Her frames are anything but mass-market products. Who the hell pays a grand for a rectangle of wood?

Sure, but that "high quality" is decided by preference for aspects of her work. There is no objectivity to that "high quality" standard. If in 100 years someone makes frames 10x better and you compare the two, the woman who you are using will be ranked at mid or low quality work. If quality were objective, that couldn't happen.

Manbearcat · Feb 20, 2021

fearsomepirate said:
We would have to reboot human knowledge if we actually did this.

But we’d feel so much better about ourselves in the short interval of complete tear down that it would make up for the onset of depraved inhumanity when pestilence and famine imposes impossible-to-live-with choices on families!

On the bright side, life expectancy would plummet, so we wouldn’t have to endure the misery for long!

TwoSix · Feb 20, 2021

Paul Farquhar said:
My point is that being that being horrible in any area taints everything a person does. Maybe what they said about something was right, maybe it was wrong, but either way we should disregard it and look for a different source.

No.

Eric V · Feb 20, 2021

Paul Farquhar said:
If someone cites someone of dubious character that dubiousness reflects on the citer.

This is absolute nonsense, no offense. If it were true, there would be a very short list of people to quote from.

It's also a very unnecessary shot at @pemerton for no damn reason.

pemerton · Feb 21, 2021

PsyzhranV2 said:
Appeal to authority only becomes a fallacy if the authority you are quoting is irrelevant to the topic. If the authority you are quoting is:

1. An expert on the area of knowledge under consideration,
2. Speaking about their area of mastery, and
3. Expressing a view that is in general agreement with other experts in the field (as opposed to some crank's one-off conspiracy theory),

Then that's not a fallacious appeal to authority! That's just doing your due diligence with your research and citing your sources!

To add to this: I have taught Ruskin (via Williams) and have taught Zygmunt Bauman (Liquid Modernity).

Only on ENWorld do I encounter this phenomenon, whereby restating, and pointing to, some of the historically important ideas and arguments in aesthetic theory is dismissed as appeal to authority.

If someone thinks Ruskin, or Bauman, is wrong that's their prerogative. But let's hear the argument! The fact that someone is famous in their field (ie an "authority") isn't an argument that they're wrong! And in fact often it's a reason for pause before just dismissing them - maybe there's a reason why they're famous!

Morrus · Feb 21, 2021

fearsomepirate said:
The consumer is the final judge of quality

Of course they’re not. As an aggregate they might be a measure of popularity, but that’s an entirely different thing. Holiday Inn is not higher quality than the Ritz, and to suggest so would be absurd.

pemerton · Feb 21, 2021

On the comparison of Ruskin to Hitler:

I don't know who else posting in this thread teaches Holocaust studies. I do (as it happens, in the same module where I teach Williams and hence Ruskin - it's a modernity course). If you do teach Holocaust studies, you will know that it is emotionally very demanding, particularly if you have students who are part of a community whose members include survivors or had relatives who were murdered - because for those students it is more than just an intellectual or potentially abstract moral topic. I often do have those students in my class.

Hitler, and the political movement which he led, and the government which he created, was responsible for crimes of almost inconceivable magnitude. National socialism is perhaps the most discredited political movement in the history of humanity.

Ruskin, on the other hand, to the best of my knowledge never killed anyone, nor arranged for or called for their murder. He was one of the key thinkers in Britain whose influence led to the creation, after the war that Hitler started, of the British welfare state. Aspects of Ruskin's anti-libertarianism also inform one-nation/"big society" conservatism.

Equating the two is facile.