unlisted: true
“Why are you spending time putting those
{curly braces}over there?” asked the novice.“The code is easier to read and looks better that way” responds the expert programmer.
“Why are you using such a complicated knit for this sweater?” asked the beginner.
“It will be warmer and it looks better that way” responds the expert knitter.
“Why do you prefer these extremely expensive wines?” asked the novice
“They contain subtle flavour notes that aren’t present in cheaper wines” responds the sommelier.
Some other examples:
- This designer talking about mixing capitalisation/casing of sentences in a web landing page being off-putting to users is probably expert aesthetics, but it serves the purpose of communicating that an expert did design this, so they’re on the ball and can afford someone professional https://youtu.be/DY5Z-uZ6ZMc?si=SuM983H2uDIy_sdU&t=818
- Directors making specific shots or cinematic choices
- programmers using a specific language or specific style,
- programmers spending time whittling down the code to be “beautiful”.
Potters becoming so good that they start to approach the geometric perfection of a machine.
Due to AI art and crafts, publicising yourself online means that the process is more valuable than the product. Nobody’s interested in the final product if it’s not a utility item. If it’s a work of art, then people are interested in the process of creation.
While you are learning a field, you are told to listen to experts and to learn from what they say. But an expert’s opinions will diverge from the general public, which is very unintuitive if you’re trying to sell to the mass market because all the experts are telling you to listen to the experts in order to get better. So getting better seems to be antithetical to selling more stuff.
What’s the difference between expert aesthetics and someone taking pride in their craft? Is expert aesthetics just when someone does more than the barest minimum?
When creating something, you’re trying to optimise both for function to make something useful, but also for beauty to make something desirable. But I posit that these two aren’t completely distinct, and that purely functional decisions can become aesthetically pleasing to experts, as they grow to admire highly functional objects.
That is, there are some aspects of functionality which are hard to show, because they are worthwhile just a small fraction of the time, or they make some marginal improvement that depends heavily on the expert’s work style.
Consider a field with subjective output: art, writing, programming, etc. What does an expert in that field consider beautiful, and what does the general public consider beautiful? The expert, with view hazed by their knowledge of what is technically challenging, will have a different opinion on subjective beauty of a field when contrasted with that of the general public. The wine connoisseur will have a palette favouring subtleties not noticed by the general public. The professional programmer will have opinions about the location of curly braces in source code destined never to see the public Internet. The potter will have preferences towards certain construction techniques requiring a particular finesse not necessitated by a common machine mold.
Why is that the case? What causes an expert’s sense of aesthetics to mutate as they learn more about a field? Let’s explore this question, and others.
To some degree, this might be arbitrary personal preferences magnified by the necessity of working in a field for thousands of hours. I might not care about the colour of my axe, but if I chopped wood for days on end I wouldn’t be surprised if I developed a preference towards one colour or another.
There’s also the fact that, before putting your life and soul into a subject, you likely never had to think very hard about the details of that subject. If you spend time using a device or tool, it’s not surprising that you develop strong preferences about the nature of that tool.
There’s also the fact that if you use something for a large fraction of your waking hours, you’re likely to run into the 0.01% edge cases that significantly degrade or improve your work. And based on these rare-but-impactful edge cases, you’re likely to reconsider your daily routine so as to amplify or subdue them. For example, the nascent potter rarely encounters lumps in their clay, and so doesn’t think to properly filter and knead the clay in order to remove said lumps. But upon their first item shattering in the kiln due to these lumps, they will develop a preference towards lump-free clay in the future.
This can become more specific: programmers develop inane preferences with the justification that their beloved style is less prone to errors. Painters develop habits to always keep their workspace in a certain arrangement, writers curate a routine to get them into the proper mindset and ready to write.
There’s also the status signalling that comes with technically difficult tasks. It’s a difficult-to-fake signal if you can deftly use some difficult to master technique, and so a certain prestige is likely to build up around those who can wield that technique, and from the prestige, an aesthetic preference can develop that favours the technically complicated over the technically simplistic. Note I say technically simplistic, because visual simplicity does not imply technical simplicity. A perfectly straight line is far trickier to draw than a mostly-straight one.
Prestige and in-group signalling are not the only reasons to develop an aesthetic preference for technically challenging things, often this preference is unstated, but the expert just finds there’s so much more to appreciate about a piece if it’s technically challenging. Look at how the artist has conveyed the light through this wine glass with but a few masterful strokes, [ran out of time]
This point is the most interesting to me. Because if you speak with many experts, they’ll express a preference towards
field. The aesthetics of experts have a larger effect on the work produced by those experts than I think many people realise. I’ll use painting as an easy example to hone in exactly what I mean by expert aesthetics, then I’ll branch out into more controversial examples that might ruffle some feathers. I’m inevitably going to offend some experts, since I’m describing their opinion as subjective and non-authoritative. Oh well. What can you do?
When you first start painting, you have preferences that guide which paintings you prefer, and therefore what paintings you’d like to create. For example, you might paint pretty sunsets, or a boat on the water, or an elephant in the bush. The paintings won’t be technically accomplished (you’re just starting out, after all), but slowly you’ll get better and your technical ability will make you better able to realise your aesthetic preferences.
And as you get better, you’ll start to develop a knowledge of what’s technically challenging to paint, and what’s easy. Sunsets are easy to paint, portraits are difficult. Boats on the water are easy, but painting the light as passes through a partially-full wine glass is difficult. Elephants are easy, perfecting the draping folds of a piece of clothing is hard1.
The ability to notice what is hard is a good thing, it allows you to get better. If you cannot distinguish the easy from the difficult, you have no way of focussing on your weaknesses. As you practice, you get better, and eventually you’ll have the technical skill to create paintings with previously unachievable realism. You, through practice and hard work, have refined your skills to the point where you are somewhat more capable than a novice just beginning, and you viscerally know the effort it takes to paint technically challenging things.
Around this time, you visit a gallery exhibit that’s showing up-and-coming painters with various skill levels. You admire how well their subject’s jacket falls across the chair, and how realistic the eyes in their portrait is. What a beautiful painting, you remark. A still life catches your eye due to the reflections of a window in a wine glass. You barely notice the umpteenth sunset over an ocean.
At this point something interesting has happened and I don’t know how to feel about it. Your tastes, as a burgeoning artist, have diverged somewhat from those of the general population. You have a preference for paintings which you know are technically challenging, regardless of the underlying aesthetics of the painting.
I want to be quite clear about my claim here, because it is subtle. I am claiming that you, an up-and-coming artist, view a technically challenging painting and consider it aesthetically impressive, not just technically impressive. I’m claiming that once someone learns what’s technically impressive, their sense of what they consider high quality or beautiful changes to align with what they know to be technically impressive.
This is difficult to “prove”, because an expert can always claim that you, the amateur, don’t have enough of an eye to discriminate the subtleties, and that this portrait truly is more “aesthetic” than that sunset.
But to some extent, arguing about if something is “truly” aesthetic is a bit of a red herring. There is no correct opinion. And it is enough to assert that experts in a field often have opinions that diverge from that of the general public.
But I’ve seen this enough, in both myself and others, to be convinced that experts have their preferences shaped by the technical achievement of the work. It’s worth stating explicitly that this should be irrelevant. There is no reason a priori why the effort required to make something should influence the quality of the thing.
This is to say, that I imagine an expert’s rating of a piece’s technical impressiveness and its aesthetic impressiveness are correlated. With this hypothesis, the more interesting question is why would an expert’s subjective opinion be shaped by their knowledge of what’s technically challenging and what’s not? Further, are the experts putting themselves at a disadvantage as their subjective opinion diverges from that of the general public?
, and I posit that this is because the expert cannot bare think they could spend less effort and achieve a similar result.
Within a group of experts, it behoves them all to pair technical ability with aesthetic appeal. But outside the group of experts, amateurs will likely be utterly confused about why one piece is incredibly expensive while another (which they feel is just as good) is selling for pennies.
There are two things happening here. One, is experts want a way to signal their expertise. And one way to do that is to do tricky things, because the tricky thing’s purpose isn’t to look good, but to signal that skill was required in the making of it. I’ve linked another essay I wrote about purposeless things at the bottom of the page.
Another thing is that fields which do not have good returns for people putting lots of time into them do not tend to develop experts in that field. If you can put 100x more effort into a field than someone else and only achieve 1.1x better results, it’s unlikely that a large collection of people will choose to put much effort into this field. This is adjacent to saying that fields in which the skill ceiling is low do not tend to develop experts. Examples of this are tricky to come by, because the internet is practically designed to allow niches to thrive. I might say “walking” or “opening the fridge” would be fields in which there is little expertise, but I’m sure the professional walkers and fridge-openers will come for me with optimal walking gaits and perfectly oiled hinges.
Other examples
If you are the expert in the field, it can be tricky to see what it is about your opinion that’s due to the technical complexity of the work and what’s due to some inherent subjective aesthetics of the work.
But here are some more specific examples to help refine exactly what I’m referring to when I say expert aesthetics.
- Programming: There’s an undoubtable feeling amongst programmers about needing to code in a “real” language. Or to use proper abstractions. (TODO: expand on this more, this part’s weak)
- Playing an instrument: There’s a distinct difference between the music listened to by orchestra conductors and your everyday layperson. The final scene of Whiplash (2014) shows this in crystal: It’s a cataclysm of cymbals and drums, incredibly rapid, unbelievably precise, but it’s sole purpose is to convey the incredible technical achievements of the protagonist. That scene does not attempt to pretend the piece is easy listening, at least, not in isolation of appreciation of the technical difficulty of performing the piece.
- Cooking: High-end professional chefs develop a subjective taste that leads them away from simple-to-prepare meals. Due to their expert aesthetics, they are guided towards meals that show their expertise by taking a long time to prepare and by being easy to mar. Because cooking is something many people want (and need) to do, there is a large market for chefs which cater to the novice’s sense of aesthetics. Some chefs specialise in “simple” food for this very reason, they’ve spurned the aesthetic opinions of their fellow experts in preference for an aesthetic that’ll appeal to a larger audience of non-experts.
What are the requirements for expert aesthetics?
What causes this divergence in aesthetics between novices and experts? Given the examples above, the following appear to be requirements:
- Subjectivity2: In fields where there is an objective measure of quality, novice and expert aesthetics are a lot closer. For example, speedrunning is defined by the time taken to complete some challenge, and there is little regard in that community for anything else. No speedrunner is shunned for using an “ugly hack” if they get a faster time. Another example would be business.
Some examples of things that do/don’t have expert aesthetics:
- Hedge funds: nobody cares, so long as your number goes up more than the competition
- Charities: the meaning of expert and novice as applied to charities is a bit tricky here, but … Those with impersonal-but-effective goals (e.g. all of Effective Altruism) typically
- Fashion: Any high-fashion runway is quite explicitly not about showing wearable garments but rather about creating a small spectacle.
NOTE: how much of expert aesthetics is just the thought-leaders controlling the narrative to be something that they want to see, and how much is actually due to a divergence in aesthetics between the experts and the novices?
I guess there’s actually two kinds of “experts”, and the jargon falls apart. There are the populist experts who have the technical expertise and use it to produce things for the novices, ignoring the expert’s aesthetics. And then there’s the elitist experts who embrace their subjective ideals and create almost exclusively for themselves or for other elitist experts. TODO find a less offensive word than “elitist”
What this means for you
If you never have to sell to amateurs, you don’t have to worry because you don’t care that your taste will drift. But if you want to take on a creative hobby and then try to make money from it, take note.
When you’re an amateur, notice what you like, and what you don’t. Note it down on paper, if at all possible. Your tastes will drift as you learn what’s easy to do and what’s difficult, but don’t lose forget that if you’re selling to amateurs as a business, you can’t afford to care about the technically beautiful things, you can only care about the practically beautiful things.
Additionally, making technically difficult things serves as a reliable indicator of the creators talent. It is difficult to fake. So societies of experts learn to reward shows of expertise, since it signals belonging to the in-group.
At the end, it depends on your goals. If your goal is to become more technically adept, you must critique yourself and strive to do things that are technically challenging even if you don’t see them as aesthetically pleasing works.
If your goal is to sell something, you have no choice but to appeal to your consumer. Be wary of making things you want, or making things because you think they’re beautiful. It’s very possible that you disagree with your customers, in which case you need to suck it up and build something they want. It doesn’t matter what you want: you’re not buying your product.
“Expert aesthetics” is a phenomenon I believe to be real, but have been struggling to pin down for a while.
As someone gains expertise in a field, their sense of aesthetics in that field will change: they’ll start to find different things beautiful than what they did when they were novices. Their sense of aesthetics will morph as they grow to see the fine details of the field better, and learn what’s technically difficult to do versus what’s impressive-looking but actually simple.
We can see this with programming; tweaking the colours or border-radii of a website will often draw ooh’s and aah’s from management, but only the most elaborate distributed architecture diagram will gain you points on hackernews. The experts have gained a sense of aesthetics for the things that are technically challenging, in a way that’s different from what a layperson might think is aesthetic.
Is the expert’s view wrong? I don’t know, and I don’t think a fully-general statement can be made. Consommé is a french broth that (I’m told) is fiendishly difficult to keep clear, and even the slightest mishap will turn cloudy (try search for crystal-clear consommé and you’ll see the steps that are taken to avoid this). But is a perfectly clear soup really that much better than a slightly cloudy soup? I’m sure the French chefs would scream at me for even asking the question, and I don’t doubt that they’re tasting subtleties that I miss. But nonetheless, I suspect that their technical appreciation for the skill required to make a cloud-free consommé is being confounded with their aesthetic appreciation for the taste of the finished soup. In a world where they knew not the difficulty, would they appreciate it the same?
This applies to all fields of expertise that I’ve cared to examine, and the impact is a disconnect between the experts in a field and the laypeople outside of the field. This disconnect isn’t problematic, but it becomes visible when experts try to sell their wares. An expert has a different sense of aesthetics to the layperson, and so when they try to craft things that appeal to their own sense of aesthetics, the layperson is unimpressed. But when the expert is demotivated when they figure out what impresses the layperson, because this thing is almost certainly not technically challenging enough to be interesting.
If your interest was piqued by the mention of “purposeless” things that nonetheless serve a purpose, you should read my essay Intentional lack of purpose. It describes how some objects appear to serve no purpose, but if you look carefully they’re actually achieving their goal of representing an expenditure of effort or wealth.
If you found this discussion about the differences between experts and novices, you probable will enjoy reading my essay Experts have it easy. It’s about why is it so frustrating to start out in a new field and why newcomers to a field just don’t seem to get it.
Footnotes
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If you have qualms about these exact definitions of “easy” or “difficult”, keep them to yourself. You know what I’m getting at ↩
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I considered abandoning this essay for a long time due to the inherent subjectivity of expert aesthetics, but I think there’s something here that can’t just be waved away by saying “that’s just my opinion and my opinion can’t be wrong”. ↩