This World and Me

Back in 2020, I wrote a post on this blog titled " Objectively good ". That post was a bit of a peeved response to something that someone I knew at the time said. This post is a bit of a sequel to that one. In this post, I want to discuss a phrase which has grown to be another pet peeve of mine. You have probably heard it before. Sometimes, when debating a particular topic, one person will say something along the lines of the following: "I'm entitled to my opinion." What exactly does that mean? My first thought is the freedom of speech. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits Congress from passing any law "abridging the freedom of speech", and the Fourteenth Amendment has been held to extend this prohibition to state governments as well—see Gitlow v. New York ,  268 U.S. 652 (1925). The result is that all persons subject to U.S. jurisdiction have the right to express themselves freely without fear of retaliation from the government. Noti...

I have a pet peeve that comes up when I talk with someone about a song, a film, a TV show, or perhaps a book. Occasionally, one of my friends will describe such a work as objectively good or objectively bad . These phrases will always cause me to raise an eyebrow. What exactly are the objective factors that determine the quality of a creative work? I can think of a few ideas, but each seem problematic. My first thought is numbers. We could sample from a group of people who have experienced a particular work and ask them whether they think the work is "good". If a supermajority says yes, then the work is objectively good ; if a supermajority says no, then the work is objectively bad ; if there is no clear answer, then the work is objectively neither good nor bad . This method is questionable because it seems to rely heavily on mere popularity. To use an adage that one of my high school English teachers had on her little podium: "What is popular is not always right, and ...

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. —Steve Jobs, Stanford commencement address , 2005

Two weeks ago, I posted about intention and its relevance in homicide law. We spend a great deal of time and effort on criminal trials with the goal of ascertaining a person's intentions when they caused the death of another person. In different areas of the law, a certain intention can mitigate the severity of the punishment while other intentions can exacerbate the severity of the punishment. In other areas of the law, intention matters nothing at all. Nevertheless, intention undoubtedly plays an important role in how we go about our lives. We often excuse mistakes if they were made unwittingly – that is, "on accident" – but we are less sympathetic to harmful actions if they were committed with the intention of doing so. There is an aspect of this world, however, where intention is important, but in a different way. That aspect of the world is interpretation. * * * The definition of "interpretation" is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary,  the ac...

This post comes as a sort of follow-up to this old post . In that post, I pointed out that different people have different artistic tastes, and the fact that other people don't enjoy something does not necessarily indicate that you shouldn't enjoy the same thing too. Also, it is questionable whether enjoying something solely because other people enjoy it is really true enjoyment. I suppose a corollary to that is challenging whether disliking something solely because other people dislike it truly means that one dislikes it. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic , an animated TV show with a target audience of girls aged 4-7, comes to me as a good example of all this. Despite its young demographic, the show has unexpectedly garnered a massive fan following consisting of older viewers, many of which are male adults. Indeed, the My Little Pony fandom —the members of which identify themselves as "bronies"—has grown to be notorious. I suppose the question I really want to a...

I am in a state of bliss right now. Pure ecstasy. For on this first day of February, two thousand sixteen, American singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and Minnesotan music producer Adam Young released his first album as "Adam Young." I've posted before about Mr. Young. He is more widely known for Owl City, one of many musical projects he has created over the years. One of Owl City's songs, "Fireflies," propelled him into the international spotlight and peaked at position one on the national charts of seven countries. Today's album epitomizes exactly what draws me to Owl City and the ingenious man behind it. Every single instrument, every single lyric, every single sound—the overwhelming majority of Owl City was conceived, written, produced, engineered, recorded, and mastered by only one person. Owl City is often mistaken for a band, because (until today) Young doesn't use his own name for his musical endeavors. "Owl City" is mor...

In the past, I've written about what music means for me , but I haven't yet touched upon the actual kinds  of music I  personally like. I get asked fairly often while meeting new people, "What kind of music do you like?" I can usually answer with a one-sentence summary. If you asked me right now, I would probably say, "oh yeah I've recently started getting into some electronic dance music, and my favorite artist is Owl City." What? Owl City? Why do you like Owl City? Well, if you really want to understand my tastes, it would take a lot longer than a one-sentence summary--perhaps even more than what I can contain in the size of a blog post. But I'll try. In order to truly understand my musical tastes, I have to explain how music came into my life, and what my relationship with music is. I started my journey into music naïvely. Keep in mind that my parents immigrated to the United States from China just a few years before I was born. So, growing up i...

I made a point in my previous post about " The Meaning of Music " that I wanted to expand on. To summarize: the most important thing about art is what the person who experiences it feels . The determination of whether a work of art has value rests on whether it is able to elicit a strong emotional response from the audience. This makes the determination of value a subjective process, which opens the door to the idea that different people have different artistic "tastes". A work of art which I find appealing may seem to you absolutely dreadful. And this is where something interesting pops up. It is highly unlikely that you or I share the same interests, yet there are still some things which are considered "popular" that a great deal of people share an interest for... or do they really share an interest? The post was somewhat inspired by this blog post . The blog is the creation of Adam Young, creator of a musical project which I greatly admire called Ow...

Art, as defined by Google, is the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power. The single most important thing about art is what the person who experiences it feels . There is never a fully correct answer to how one is supposed to feel when experiencing a work of art. Enter an art museum and approach a gallery containing more modern pieces. There will be works which boast an intricate aggregate of patterns and colors, and there will be works which are strikingly simple, sometimes so much so that lay viewers will question why the work has value. And it is here where the majority of viewers ("lay" viewers) are mistaken. The determination of the value of a work of art does not rest on the work's complexity, nor is it determined by the amount of effort the artist put in to create it. Rather, the value of the ...