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Comment by jey | Hacker News Reader

False dichotomy; technique and artistic quality are orthogonal concepts. You can have a technically perfect shot that is perfectly bland, and you can have a shot that would've been beautiful if only you knew how to set your shutter speed. It's certainly not like understanding the technique takes away from the beauty, and it's true that the beauty doesn't come from having perfect technique. Norvig's post was clearly about the technical aspects of the challenges of shooting dancers.

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I agree it's orthogonal, I make it clear in my post that it's an option, but only one of of many. Some shots need technique, others are fine with a polaroid. There's nothing more to say about it.

How do you know this is true: "Engineers who become photographers generally spend an outsized amount of time making their images sharp, have true color, be adequately lit, etc."

Not all engineers are robots. It doesn't take an artist to realize art has both technical and human/emotional components.

When you respond to a sentence using the words "generally", "tend to", or "usually" with one using the words "not all" or relatives, you are effectively conceding the point. Correlation cannot be denied with a mere counterexample.

Can correlation be assumed without sources and facts as was done in the article?

"Not all engineers are [figurative] robots" is certainly a fact and was meant as an upper bound on the number of engineers who believe that photography is merely technical in nature. I'm questioning whether the lower bound is statable as "generally engineers believe this", and claiming that I don't believe it is.

To further clarify my opinion: the line drawn by the author is too black and white. Its inhuman and unemotional itself to assume that another large group of humans can't see the emotional and human side of art.

I mostly agree, and in some parts of the world, the art is in the craft more than in some other parts of the world. That being said, I think people are more able to look past bad execution than they are able to look past vapid technical displays. I know there isnt a definitive answer, but i usually think of the thing that makes art different from engineering is that artists have focus more on "what" than "how", which is kind of the opposite of engineers. Its cool, though, the way each discipline kind of turns into the other at various points along the way. Often you have to figure out "how" to actualize "what", just like you have to figure out "what" to answer "how" sometimes.

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