The Era of ‘Quantitative Aesthetics,’ Where Data Points Dictate Taste

If anyone wishes to pursue this topic of "quantization" further, I recommend "The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times" - a book by Rene Guenon [1]. Guenon examines the direction the world is going to as a shift from quality to quantity, and with this simple analysis he covers topics ranging across democracy, science, art, crafts, production, etc. The book was written in 1945 and some of the topics he touches upon can at first seem quite esoteric - i.e. that a tendency to measure the effect of some tragedy according to how many people were affected by it is already a sign of quantitative thinking. But I am surprised how well it captured many trends we see in society today. For example it can be argued that under the view he proposed, AI would be yet another step away from quality and towards quantity.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Reign-Quantity-Signs-Times/dp/0900588...

I don't agree with most of the article, but I do find the idea of "quantitative aesthetics" interesting.

I am but one sample, but I would really like a feature in Instagram to view posts that fall within the, say, 5th to 20th percentile with regards to the number of likes. I am now condemned to the people I already follow on one hand, and the massively popular (and therefore typically very uninteresting) artists on the other hand. I would love to discover more fringe art.

The tag system on Instagram is fairly adequate for discriminating between an interest in art or cars, but both tropes are still quite big.

If anyone at Instagram is reading this: perhaps you could train your algorithms not only on popularity, but also on an interest in the _lack_ of popularity.

We're not that unique, if a lot of people like something, there's a fairly good chance that we will like it, and the converse is true also.

When the offer exceeds the available time and resources to consume/experience something (art, media, music, games, food, wines, whatever...), it makes sense to go about it quantitatively and hopefully reduce the chance of a catastrophic miss...