Ask HN: Is it possible to be objectively good at something?

Writing is creative and typically produces a final product that is subjective. However there are components of writing such as spelling that are not subjective.

It seems reasonable to me to say that he is a popular writer and subjectively good and that he is an objectively good speller.

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I would argue that if a majority of an audience says something is good (subjective to them), then that thing is good objectively. If something is popular, then it is good. Not to say it is without flaws. That is different.

Take the example of spelling that another user brought up. They claimed it is objective, but that isn't really true. Is the correct spelling color or colour? The answer to that is cultural, and therefore subjective. Unless you hold as I do that popularity is similar enough to objectivity to qualify. The cultural or popular notion determine what is right regarding subjectively judged subjects. This notion, including the spelling and even usage of words, can change over time.

"good" is a subjective term by definition. What you mean by "objectively good at something" can at best mean "many people think the person is good at something".

What's considered "good" also changes over time. "Earth is flat" was a "good" theory until people found out other possibilities, and so on.

I think this entirely depends on if the people involved in the comparison are using the same basis of measurement.

If everyone agrees on what is being measured and how, then it should be easy to then do the measurements to get results. (who is best)

If the people involved in the comparison don't agree to a basis of measurement, then it's an exercise in futility and nothing more than an exchange of opinions.

Only if that something that someone does is objectively measurable.

Usain Bolt, Michael Jordan, objectively the best at what they do.

Yes, as long you properly define what it means to be good and make sure it's measurable.

Tolkien is a good writer when we define 'good writer' as a writer whose stories are enjoyed by millions of people, or a writer who is capable of supporting themselves financially by writing fiction.

One of the definitions of good is 'having the qualities required for a particular role', which is pretty explicit in requiring someone to establish criteria with which you judge something as 'good'.

Some kinds of performance are measurable. Tell me how long it takes you to run a 5K race and I can tell if you are a "good" runner.

In the case of literature you can't stop someone from having a crackpot opinions such as "Tolkien sux because stories about 'other worlds' are escapist and distract workers from class struggles" or "I hate Tolkien because he inspired DanMachi and other sick anime that my boyfriend watches".

The value of Tolkien as a writer goes beyond "he sold a lot of books" to the influence he had with other writers. He was a pagan but certainly had common cause with his Christian friend C.S. Lewis when it came to the books they wrote. Whether or not you think Tolkien's influence is good or fair, it is objective that the influence was vast.

I would think things that have a simple objective measure are candidates. The 100m race for example, “good” = fast. Fast tends to be a pretty objective measurement.

I think for any sufficiently complex human activity, including writing, musicianship, or performance in a sport, there's no way to be objectively good at every aspect of it, and there's no one measure that captures all the different possible ways to excel. Overall performance is a complicated mix of competencies, some of which are easier to measure objectively than others. Different observers will judge the "goodness" differently based on which sub-tasks they consider more important. Even among the "greats", you can point to sub-areas that they don't do as well.

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.

My opinion is that it is possible. But if you are rigorous about what "good" and "bad" means, then no because there's always going to be someone who thinks different. Can we say Mozart was a good composer? I'm pretty sure you can find music experts who would say no, even though the majority would say yes. I personally don't like the idea that art evaluation is completely subjective because then I can just spit on a canvas and say it's art and you don't have arguments to say it's bad art when in reality we "know" it's bad. Happens a lot with music.

To be openly judged at something, you need to openly lay out your plans and then try to make it happen. If it worked out as expected - you're good at it.

Yes, you can be objectively good at simple tasks. You can be objectively good at typing, but not at writing. You can be good at dicing vegetables, but not at cooking. You can be good at knitting, but still knit nothing good if you lack the design choice to choose good things to knit.

My understanding of your use of the word "good" here is that you are referring to "quality". If so, then the philosophical discussion about "quality" has been covered at length by many great philosophers, one interesting example being "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance".

Oddly, I interpreted "objectively," as necessarily immeasurable, in contrast to commenters here who state the prerequisite is that "good," be measurable. The example I think of is judged sports, which are essentially arts with a measurement criteria bolted on to them after the fact to facilitate governance. In these cases, the interpretation of the performance does more to legitimize the governance and the judges than it does to meaningfully evaluate the performance itself.

In this sense, I'd posit "objectively good," is a question of beauty, and not measurement criteria. Those sports suffer from the Goodhart's Law problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law), where you don't need a competition to recognize someone is objectively good at something if they perform it beautifully.

The idea of "good," as a set of measurable scalar quantities presumes that you can express the object in those terms, which in the case of writing or a performance, you can't. There is no set of instructions that can reproduce a "real" performance.

You can produce something where people won't care about its difference from the "real" one (lots of economics and cog.sci on that one), but the existence of a simulation does not change the fact of the existence of the real.

For example, if some future GPT-7 produced the literary equivalent to crack cocaine, it would still not be Ted Chiang, whose work is beautiful and could be said to be objectively good. People might prefer this new crack-lit, which mutes their ability to sense ugliness, parasitism, disgust, or horror, but its existence does not obviate the existence of Chiang. That essential existence is what makes Chiang an objective phenomenon, and the beauty of his work is what makes it good.

I don't think there are short answers to this question though. :)

> If most kinds of success or talent are usually perceived, can we ever truly say someone is "good" at something?

Only if there are established and accepted criteria, standards on which everyone agrees. The driving range of an electric car, for example.

By contrast, outside science and technology, "good" is a matter of individual taste.

My point? Standards must be defined and accepted by all interested parties.

Here's my favorite example of the opposite case: an optimist and a pessimist have a debate.

The optimist says, "This is the best of all possible worlds!"

The pessimist says, "That's right!"

Both declare victory.

I know you asked about "good" implying skill, but your example of Tolkien made me think of Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste"[0]

Not the lightest reading, but very worth the effort. TL;DR - taste is something that can be more refined or less refined. We have some reasons to believe that more refined tastes are 'better' than less refined tastes (people who have learned to appreciate more sophisticated tastes never want to 'go back' even though they now have fewer opportunities for enjoyment).

Obviously it's very controversial and you can make the argument that it's just snobbery, but I think Hume gets at something.

[0] https://web.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/361r15.html

Go a round against a heavy weight champion in boxing and ask the question again.

It's impossible to be "good" (or bad, nice, etc.) objectively, because objectivity would require everyone to agree on that. "X is good" is not a proposition in logic, so it can't be confirmed or negated.

However, you can choose a more objective formulation of what you want to achieve. One way is to express it in relation to what others do, e.g. "I won a marathon" - this is a proposition and an objective fact.

Michael Jackson is a good basketball player. Wayne Gretzky is a good hockey player. Mike Tyson is a good boxer.

I think we can easily say these unbelievable athletes are "good" at their respective sport.

"Objectively" means that someone should be able to unambiguously tell, without having to apply any judgment.

And yes, it's possible. Am I objectively good at calculus? I passed the AP test. That's an objective measure.

But it's not that simple, for at least two reasons. First, it's always possible to question the "objective measure". Is the AP test a good test of whether someone is good at calculus? AP says so, but that's not actually any help. College admissions departments think so, too. But grad school admissions people don't think so at all, and neither do math department hiring committees. This shows the problem: There is a measure that can objectively be met or failed, but is it the right measure? How can you tell? Not objectively.

Second, in many fields, there is no analog to the AP test. Is Tolkein a good writer? Is the Mona Lisa a good painting? There is no clearly objective measure. The only measure is that many people think so; more people than think, say, my daughter's watercolor is a good painting. That's subjective, but at least it has the merit of being subjectively shared by many people. And with something like Mona Lisa, it's shared by many people across many years - it's not just today's fad. That's still subjective, but it's at least a subjectivity that has widespread agreement to it.

To answer your title question...

Not if you're me.

Well, that's one of the reasons that athletic competitions are popular. At the end of 100 meters, someone's in front. And within the sciences and technical fields, the limits of charlatanism are sooner reached. Plenty of writers go out of fashion pretty quickly, but it takes a Stalin to back a Lysenko.

I would say that there are better and worse writers, and I can offer my reasons where I offer an opinion. Yet I know that there have been ages that reversed the attributions of better and worse held now. Shakespeare was out of fashion for a good part of a century, to name an obvious example in the English-speaking world.

Cash is one way to judge talent. How much cash would people pay for a service? If you can make money off glass jewelry, you're a decent jeweler. An objectively great chef would have people booking his restaurant months in advance and charge hundreds or thousands of dollars for a meal. If you're not able to make a cent off it, you're not yet skilled enough.

In the classes I teach, I design the skills learned in terms of cash. A 3 day class will teach you enough to avoid paying a professional to do something, but not enough to get a job. A 3 month bootcamp will be enough to land you a nice job, but not $X salary.

With Patreon today, it's more directly correlated than ever. Even skills like birdwatching or poetry could pay out.

I don't think there is an absolute best. Everything is relative. Suppose somebody scores 100 out of 100 in a test. Is that supposed to be objectively good/best?

When we say someone is the best in their field, all we mean is that they seem to do something much better than everybody else in that domain or they possess some special quality that not many others have it.