The tricky aspect here is that most people believe that taste, and the 'quality' of artistic work, is mostly a subjective matter, but when they make criticism of art they treat their views as objective truth. Thus when you criticise a friend's work, or vice versa, the temptation is to think of it as "(Your|their) work sucks!" instead of "Oh well, (I|you) didn't like it, maybe someone else will."
Semmelweiss, on the other hand, had no subjective matter. He had the statistics showing that as soon as doctors started washing their hands, infant mortality went way down. It was just the doctors' pride which made them think he was accusing them of regularly killing newborn babies.
Of course there is bad art which everyone agrees is terrible, and telling people that truth is hard. In the end, though, it's better to be honest because it's probable that your friend would respond with a determination to do better next time. The trick is to be tactful.
I'm not overly familiar with this story, but it is easy to recast as a fight between the empiricist and the theoretician. To the empiricist, a man shows up with statistics showing a correlation, maybe even causality, and that's all you need. To the theoretician, if the man with the statistics says it's due to little green men that live in his head, the numbers aren't enough.
In hindsight, we can see that he was right and it doesn't matter why. But there are also plenty of other stories where acting too soon, before having a real, theoretical understanding of what's going on, would have been a lot more detrimental in the long run.
Could not agree more. I have design based startup where we do digital home staging for real estate clients and this is our most difficult problem, getting past the subjectivity of interior design.
It's funny to see the exact same furniture used for various different clients and see the wide range of feedback we get from "I love it" to "that looks terrible" and usually the negative feedback is always expressed as definitive comments like "that does not work" or "this NEEDS to be changed". Someone recently even went so far as to say that a mug should be next to a coffee machine instead of a cup.
Even though we state that we are appealing to the majority of home buyers and not individual preferences I have yet to find a good way to get past design subjectivity. I think it is just human nature to inject our preferences into artistic things and express them as if it is the other person's work that sucks.
>It's easy to criticise a minor detail of a friend's work, but harder to say "you don't have the talent for this, give up."
I would question whether most people honestly have the expertise to make a judgement like 'you don't have the talent for this, give up'. I think people routinely overestimate their own abilities and discernment. Taking a hasty/faulty analysis and then telling someone to 'give up' seems like a terrible idea.
Semmelweiss, on the other hand, had no subjective matter. He had the statistics showing that as soon as doctors started washing their hands, infant mortality went way down. It was just the doctors' pride which made them think he was accusing them of regularly killing newborn babies.
Of course there is bad art which everyone agrees is terrible, and telling people that truth is hard. In the end, though, it's better to be honest because it's probable that your friend would respond with a determination to do better next time. The trick is to be tactful.