I can totally relate: I hate food that tastes good, and breathing oxygen.

Interesting works the same way. Something can be objectively interesting without anyone actually finding it interesting.

If this sounds funny, it's because words are defined as used. And there are certain words that are used differently than what they actually mean. For example, if I asked you for an interesting idea you wouldn't tell me the number of penguins in Antarctica, because we all accept that a fact is different than an idea. But if you look in a dictionary, you'll see the word idea defined as if it were a fact, even though we all agree that it's not. Why? Because in practice when people use the word idea it's almost always in the context of "give me an idea of how big this room is" or something like that. I.e., in most cases idea is used as a synonym for fact, even though we agree that this isn't what an idea is. You'd have to look in a really good dictionary and scroll all the way to the bottom of the list of definitions to even get a hint that this is the case, and even then they won't give you a good working definition.

So what is interesting? Unalone nails it when he says something different. That is, something that breaks with our mental models of how the world works, but without actually suggesting a new set of more accurate schemas (which would be insightful.)

I prefer reading insightful stuff to interesting stuff, which is why I say that reading stuff that's interesting (objectively) doesn't hold my (subjective) interest.

I mean, thanks for agreeing with me, but from what you're saying here I think that you're saying something pretty nonsensical. "Interest" and "insight" aren't objective standards. It's entirely subjective, through-and-through. If you don't like reading because you don't find it interesting, then it's not interesting to you. It's not objectively interesting whatsoever. And usually, insight and interest are matched. If something's saying something new, then it's both insightful and interesting, precisely for the "different" argument that I made before.

From Paul McGhee's paper Cognitive Development and Children's Comprehension of Humor:

This study investigated the relationship between children's level of cognitive functioning (according to Piaget's theoretical framework) and their comprehension and appreciation of humor based on violation of cognitive expectancies. A distinction was drawn between novelty and incongruity humor, differing in the nature of expectancy violation represented. [...] Analyses of age differences indicated consistent significant increases in comprehension with increasing age for all humor stimuli. Similar analyses for humor appreciation yielded no significant age differences.

This was done in 1971, when we didn't know nearly as much as we do now about the validity of Piaget's framework. If this research was redone today with more modern techniques and cognitive development theories the results would be even more telling.

And if you look at the prior research this paper cites, it's clear that there is an objective basis for humor and it's been carefully studied.

For instance, there's slapstick humor, which derives from being over-the-top. There's absurdist humor, which relies on the unexpected. There's clever humor, which is funny because it requires effort to understand it, and so there's a congratulatory aspect to it. There's dark humor, which - at points - doesn't trigger any laughter at all, but which still must be included under the umbrella.

I'm certain that you can measure certain parts of humor. But at the same time, while there's a physical part of us that derives humor, that does not make humor itself objective. The fact that every single person has different objective reactions makes humor inherently subjective, even if there's a physical element to be studied and torn apart.

It's like - I said this in another thread - the testers who try to analyze creativity. There are certain ways that you can identify a creative person. The problem is, none of those ways are perfect and all of them are thwarted by different studies. While you can test creativity and create an objective model, you'd only be fooling yourself.

Also, I understand that humor, as experienced, is subjective. But if you look at a piece of text it is also possible to objectively say whether there is something novel or broken relative to a given set of existing mental models.

Nabakov's style in Pale Fire similarly defies description: it's never once laughable, but it's certainly humor. The comic Achewood has moments like that, also: you find yourself laughing but there isn't any quick analyzable reason. It's not always about a broken situation.

edit: So a few years ago I was attempting a startup with a cofounder who I really liked. Within about two months of starting his mom committed suicide, his high school gf died, and he came down with mono. True story. Is it funny? It's fucking hilarious. Why? Because people aren't supposed to be that unlucky. It shouldn't happen. It violates our beliefs about how the world is supposed to work.

As you're arguing this you're changing your definition. You began by arguing that humor's objective and capable of measurement. Now you're saying that you can achieve it without ever having a singular funny moment. The problem is, your making that argument is countering your claim that there isn't any subjectivity to humor. You're splitting what humor is into several categories, and that invalidates the original claim. Plus, see the statement that I made before about the definition of humor: it doesn't just mean funny.

This is the problem we get into: while the English language can be said to be objective, it's only objective because words can mean many things at once. It's objective in a very complex way. And because of that, attempting to prove a point about objective humor like you did by citing that study is proving the point by ignoring everything but a very slim definition of a single word. That's not a good point to make, if you're losing out on the broader connotations of what humor is.

And your original point wasn't about humor. It was about interest. The two pertinent definitions: "The state of "wanting to know or learn about something or someone," and "The advantage or benefit of a person or group." You claim that fiction holds objective interest. That statement is false on both definitions. A person's want to know something is subjective. I find Ulysses a fascinating read because I think that Joyce's hypothesis that the human mind is in and of itself a heroic triumph is one that makes for incredible prose. You wouldn't think that. Therefore, you lack that subjective interest. Similarly, if it bestows an advantage to particular people (as the other definition goes), then it's not objective, because it happens differently for different people. So interest is subjective, same with insight and humor.

(As for this humor study: while I really do love the fact that science discovers more and more about the human mind, you can't cite a 30-year-old study and say that humor's been defined. Creating an objective study of humor is only valid if the result is a method of quantifying humor. And you can't quantify it by looking at reactions to already-formed comedy: you'd have to prove that it's possible to produce humor and predict the reaction ahead of time. So even if humor was only "funny" and not any of the other branching definitions, that study would prove a very slim aspect of humor's definition true and nothing else.)

I'm not claiming there isn't any subjectivity to humor, I'm claiming that it is objective as well as subjective.

When I say that humor is objective, I mean there are several patterns underlying what can make something funny. (You yourself said you enjoy discovering new kinds of humor, and kinds of humor implies underlying patterns.) I believe that it is possible to discover these underlying patterns, and then make a determination as to whether a statement falls into one of these patterns or not. This can be done independently of whether or not a person exists who can see that the statement falls into one of these patterns.

But I also believe that humor is subjective, in terms of the feeling we get when we hear something funny. I don't believe that this can be quantified or measured-- when I say that humor is objective, I simply mean that a binary determination can be made as to whether or not a statement falls into some underlying bucket.

"And your original point wasn't about humor. It was about interest. The two pertinent definitions: 'The state of 'wanting to know or learn about something or someone," and 'The advantage or benefit of a person or group.'"

My belief is that the first dictionary definitions you list is a symptom of interest, but not what makes something interesting.

The Baillargeon paper I cited talks about how babies look longer at impossible events. For example, if you create an illusion whereby you drop a toy and it appears to fall through a table, the baby will look at that longer than if the toy lands on the table like its supposed to.

Interesting is very easy to define: Anything that violates our expectancy of how things are supposed to work. (Insight and humor are specific subsets of 'interesting'.) In practice you wouldn't describe something that was insightful or funny as interesting, for the same reason you wouldn't call a senator a congressman even though a senator is a congressman.

Anyway, it is this violation of expectancy that makes us want to know or learn something. In other words, when our expectancy is violated we naturally want to either find some new schema, or else amend our previous schema to make it more accurate.

Anything that violates our expectancy is interesting in an objective sense. And things that violate expectancy do generally hold our attention. But not always. The reason being that insightful writing is even more compelling than writing that is merely interesting, so it tends to steal our attention away.

Okay, then. That makes sense. I don't know if from that you would be able to quantify humor like you mentioned before, but yes: there is rhyme and reason to it.

Anything that violates our expectancy is interesting in an objective sense. And things that violate expectancy do generally hold our attention. But not always. The reason being that insightful writing is even more compelling than writing that is merely interesting, so it tends to steal our attention away.

I still don't agree with that - I think that there's more to "insight and interest" than just declaring objective tags to things. I have easily learned more from reading fiction than I have from reading nonfiction. But I see where you're coming from.

Now I have to go and upvote this whole discussion. This was one of the best I've had on this site. Thanks a ton.

What makes something insightful is a whole other discussion, which probably it would be best not to go into here lest pg shit himself when he checks his threads page.

"Now I have to go and upvote this whole discussion. This was one of the best I've had on this site."

Same on both counts. Thanks. Discussions like this help immensely to strengthen my writing, in terms of having someone to try to break my ideas and force me to express things with more clarity and precision.

But that makes it subjective, doesn't it?

To illustrate, the phrases "The audience finds this interesting," and "The audience finds this insightful," are both subjective in the sense that their truth-value is dependent on the subject (different speakers likely would have different perspectives,) but they are objective in that, given a particular subject, they are either true or false. So: ojective in the particular, and subjective in the universal. The difference is that the later can depend on factors that are external to the subject, are objective and can be shared.

A phrase (or whatever) can be insightful with respect to a particular context if it adds something that was not previoulsy present in that context. So an analysis of Hitler (for example) revealing him to be a raving ego-maniac would have been insightful in the early thirties when most people had rather more benign opinions of the Nazi party. Released today, the same analysis would be rather less insightful. Given that when people use the word 'insightful,' they usually are speaking from a particular context (usually shared with the listener), the word can be said to be used objectively.

My only objection to that would be that again, an audience can vary wildly in different conditions. My professor gave an "enlightening" lesson on Delicious to my class, that the audience (college freshmen) on a whole found insight from. But the same lesson to, say Hacker News, would be far less insightful. You could get two different objective readings for the same material. Or am I missing something in what you said?

I just annoyed when people are too quick to insist that something is 'subjective' as a means of dismissing it's relavence or importance, so I tend to be picky about it.

In the same way that one mathematical object can objectively be larger than another mathematical object, one mental object can be objectively insightful in relation to another mental object.

Expound.

Also, "there are certain words that are used differently than what they actually mean." Huh? What is the inherit meaning of a word? Do words exist somewhere, true, pure, fixed in meaning, waiting to be used- and they are used, horribly, by every passing stranger, growing uglier and more cynical each day as they begin to believe the lies about the true nature of their "meaning?" (Yes, I just conflated linguistics and prostitution.)

I think your distinction between objective and subjective is really the distinction between popular and particular. For example, I know the Mona Lisa is popularly meaningful, and I acknowledge that, but I in particular am unmoved. It is a perfect way to avoid argument. Who tries to avoid argument on the internet? You are no sage.

However, your use of the word "funny" in the first paragraph to mean "humor," and then in the third paragraph to mean "a little off" is actually quite clever, as you were discussing novel breakages and the unexpected ways in which words acquire new meanings. You cunning linguist, you ;)

I don't think so. But I think when we talk about, for example, an idea, there is some consensus that we are talking about a mental model of the way something works, the way something could work, or the way something has worked previously. (For sufficiently large definitions of something.) And if I asked you whether or not a fact was the same as an idea, you would agree that it was not. So our collective agreement on what the word means doesn't differ from the dictionary definition because it comes from some platonic ideal, but rather the definition in the dictionary is wrong because of a quirk in the way dictionaries are made.

"Objectively... funny? As in, if the entire human race disappeared and no other beings capable of abstract thought existed, certain things would have the qualities of funny?"

All humor comes from something being novel or broken relative to a set of existing mental models. When I say something can be objectively funny, what I mean is that something can be objectively novel or broken in relation to an existing mental model, whether or not anyone else realizes it.

So, can something be funny independently of humans?

Imagine if you will something being novel or broken relative to a mental model that no one actually holds. Is this funny? Clearly it can't be subjectively funny to anyone, because the humor is relative to a belief that no person holds. But can it be objectively funny, in sort of a mathematical sense? I don't see why not.

So you're saying that something can be objective subject to its relationship with something else. Isn't that subjective?

"I don't see why not."

Well. Going along with your definition before, the one regarding that study, you need to realize that there is no way of quantifying the unexpected. Take Monty Python. They and their fans showed that you can take something unexpected and, by repeating it, make it more expected and therefore less funny, subjectively, over time. So the joke is subjective in terms of who it appeals to.

Now, you couldn't quantify something like the humorous value inherent in the Spanish Inquisition Sketch, and here's why. The primary punch line relies on the knowledge of the fact that "I didn't expect the bloody Spanish Inquisition" is a snippy, commonplace response to somebody's becoming overreacted to something. In order for "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!" to be funny, you need to understand a) the perception that the preceding dialogue is indeed snippy, b) the understanding that the lead-up line is a gross exaggeration, and c) the knowledge of what the Spanish Inquisition was, and why they are, in fact, unexpected.

The problem is that all three of these things are subjective. You said it yourself: animals wouldn't find it funny. And the reason for that is that our humor is largely based on notions about our society. They're only funny subjectively within our society. Without the society, there is no humor inherent in many of these things. That also explains why infants laugh so much at funny noises. When you're young, these things are entirely unexpected. The older and more sophisticated you get, the more you come to expect from things and the harder it gets to produce a funny response. And people evolve their responses at different speeds. I don't laugh at very many jokes anymore, because between dedicated study and a set of rude friends, I've heard an incredible variety of jokes and humorous situations. The comedic shows I watch tend to be the ones that are more focused on craftsmanship rather than on the unexpected. When I do find a new type of humor, my response is delightedly juvenile - and usually, my responses to other forms of humor are lessened. This is all entirely subjective. You can't define it. You can monitor it, as that study did, but that's something different entirely.

Two is larger subjective to its relationship with one, but two is objectively larger than one.

But humor isn't as harshly defined as the number system is. Rather, defining humor like that would be like saying "the sound of the word 'two' is objectively greater than the sound of the word 'one'." Once you say that, you need to define what those sounds actually mean, determine the numeric value of each, and then make the comparison. Until you do all those things - and all of those things require subjectivity within the confines of a language - then the sound of the word "two" has no meaning. The concept of two is objective, because mathematics deals only with objectivity. But humor doesn't have such harsh definitions, none of it is objective, and you can't limit it in a way that makes it objective.

You read fiction for the things that interest you. If an "interesting" thing doesn't hold your attention, it's not interesting. I find that some authors remain interesting upon multiple rereads, while others fall apart rapidly. But fiction can say things that nonfiction can't, because with fiction you can create an entire artificial construct just to prove a point.

Yes. We methane-breathing anti-gourmets are known for our occasional lapses into snarkishness.