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Why is quality rare?

gleech.org · 1,255 words · saved by 6 readers

24th March 2015 •  Why in general is it harder to do things well than badly? •  Confidence: 80% that I've captured the main contributors. •  Topic importance: 8 / 10 •  Reading time: 10 mins. •  Podcast version here. I recently realised I don’t know why quality is rare. Some possible reasons: These are not probably mutually exclusive. I’ll fill in new ideas and evidence for each as I go. That bad things are easy and good things hard, that pain is sometimes chronic and pleasure always fleeting, seems like the largest part of “the Human Condition”. Consider: if we were immortal but otherwise exactly as we are, then a lot of people would still have a terrible time. (Even ignoring the dementia and cachexia.) But if we were stubbornly happy - if we often experienced joy for no particular reason, if the worst misfortune was quickly recovered from - then at least to me this seems like the remaining problems of mortality, meaning, progress would become ordinary ill-defined problems rather tha

χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά. (Beauty is hard.) – Plato I recently realised I don’t know why quality is rare. Some possible reasons: Brute probability 'Quality is rare because the number of quality states is much smaller than the number of bad states of things - and neither nature nor artifice are enough to target the former very well or very often.' If you've spent much time looking at C20th modernism , this will seem plausible. Social constructionism 'Quality is rare because we estimate a thing's quality by its rarity, or by how hard it is to do.' (Cop-out, true only of positional goods and not others.) E

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