Ordinary Banana

Plenty of examples exist of measuring beauty, both objective and subjective, that are culturally consistent and repeatable and even meet the criteria for a metric.

Measuring popular perceptions of beauty (like symmetrical features) but I'm not sure that's always the same thing as beauty.

That's your problem, not science's. People who try to gainsay this kind of thing almost always ends up saying: "My ill-defined, private definition falls outside the realm of carefully defined public definitions."

I very much doubt it's just me. Would you accept the outcome of a vote on the best art in a world where millions of people think Ayn Rand was a great novelist?

That's a perfect example of what I've just described. A world vote is by definition a well-defined public quantification and you've just asked me to set it against my own private aesthetic view.

I fundamentally disagree with that definition of beauty. Thomas Kinkade paintings are not beautiful regardless of how many people think they are.

trying to get a better abstract handle on the essentially subjective is one of the most exciting scientific projects

like that’s what christopher alexander is up to, though his methods rarely look like regular science