How does good taste work?
Hi everyone,
I’ve been thinking about good taste recently, for a variety of reasons, and I thought I’d shared some of my thoughts today.
I asked about good taste on Twitter the other day:
I liked some of the answers but not others, which is partly my fault for asking a question I thought I already knew the answer to. Still, some of of them were enlightening, some of them I disagreed with, some were somewhere in between.
Various people denied that taste exists. I think they’re obviously wrong, and in fact I don’t even think they’d really believe what they’re saying if they thought about it for a bit, they’re just rejecting out of hand a concept they feel has mostly been used against them.
The two main claims of this form are:
You judge someone as having good taste when they like the same things as you.
Taste is mostly a proxy for wealth, class, etc. and is a way of gate keeping.
I think the first is obviously false - many people judge others as having significantly better taste than themselves - and the second is also what you would see if taste were a real thing.
Good taste clearly exists
My evidence that good taste exists is as follows:
Some things are good, and some things are bad. This is all very subjective, and not everyone is going to agree on which things are which (more on this later), but you still get things where there is broad agreement among a large number of people that they are good or bad.
There are people who are much better at producing good things than other people are. This might be out of some sort of intrinsic genius, but it’s usually not. I’m a better writer than most people (I don’t claim to be an amazing writer, but I’m clearly a good one), and this is mostly not due to intrinsic talent I’ve just been writing a lot for several decades and I’ve got good at it.
What this means is that there is expertise that allows you to produce good things. Hopefully this is not a shocking revelation to you and I am just spelling out the obvious.
A recurring theme of research on expertise (See e.g. Sources of Power by Gary Klein, or Peak by Anders Ericsson, for two very different takes on expertise which agree on this point) is that experts notice different things than lay people, and (this comes up particularly in Klein and the naturalistic decision making field he founded) have strong intuitive senses underpinning their expertise. An expert in producing good things doesn’t just have a long list of rules and things to do, they have a very strong felt sense of the sort of things to pay attention to and the subtle details that produce quality.
I do not have a better word for this than “taste”, and “taste” is what everyone with some degree of expertise seems to call it.
This sense of taste then extends to consumption as well - the sort of thing you like is very much informed by your understanding of the subject. Expert musicians will notice things in the music they listen to that others don’t. Expert writers will appreciate things about writing that will probably pass you by if you don’t know just how much editing must have gone in to get that exact turn of phrase.
There are other forms of expertise too that aren’t necessarily linked to creation. Coffee and wine1 experts clearly notice things about the things they drink that others don’t, so have taste in the sense that they have awareness of and preference for things that others think just taste the same.
Based on these examples I offer a tentative working definition of good taste: Good taste in something is the sort of preferences you tend to acquire through familiarity and interest with it, after devoting time and effort to learning the subject.
This isn’t a perfect definition, but it seems to capture something interesting about taste.
Good taste is clearly exclusionary (and that’s fine)
If good taste requires time and effort to acquire, then some things will naturally follow:
People with more time and effort to spare will have more capacity to develop good taste.
Things that people of good taste prefer will tend to be more expensive, because they are harder to make and have a smaller market.
People will use good taste as a signifier of being the sort of person who can afford to spend time, effort, and money on “the finer things”.
A particular consequence of the latter is that you will get an awful lot of people who “have good taste” in the sense that they do what someone with better actual taste than them tells them to because that’s how they show they’re rich and classy.
This is fine, and should not be used to discount good taste. Rich people have more access to all of the good things, that doesn’t make them good. High quality health care is also a signifier of wealth and privilege, and it’s good for everyone to have that.
The way to counter this is not to deny the existence of good taste, but to treat good taste like we should (but often don’t) treat anything else that is expensive to acquire: It is a personal choice whether the cost-benefit analysis is worth it or viable to you, and it is not a moral failing to lack it.
I have bad taste
One of the reasons I’m interested in this problem is the growing realisation that I have bad taste in a lot of things, especially fiction.
This is somewhat tying in with my recent post about The humour test for expertise, in which I talk about how being able to get the jokes in an area is a good indicator of expertise. I finished with:
Another application of the test is that the jokes you find funny probably tell you something about your areas of expertise that you hadn't realised. This may be an uncomfortable realisation because e.g. it causes you to realise quite how much time you've spent playing Slay the Spire.
This isn’t actually the most uncomfortable realisation I’ve had in this space recently. The most uncomfortable realisation I’ve had of this sort recently is that I read An Infinite Recursion of Time recently and I think it’s hilarious. Warning: Don’t read this unless you are already familiar with the hive of scum and bad web serials that is Royal Road. If you really want to get the joke, read Worth the Candle and maybe Mother of Learning first, as actually reasonably decent instances of the genre. An Infinite Recursion of Time is not actually a parody of this genre, but it’s hard not to read it as one, and it’s certainly not a good instance. But it is, to me, very funny.
To get an idea of the sort of thing this story is, I commend you to this review:
When you think about Royal Road (formerly Royal Road Legends (formerly Royal Chuck Legends)), what story comes to mind?
No need to think further. Rhetorical question. This is it. This is the story to out-story every other in the site. We've reached platonic royalroad-ness.
Do you like numbers going up, and magic systems completely laid bare within a single scene? It's got it.
Do you like waifus who seem to have nothing going on except a mission to bang the protagonist? It's got it.
Do you like power fantasies to the level of describing the main character's muscles twice a chapter? Boy, has this got it.
Here, let me quote an excerpt:
> "Progression RPG" and "time loop" go hand in hand together, or really, they're interlocked in sweaty, passionate intercourse that nine months later produces a baby called "OP protagonist". In my dreams, I am that baby.
Or:
> It was time to step forward and hope Chadness was a stat.
All other writers in the site should go back to the cave where they belong, abandoning their careers to stare shamefully at the shadows on the walls. Shadows emitted from the light reflected off Mr. 17's sweaty muscles.
Bow down to the king of shitty writing. God help us all.
I mention all of this not to pick on the author, who is clearly living his dream, but to highlight the uncomfortable realisation that I have clearly read enough of this sort of thing that I get the jokes, and maybe I should reflect on what that means about my life choices, and sense of taste.
It’s also an interesting test case for my working definition. It is possible to have “good taste” in the sense that I suggested (preferences acquired as expertise in a subject in question). Can one have good taste in trashy web novels, or is it a subject that is intrinsically in poor taste?
XKCD on taste
I think Randall Monroe is conflating two different things here: The acquisition of taste, and the enforcement of it. It’s understandable given how many people are dicks about their taste, but I think it’s worth separating the two.
Setting aside the question of whether you should be a dick about your taste (you should not), there’s still a question: Is it likely that the scenario he describes would play out that way?
Yeah, it probably would. Know why? Because those people would be bored out of their mind and desperate for any source of stimulation. What people will invest time and effort in is heavily constrained by what is available to them. Under less dire circumstances I read Robert Jordan’s “The Fires of Heaven” five times cover to cover in quick succession, and let me tell you that by the end of the fifth time I would have happily traded the book for a collection of pictures of Joe Biden eating sandwiches, and also I would have read the book a sixth time if I hadn’t got out of that situation.
I think hat guy’s defence that some things have more depth than others is pretty solid, but as always you have to compare to the options that are actually available to you.
I think there is definitely some sense in which some things are more worth developing good taste in than others. Some notion of richness and connection to other things, perhaps.
I think, perhaps, key to this is some sort of reward curve. At what point does putting in more effort hit the point of diminishing returns? This is, again, important to contrast to alternatives: If you’re enjoying the process the effort is almost free, and if you don’t have anywhere better to spend the effort the opportunity cost is low enough that it may still be worth becoming a Biden sandwich expert.
In the normal course of things, the modern world does give us enough variety of options that we should be able to avoid the Biden sandwich problem. Perhaps what we need is some sort of meta good taste? An expertise in seeking out things with the depth to be worth our time and effort to acquire a taste for.
It’s hard to keep up good taste
One interesting aspect of my “bad taste” is that I clearly know better. I’m not going to claim that my standard reading quality is amazing, but I certainly read a lot better fiction than An Infinite Recursion of Time - My favourite authors are people like Lois McMaster Bujold or Terry Pratchett, who do really rich character-based fiction. It’s not “fine literature”, but I think at their best each author is an exceptionally good author in ways that many more highly regarded authors fall short.
But regardless of where you think they fall on the scale of quality, if you were to draw a line from An Infinite Recursion of Time to peak Terry Pratchett, I’d be forced to admit that the majority (though perhaps not the overwhelming majority) of books are closer to the An Infinite Recursion of Time end than the Terry Pratchett end.
Why?
Well, a variety of reasons I think - among them that I need to branch out my tastes in fiction enough that I have a better supply of high quality fiction (royal road is a great source for a lot of fiction, but you know where you stand on the quantity/quality trade off with royal road) - but probably the biggest reason is that I mostly read fiction when I’m tired. The overwhelming majority of my fiction reading time is in bed before going to sleep.
I think this is a common experience. Someone might have amazing taste in food, but when they’re tired and can’t make decisions default to popcorn or McDonalds takeaway or something. We have this entire notion of a “guilty pleasure”, and I think what it often means is “I know better but I choose this worse thing anyway”, and I think some of this ties into the idea of taste as expertise linked: Your preference for the “finer” things is intrinsically tied to the deployment of a skill, and that skill is always going to require more work to use than to not use it.
Additionally, I find that being tired gives one a preference for the familiar and comfortable. Reading something trashy that is basically the same as the five other trashy things you’ve read with the character names changed is sufficiently comforting
As a result, if you’re tired all the time, and short of time and energy, then developing good taste is going to be pretty hard and probably won’t be worth it. As a result, developing good taste is definitely a life complete problem.
Is this worth solving?
I think it’s worth it for me, and other people have to make their own decisions.
The thing that’s driving me to do it is that at some point the bad taste version starts to feel stale. The novelty value is running out - if I’ve read a hundred moreish trashy web serials, they start to feel less moreish by the end of that, and I start to crave something a bit more interesting.
Importantly, the thing that makes it worth solving is not that I feel bad about my current reading habits, but that I feel like I’m missing out by them. There is clearly something there to get that can be found in other reading, and I’m not currently getting it, and I’d like to be.
Importantly, this is context specific. I think it’s worth it to me to develop good taste in fiction. I don’t think it’s worth it to me to develop good taste in films, because I don’t care enough. It’s not worth it to me to develop good taste in cheese, because although cheese is delicious I can’t eat it without suffering. As with all things, cost-benefit analysis, individual choice, etc.
But although individual choices are context-specific, I do think there is a generic problem: How does one develop good taste in a subject?
So what does one do about this?
How does one go about developing taste?
I think there are a couple of obvious strategies to deploy here.
The first is that very simply if you want to develop good taste you need to actually invest time and effort into the things you’re consuming. I’m never going to develop good taste in novels while I’m reading entirely before bed, I need to actually put some high energy high quality time. I might get to the point where my bedtime reading is classy, but I clearly can’t just start by introducing high end literature at that point.
It may also be worth trying to lower the effort of engaging with good things, but I’m not sure this looks meaningfully different from just engaging with more good things - as you do it more in your high-energy periods, the effort goes down and the times in which you can engage with it broaden.
In order to expand one’s taste into appreciating things that are better than what we currently consume, strategies like I talked about in Start from amazing are probably the way to go - develop your taste on examples of the things you’re trying to acquire taste in that are already good enough that they blow you away. This is part of why I was asking for recommendations of such novels on Twitter the other day.
Finally, I think there might be more to explore in the idea of taste as expertise. Perhaps we can explore various mechanisms for extracting knowledge from experts (see e.g. Cedric’s excellent Tacit Knowledge Series) to try to speedrun the process of taste acquisition, by learning from people who we can recognise as having better taste than us? I don’t yet know how this will work, but I’m going to be thinking about it further.
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