Eh. I like the phrase but I disagree with the premise you apply to it. If I were defining a few things about myself I would say "I like Anime" and "I hate EDM". I keep ratings for every anime I've ever watched, the average score is about 7.48/10. Objectively, a lot of it was crap that I would never recommend to anyone, but it's crap I enjoy. On the other hand, there are EDM songs I like that are on my playlist on Spotify. Even though I'll happily listen to them, they don't make me think "Wow, I really need to test my view that I don't like EDM". I already know I don't like it. The fact there are exceptions doesn't make it not a useful rule for me to follow when choosing music.
IMO the healthier attitude, rather than seeking out things you don't like, is to leave yourself open to things you don't like, particularly in a group setting. It's very annoying lately, my group of friends wants to play video games after work, but everybody has some kind of game type they don't like that makes it hard to reach consensus. Rather than being in constant pursuit of optimized personal pleasure, it's important that I sometimes just play the games I don't like so in the future they'll play the games they don't like with me. And then maybe by chance one of us actually will end up liking it despite ourselves.
There's another layer here as well as to the scale of things. "I don't like EDM" is a very differently scaled statement than "I don't like Music". When confronting your own preferences, I think it's important to compartmentalize them appropriately. I identify myself as someone that likes anime, but I will never watch another shonen sports anime again willingly.
To expand on what you're saying, there's a big difference between "I don't like X" and "X is bad". I've never been much of a wine person. It's not without trying. I've had everything from cheap boxed Franzia to a several hundred dollar bordeaux (that was totally wasted on me). I took a wine class where I was given samples and explicitly told "this is what good wine tastes like". I don't dislike wine and I don't think wine is bad, but the 10% of wine that is good doesn't appeal to me that much.
The thing about wine is, if you don’t physiologically have tons of fungiform papillae on your tongue (ie super taster) you’ll never appreciate the nuances in wine. If you’re a non-taster wine is pretty much wasted on you for sure and you should seek out enjoying food with regard to texture rather than flavor. So it very well may be that it’s not even a matter of preference, but a matter of nature.
This is equivalent of "if you don't have enough muscle fibers of specific type in your legs - you'll never win the Olympics". While it is probably true, it doesn't mean you can't run just for fun with friends or play football with colleagues or do a ton of other physical activities.
Taste can be trained, and to surprising extent. Any person without tasting apparatus injuries may learn to evaluate wine and distinguish good $10 bottle from bad $50 one in a blind tasting.
I don't know if I'm a super taster, but I am a huge fan of other beverages, alcoholic or not. I collect Scotch, rare beers, meads, and I used to help organize a liquor tasting/sharing group. I can definitely understand wine tasting notes - I may not be able to tell a vintage by taste but I can tell different styles of reds apart. I just don't think I like wine that much, which I'd assert is a preference.
How do you know if you have it? When trying different wines all I can notice is how strong the alcohol tastes. The same thing about vodka and other stronger drinks. I can notice change of flavor in beer and food more or less fine.
I knew a super-taster. She was a foodie and a chef. Her favourite things were Oreos and vanilla ice-cream. She could tell if the milk was left out of the fridge for a minute. She could distinguish all the variance in wines but didn't specifically enjoy any of them. I think a lot of the pleasure in wine tasting is the 1-upmanship. Personally I have been recommended wines for certain meals that complemented so well it made me notice. That's good but only in context not in isolation.
The wine example is a tricky one because there's another metric aside from like/dislike or good/bad that wine falls into. Maybe class related status bullshit?
I enjoy wine, but I also recognize a lot of the snobbiness about it (particularly at the high end) is a mixture of snake oil and rich people looking for a place to buy more status.
I remember some interview on NPR with a wine expert. The host was asking why in all the double blind trials people aren't able to consistently rate wines or even have consistent preferences. The wine expert complained that it's the fault of doing it double blind and 'when they're present with the people' (and likely giving them obvious clues about what's supposed to be good or not) 'they can tell the difference'.
There's good/bad, like/dislike, but there's also true and fraud, high status and low status. Sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference, sometimes there isn't a difference.
The middle-class version of this is craft beers. Oh god, the grief I was getting from my friends once almost everyone got infected by the "I only buy expensive craft beers, and I care for taste" showmanship. To each their own, but I really do think that a particular brand of cheap, mass-market beer that I like tastes better, and it's also cheap. I have other things that I like to pay premium for.
Yeah, I think where the trouble starts is when people take preferences as a declaration of some kind of Kantian universal imperative. So someone else’s taste becomes a judgment on you as a person. This drives people bananas on the internet, where you don’t have to treat other people like, you know, people. In particular, I think this accounts for the frothing rage that video game reviews can generate.
For my part, I’m just glad I grew out of giving a shit what kind of music other people like.
> but everybody has some kind of game type they don't like that makes it hard to reach consensus
The paradox of choice. Or whatever the term is. The huge range of options available let us whittle ourselves down into a perfect little hole of preference, but I suspect that diminishing returns kick in real quick.
The truth is that you'll probably have nearly as much fun if you just pick up one of six cartridges you've got (like we had to back in the old days) and have at it, than if you spent a week carefully selecting the optimal game from the tens of thousands out there. That is a deceptively attractive misuse of time, for some reason.
> The truth is that you'll probably have nearly as much fun if you just pick up one of six cartridges you've got (like we had to back in the old days) and have at it, than if you spent a week carefully selecting the optimal game from the tens of thousands out there.
As someone who enjoys bad movies more than good movies, this is simply not true. Pick any 6 random games on Steam and see if you find 2+ of them moderately enjoyable.
There really is just a lot of crap out there, and not everything is meant for everybody. Also over time gaming has become more mainstream which means more people interested solely in money, a larger audience for more niche genres, as well as half-assed hobby projects since Steam Greenlight (which is now Steam Direct) have cropped up over time.
I get the gist of your argument and there's something to be said for just trying something new and enjoying it. But your argument is roughly equivalent to "buy a plane ticket anywhere in the world and enjoy your 1 week vacation!" Chances are most people would prefer Paris, France to Paris, Texas. Even if a few people would actually enjoy the different experience equally or more, most certainly wouldn't.
I generally agree with that, with the caveat that the top 10% of anything is closer to indistinguishable. For example, there's a very clear difference between Paris, France and Paris, Texas. However, once we've narrowed the category down to "popular vacation destinations" or something like that I think the differences are narrowed.
I feel like you're actually agreeing with the article. From what you're saying, you've consumed enough anime and EDM to make an informed decision on whether you "like" them or not.
I think this is very different, for example, from eating chinese food in the US and deciding that one doesn't like chinese cuisine (without being aware that most of the chinese food that americans experience is a very poor representation of what mainland chinese food looks like, never mind _good_ chinese food)
The point about being open about video games you don't like seems to reinforce that idea: maybe the game genre itself is not to your liking, but it turns out that the social aspect is worth it. This was the case for me and LAN FPS back in the day: had I dismissed the genre, I would not have experienced the fun of LAN parties.
I’d challenge the notion that you don’t like EDM, especially when there is some you like.
When I was a kid, I was a pretty picky eater. Then one day I was in a sandwich shop, and someone ordered a type of ham sandwich that I’d never get, but clearly a lot of people do. It made me think, “wow there’s a lot of people who do like it, so maybe there’s something to it. And I should want to like it too, because if I did, then I would have more things to enjoy in life.”
That principal has taken me quite far. If your default view is that you want to like things, it’s amazing how much your previous objections can crumble. Usually it’s not just about exposure (to the “right 10%”), but also your mindset.
I think it is a fallacy that “if you only tried it more often, then you would like it” or the sibling fallacy “if you tried the absolute best, then you would like it”.
I have personally experimented with this, with various products I don’t like. For example, I have repeatedly tested Manchego cheese, expecting to eventually grow to like it (I love a wide variety of cheeses), but somehow I still don’t like it. The same with some forms of music that others may love which I have tried to appreciate, but I just never grow fond of the genre.
That said, perhaps a counter-example: I have found that at my favourite restaurants (more than one cuisine), I can pick anything on the menu, and I will like it even though it may a dish or contain an ingredient I would usually dislike... but maybe that is because a seasoning/sauce matters more to me than the base ingredient? Or I’ve found a chef with similar taste profile to me?
I am now old enough to give up more quickly on things others love but I don’t. I have also learnt that some things/experiences are not worth trying even once, regardless that others recommend them.
This is a little off the point, but thinking about games I find that the “8 kinds of fun” is a really useful lens, especially for deciding whether someone else might like a particular game. Definitely more so than the spectrum of good/mediocre/bad that reviews generally sort games into.
The idea is that broadly there are eight basic ways that people get enjoyment out of games: challenge, narrative, sensation, fantasy, discovery, fellowship, expression, and submission. They’re basically self-explanatory except the last, which is “turn your brain off and unwind” games candy crush or a slot machine.
Everyone has preferences in these categories to different degrees, and they go a long way to predicting what we’ll enjoy. Into challenge and discovery? You’ve probably already beaten dark souls. Expression and discovery, and can do without narrative? Minecraft. If I was running a game review site, I’d break games down by which categories they hit, and how well.
And for my fellow (former) EVE Online players, this explains why different portions of the player base find each other totally incomprehensible.
Hmm, idk, I like anime too. But I would strongly expect to dislike a randomly chosen anime title (generously, filtering down to stuff at least loosely targeted at someone my age). It's relatively easy to find curated lists of stuff that is not crap. Games are harder. I feel like at this point I look at a game and can more or less visualize the entire game loop, estimate a low percentage of content that would actually interest me, and just yawn at the prospect of playing it. But art is pretty boring if it has nothing to novel to say.
Novel art is a fantastic thing to enjoy. But if you're really looking for it, it's a more difficult thing to find by the day.
> I would strongly expect to dislike a randomly chosen anime title
I'd argue that the japanese anime space is extremely crowded and there's a lot of bad quality stuff and recycling. Upon seeing yet another shounen harem, I'd often joke that episode 7 would surely be a beach episode... and sure enough, it almost always was!
For those who don't like "EDM", there is still hope: Good quality techno by established musicians can be had every weekend at Techno-club.net. It's a pay-for site with a reasonable cost, similar to a ticket price you'd get at a club for a night.
I almost gave up on trying to wade through some of the crap on the latest and greatest music subscription services. Sometimes you just gotta let the underground artists take care of things!
The site owner and moderators are good people trying to do great things with some of the most talented DJ's. Check it out every Friday and Saturday. Note: All times are in London time, FYI.
This is really the key point for me. I’m actively working on reframing my perspective. Optimization of this sort massively damages relationships, obviously.
I'm a firm believer in this, having lived through "NYC used to be so cool" or "Burning Man used to be so cool." If you focus on the essential 10%, you learn what that thing really is about.
NOW. Here's where it gets personal and interesting.
I went with a friend to a shitty diner and ordered eggs benedict. I love eggs benedict. And he was like: "Why did you do that?" "I love eggs benedict!" "I love eggs benedict too, but I don't like lame eggs benedict."
That struck me as so inconceivable.
Then I remembered a friend who would constantly order shitty burgers by delivery. And I gave them such grief: "burgers are only meant to be enjoyed when they are amazing, why order a mediocre burger??"
In retrospect, I realized that there are certain things that you will like even if they aren't great, once you appreciate them. And certain things you will only like if they are done the excellence. I like any egg benedict, even if it's lame. I am a snob when it comes to burgers. Switch this for your world-view.
The important point is that you must learn to appreciate something, before you sort it into "I enjoy it" vs. "not good enough". You can't simply dismiss an entire genre based upon some theoretical a priori motive. But after you have tasted it, and I mean truly tasted it, you can decide whether you can be an elitist about it.
What you're saying is true most of the time, but some times a difference in quality really is a difference in kind.
I'm really not a fan of most store-bought bread. I'd eat it if the alternative was homelessness, or if I thought I'd embarass someone by rejecting food they "made"; however, homemade sourdough bread is to die for.
Generally, mediocre stuff can be pretty decent, and is worth trying to enjoy, but some crap is really just crap.
> Maybe you haven’t discovered the good 10% yet. Keep looking.
Keep in mind that 90% of your own opinions are crap, too - so you aren't likely to know the good from the bad even once you're exposed to it.
To put it another way, you can't really know whether you like something or not until you've a) gotten over the fear of it, and b) learned how to do or recognize it competently.
I guestimate that the ratio to my eye is a bit better for HN on technology, but I'd also argue that anything outside business, science, and engineering the ratio is often worse - Political threads seem to really show off a lot of overstretching, both in issues of political economy and in often pretty blatantly tribal lack of due diligence that wouldn't fly if the thread were about (say) something just as easily google-able but technology (HN I love you, but you're bringing me down, and all that).
Facebook sees about 5 billion items posted daily. The typical person likely sees between 10--100 items, and closer the lower end than you might think.
At a ratio of 10 : 5 billion, the non-bullshit fraction is about 0.00000002%. Or 99.99999998% of everything is bullshit in terms of relevance.
(This also means that any rating or selection system itself is operating very nearly randomly.)
If 10 items seems to few, remember that the average person uses social media for about an hour pervday --- interaction per item is 60 minutes/n, where n is the number of items viewed or interacted.
Even skilled content moderators have an upper bound in practice of about 700--800 items/day, sustained.
I was going to say the same thing, there is insane amount of pre-filtering before we even see anything. So real proportion of crap things is somewhere above 99%.
Yup, crap is inextricable from greatness. A diamond only forms in the rough, it doesnt form inside other diamonds, it doesnt have the right conditions.
Presumably the 90% of tomatoes that were not red and fine were made into ketchup or something like that. Of course if you select for an attribute first then that attribute is going to be over-represented.
Of the remaining 10% that reached the shop, 90% were probably not perfect photo-like quality, and you can find them dumped in the trash can at the end of the day (if you can grab them before local freegans do, that is).
In a random store most likely 100% of tomatoes are crap, as stores overwhelmingly pick the varieties of tomatoes which are optimized so that they can be transported and stored and transported without damage and spoilage (and since logistics takes time, they have to be picked before they're fully ripe), trading off flavor, taste and nutrients.
There are many tomato varieties that objectively taste much better (you don't have to be a snob or supertaster, the difference is obvious), but they are hard or impossible to distribute through modern logistics, you would have to live very close to the grower (or grow them yourself) so that you can eat them the day they're picked without driving them around half the country. And, of course, you get them when they're in season, not year-round. That's impractical, so most of us rather choose to eat crap tomatoes most of time - and so 90% of tomatoes are crap. Even if they're red and we consider that crap as normal, they're still crap in comparison.
Well I agree except that I don't want to think of mundane things as crap.
Where I live tomatoes are either green at harvesting or grown at least part time in green houses during spring. Imports is a must in practice. Fruits like oranges or pineapples are thready and blend. I couldn't believe how good fresh such tasted when I was in the tropics.
The blend tomatoes in stores being crap are tangential to the "programmers can't program" mythos or how guys rate girls on a very not normally or uniformly distributed 10 points scale.
1) I think the view that “90% of people are crap” is incredibly misanthropic, cynical, and a view that would likely make the world a worse place if widely adopted.
2) I think enjoying the 90% of crap is maybe more important than enjoying the 10% of not crap.
Being able to enjoy bad movies, bad music, bad art, bad everything is great. Who wouldn’t want to increase the amount of things they could enjoy by 2x or 3x or 9x? I watched Battlefield Earth recently and it was a blast! One of my favorite shows is How I Met Your Mother (which is "crap" if you define "crap" as "less than the 90th percentile in that medium"...it's prolly a 70 or 80th percentile show).
Why be an elite who turns their nose up at things when you can enjoy both the things the elites like AND the things they sneer at? Sign me up for the trash!
>Think you hate poetry? Roller coasters? Banjo music? Thai food? Maybe you haven’t discovered the good 10% yet. Keep looking.
Maybe liking something means appreciating the average.
I like steaks. I mean, I really like dry aged t-bones, but I also like a simply seasoned sirloin. I wouldn't even turn down an well done hockey puck if it came with a baked potato.
I don't like movies. You would never find me indulging in the latest Sharknado nonsense. But I can enjoying myself while watching a critically-acclaimed film.
>Then there’s relationships. Think there’s no one out there who can make you happy? Maybe you haven’t climbed out of your 90% of crappy relationships yet. Keep looking
There is no one that can make you happy. That's up to you. There are people that you can work well with and build a good relationship. That good relationship can help with the happiness but your attitude matters more.
Sure. Recently I tried an Indian dish that quickly made Indian food go from being my 10th favorite option to my 1st. Turns out I just hadnt found the Indian food I loved until that night.
Now it makes me wonder if there is an Italian dish I would love that much.
I didn't know this was a "law", but i've been triangulating on this same feeling for a long time now. I would say it's 1%-10% of anything is actually good. You can basically apply this to almost any category, but for most things it doesn't really matter. I would guess while no two people would agree if asked to pick their top 5% of any one thing, if you tallied up all the votes and had enough participation, you could probably put together a list that would generally include the best of whatever that category is.
The story behind it is interesting; critics complained about the low-quality of typical sci-fi. Sturgeon observed that 90% of novels in any genre (or pieces of art in general) are garbage, so the observation that "90% of sci-fi is crap" does not speak to the quality of sci-fi as a genre.
Plus one on accurately quoting/applying strong opinions, loosely held. Anecdotally, most of the time I see this applied people just want someone to be easy to convince. Easy to convince should be a function of the data/reasoning that lead to the currently held choice. Until an exceeding choice is found, why relinquish the currently held one for one with _less_ data/rationale?
I think it would be more accurate to say, 90% of everything will be crap to you. I listen to a lot of music and it is true that 90% of what I hear I consider crap. However, tastes very widely. I could find an amazing song and show it to all my friends--who like the same genre of music--and only a fraction of them will love the song also.
Combined with the further "Strong Opinions, Loosely Held" this is very real advice.
Broad statements like this tend to be very inline with our intuitions for many things - even if we must admit that they have very little "real" evidence. It doesn't mean that such common aphorisms don't have value or utility in our lives...
> Keep your identity small. “I’m not the kind of person who does things like that” is not an explanation, it’s a trap. It prevents nerds from working out and men from dancing.
Good one! Subjective identity is merely one's perspective on one's own past experience...why turn the future into the ultimate risk.
I enjoy discovering new music a lot. I'm also extremely selective in picking the songs that go into my personal music library. Maybe 5% of the songs I listen to, _within the subgenres I already prefer_, make it.
I don't disagree with the author, based on my narrow personal experience.
I am actually thinking the reverse now: Loose opinions, strongly held. It's better to a vague - loose opinion like "do not harm" but held it strongly than something precise like "never kill someone" but held it loosely.
The first (strong opinions) seems to relate to judgements. The second to values (how we arrive at judgements).
There's a fair argument that values might need to be less rigorously arrived at but more tightly helf. Many values are beyond proof and more closely resemble axioms or premises. Even here some inclination to revise assessments might be warranted. E.g., "kill, if necessary to save your or another's life from one killing unjustly". Moral absolutes are hard to find.
The problem is that society expects everyone to have a pre-conceived judgement about every topic.
I encounter this frequently. "What do you think about <some news event>?" . "Do you think <some music genre> sucks?". "What's your position on <divisive topic>?".
Maybe I just haven't arrived at any opinion because it's not relevant enough to my life.
And this insistence in finding someone's position on every topic has a negative effect on conversation, because someone's always ready to take offence.
TLDR: as few opinions as possible, only relevant to your immediate circumstances
I don't understand blog articles like this with few lines of text and 7 backlinks to other articles from the same blog.
Feels like promotion more than a conversation starter.
I'd go as far as 98%, but the problem is it's getting worse! Everybody's optimizing everything, creating ever crappier crap. To quote Jay Pritchett, "Crap. Crappacino. Charlie Craplin."
IMO the healthier attitude, rather than seeking out things you don't like, is to leave yourself open to things you don't like, particularly in a group setting. It's very annoying lately, my group of friends wants to play video games after work, but everybody has some kind of game type they don't like that makes it hard to reach consensus. Rather than being in constant pursuit of optimized personal pleasure, it's important that I sometimes just play the games I don't like so in the future they'll play the games they don't like with me. And then maybe by chance one of us actually will end up liking it despite ourselves.
There's another layer here as well as to the scale of things. "I don't like EDM" is a very differently scaled statement than "I don't like Music". When confronting your own preferences, I think it's important to compartmentalize them appropriately. I identify myself as someone that likes anime, but I will never watch another shonen sports anime again willingly.