It amazes me when people seem to lack taste. I'm not even saying the ability to rank items in a way that agrees to some general standard. I'm saying the ability to notice that there is even a difference. I'll talk about taste in the literal sense but this extends to everything. I remember being at a Chinese restaurant with some friends where we were eating scallion pancakes. I said, boastfully, that my family makes better scallion pancakes and a friend remarked that he didn't think there was any difference, that indeed all scallion pancakes were exactly alike to him. Or another friend couldn't tell the difference between orange juice from concentrate and not from concentrate.
I wonder how much of this is physiological and how much is mental. I can't help but think you'd need some sort of color blindness for taste to genuinely not notice any difference between scallion pancakes. But perhaps my friend was exaggerating.
My theory is that taste is one quality that separates the academics from the business people. Academia doesn't necessitate a lot of taste. If you have it, great. If you don't have it, no big deal. On the other hand, stuff such as product design, user interfaces, even software engineering, requires taste. You need to understand what makes a good piece of software or a good product. One could argue that Steve Jobs was a product supertaster. He was finely attuned to stuff that the average user (or the average HN reader) would not see. As PG notes, taste is being attuned to the collective unconsciousness, to a collective aesthetic. If you can tap into that, you can attract customers.
> friend remarked that he didn't think there was any difference, that indeed all scallion pancakes were exactly alike to him.
This is entirely plausible. If you are used to eating some food regularly over the course of decades, you will be able to discriminate between good vs. mediocre versions. If you have only eaten a food a few times, the most relevant comparisons will be with other types of food, and you won’t necessarily notice the difference between two separate experiences of it. When compared to pizza, tacos, or bagels, all scallion pancakes are pretty similar.
For instance, a person who drinks red wine every day will be able to tell you the difference between varietals, regions, distinguish $100 vs. $7 bottles, maybe notice good vs. bad years from some vineyard; someone who has only rarely had red wine might think that they all taste about the same.
I always felt like that XKCD comic has the opposite message than how a lot of folks I know take it as.
Interpretation/Message A: You can find nuance and subtlety in anything, including Joe Biden photographs. This means that most wine-tasters/foodie snobs/art critics are just grasping at straws, and there is no value in subject pursuits of evaluation of quality whether it be Food or Art.
This is a disappointingly common perspective amongst tech nerds.
Interpretation/Message B: You can find nuance and subtlety in anything, including Joe Biden photographs. This is a testament to the power of the human mind and personality - that we can identify small minute differences in objects, flavours, and creations, and describe them with specificity. There is genuine beauty in the variety in the world and offhand shallow interactions with them do not adequately permit a full appreciation of the wonders of the universe. It's worth taking the time to find an area to gain an in-depth understanding in in, regardless of what anyone thinks. Yes, even Joe Biden photographs, if that's all it would be.
Lots of TV shows showing "experts" where they blind taste test them between expensive and cheap wine or expensive vs cheap chocolate and blind folded they can not tell the difference.
That is not to say there is no good vs bad wine/chocolate/name your food. But it has nothing to do with price.
Meanwhile, I remember a Mythbusters episode where they tested the myth that if you take cheap vodka and run it through a Brita water filter, it makes it better.
They took a bottle of cheap vodka, took a sample out, filtered the rest, took another sample and set it aside, and re-filtered the remaining vodka, and repeated this 10 times, so that they had a spectrum of vodka samples from filtered zero times to 10 times. They then brought on a vodka expert to taste test them and randomized the order of the samples to see if he could re-order them based on the number of times they went through the filter.
And he did it PERFECTLY.
IIRC, Adam and Jamie could tell the difference after 1 run through the filter, but not further runs.
I've seen a lot of videos that actually show the opposite. Even I as a non-expert over video can clearly see the difference from thousands of miles away.
The problem might just be that the TV shows you watch are so mediocre they can't even get a real expert.
Do they? Can you give an example? Because there's a recurring Epicurious series where an expert tries to determine of two samples which one is cheap and which is expensive. They're not always right but they're right quite often.
This is just your casual periodic reminder that if choosing between two possibilities, you could expect someone to be right about half the time by just guessing.
Yes yes. But the experts are consistently 90 percent plus accurate. Check out the videos! They elucidate their reasoning quite well. It's not hocus pocus
True, although this friend is asian american and likely grew up eating scallion pancakes on at least a few occasions. He seemed almost proud of his lack of taste which really surprised me.
Perhaps your friend was signaling a taste you couldn't perceive. For example, I generally look down upon scallion pancakes as a category.
Consider an American food analogue. Do I distinguish good and bad grilled cheese? How can I when its identity is that of a basic, unhealthy, cheap, low-class food? If you add more exotic ingredients, it becomes distant from its quintessential identity, so it becomes "good" grilled cheese in inverse proportion to it being, actually, grilled cheese. Contrariwise, if you enhance it by further indulging in the fats, oils, salts, etc., can we say this is "better" when it has also become even more base, even more low class? It becomes better as it becomes worse.
I find myself wanting to say something similar to your friend. All the grilled cheese are the same to me. I can plainly see one is different than another, but they are all objects of derision, and they only rise above that derision insofar as they stop being grilled cheese.
Skimming through some recipes I searched, it seems it is mostly all purpose flour and a ton of oil to make it flaky. It seems to be in the "unhealthy" camp assuming carbs and sat fats are unhealthy.
Also in the cheap camp considering the ingredients are cheap and making it does not seem too time or equipment intensive.
I find working with dough to always be complicated, but the recipe itself seems simple enough, so it might qualify as basic too, relative to other recipes.
Low class is ill defined, but assuming it means it is popular with poorer people due to the lower cost of its ingredients and preparation, then it might also be true.
"Basic" is clearly not a useful adjective, when a grilled cheese sandwich can be made with a variety of different ingredients some of which are easily available in most parts of the world, and some are not. Certainly you can make a basic grilled cheese sandwich, but it's a logical fallacy to leap from there to "all grilled cheese sandwiches are basic".
"Low class" is again highly ingredient dependent. A grilled cheese sandwich made with some "rare" sourdough bread, irish grass fed butter and 3 kinds of artisanal cheese from different parts of the world is just as much as grilled cheese sandwich as one made with wonderbread and slices of american "cheese product". It's a similar logical fallacy: just because you can make a "low class grilled cheese" doesn't imply that "all grilled cheese sandwiches are low class".
"Cheap" is also covered in a similar way.
Unhealthy I will generally concede, other than to note that our ideas about what is and is not healthy or unhealthy food shift a lot over time (and often loop back on themselves).
Uhh I can't really understand this argument frankly. You're making a value judgement of grilled cheese as a commodity food but still, if someone put a grilled cheese in front of you that used plain white bread and one that used sourdough, you'd notice the difference, right? Sure you could argue that the sourdough grilled cheese is not a real grilled cheese but in doing so, you are inherently distinguishing the two items, therefore demonstrating taste to a degree.
The argument is that I can distinguish them, but not rank them, because I distinguish them with respect to their essential character. Grilled cheese's essential character is something I view with derision, and its rank increases only by shedding that essential character. Grilled cheese with sourdough bread, or with veggies and barbecued meat, would rank as "better food" precisely because they rank as "worse grilled cheese."
But in "no true Scotsman" there's an assumption that there's an external definition of the Scotsman category that is invariant from the fallacious clause, whereas here the definition of the grilled cheese category is the system under question. Otherwise, I could say "yes, I like grilled cheese, especially when it isn't grilled and contains neither cheese nor bread."
I'd imagine there are still different situations at play here.
For instance, I'm Jewish and my mother made potato latkes one way throughout my childhood. I loved those and various details about them (texture, flavor profile, doneness, etc.) but would go to other friends' house for a meal or whatever and they'd have their own latkes that just didn't taste as good, were much simpler flavor-wise, texture was more homogeneous, etc.
And then of course I've bought frozen pre-made latkes from places like Trader Joe's.
I'd imagine it's like buying frozen gyoza at H-mart vs making your own from scratch with either pre-made wrappers or even homemade ones, plus the filling.
Not everyone/every culture has the same relationship to food as the west. (I personally feel being more utilitarian about food is healthier in the long run). Your friend may be predisposed towards idenitfying quality/craftsmanship/expressing taste in other areas of his life -clothing, grooming, music etc.
Really? I can't claim to have gone everywhere but in all the places I've been, people seem to care about food. What's this supposed place that's opposed to "the west"?
>When compared to pizza, tacos, or bagels, all scallion pancakes are pretty similar.
Bad example, as most pizzas _are_ pretty similar. And in my opinion the best pizzas are not too different from average pizzas. And yes, I had a lot of pizzas in my life, in Naples and elsewhere.
And again I ask, really? Because there's a massive difference between a soft, light Naples pizza that's eaten with a fork and a doughy, thick Dominoes pizza and a crispy, salty New York slice and a chewy, deeply roasted Sicilian pizza. Even in New York which I'd hazard is in the top 5 pizza cities in the world, there's a massive difference between Joes Pizza and Lucali.
I see what you mean now. What I meant is that I like Neapolitan pizza, Domino's Pizza, Pizza Hut, New York pizza... pizza is just really great and it's best when I'm hungry.
What I mean is: when an inexperienced person compares a scallion pancake to a pizza, or compares a scallion pancake to a taco, the two foods are obviously very different. But when an inexperienced person compares a mediocre scallion pancake to a great one, eaten on different days, it may be hard to remember the differences.
Likewise, someone has rarely eaten pizza might consider a good Neapolitan pizza to be broadly similar to a Domino's pizza, whereas someone who has pizza all the time will notice many differences between the two.
This always bothers me specifically about music. I don't claim to have some universal say on what is good and bad music, there is tons of music out there which I think is tasteful but I simply don't like.
But like 10% of music let's say is absolute garbage, mostly top 40 stuff made from cosntructed bands with some models as front men, written by a team constructed by a label to create the most generically likeable music possible, edited to the point where it doesn't matter that the models are bad singers.
This music seems to account for about 90% of global music consumption as far as I can tell. I've been traveling around the world for many years and it get's depressing when you are in some remote jungle somewhere that feels like your finally off the beaten path and you get to some little shack restaurant / bar and they have One Direction on the radio. You can't fucking escape it. I've had times where I was on 3 continents on 3 months and you here the exact same garbage music regardless of location. It's crazy how ubiquitous it is.
And there is so much good music out there. If anything we are in a golden age in terms of volume of quality independent music being produced. And yet a vast majority of people seem to have no problem listening to the bottom of the barrel junk for a majority of the music they listen to.
Part of the answer is that such people aren’t actually listening to the music. They are getting something else out of it, like using it as background noise, or just as a beat to dance to, or as in-group signaling, or maybe access to the culture associated with the music, or perhaps they are self-medicating with it, or maybe they are ogling the performer, or perhaps it reminds them of something positive that happened when they first heard it.
None of these uses require the music to be “good”.
Actively listening to music is a somewhat rare activity.
I don't really buy this. Take modern American pop country. People LOVE that music and it is some of the worst of the lot.
And again I have nothing against the genre. I listen to non pop country. But people are specifically attracted to the worst of it and they seem to very actively like it.
I have a vivid memory of this. I got free tickets to a country music concert, and basically treated it as a party with a twangy soundtrack. It was fun, and I enjoyed myself. While waiting for my ride, I got to talking with a woman who got really offended that I saw it that way - she likened it to a religious experience, and how dare I treat it so flippantly.
I apologized while marveling to myself that something that felt so mediocre and forgettable to me was someone else's reason to exist.
I can readily attest to having no taste in music. So much so that criticism of music (in reviews of albums, etc.) is incomprehensible to me; I tried using good reviews as a way to find music I'd want to listen to but discovered that music only serves one of the above functions (looking for a good beat, or whatever).
I can't tell good music from bad; either I like the way it sounds or I don't.
I suspect a fair number of other people are like this. And more power to people who have good taste in music.
Featuring bagpipes, a rapping opera singer, country music, and a children's choir singing holiday music that ends with telling you to do your shopping at Wal-mart.
"This announcement from the producers of this record contains important information for radio program directors, and is not for broadcast. The first cut on this record has been cross-format-focused for airplay success. As you well know, a record must break on radio in order to actually provide a living for the artists involved. Up until now, you've had to make these record-breaking decisions on your own, relying only on perplexing intangibilities like 'taste' and 'intuition', but now there's a better way. The cut that follows is the product of newly-developed compositional techniques, based on state-of-the-art marketing analysis technology. This cut has been analytically designed to break on radio."
I like to explain my taste in music, by saying it's like taking a shower. At first it's hot, but then you get used to it, and you make it a bit hotter, and a bit hotter. If it were that hot in the beginning I never would have got in, but this is where I am now.
Though in a broader sense, with any creative endeavor the more people that like something, the worse it is.
I think part of it is how much other music you've listened to, and how much you know about music.
For example I watched Shang-Chi the other day, which is basically pop music in film form. As someone who's watched a fair amount of films, it's easy to see how it follows all the usual generic story beats - it's good but formulaic and relatively predictable. But if it was the first film you'd ever seen it would be amazing.
You have films that intentionally subvert expectations, relying on the fact that the audience knows how the story usually goes. That's jazz music. Classical often as well. But that relies on people both knowing the usual tropes and also wanting something different - there's some comfort in the known. Many people just want the superhero film. After all, the simple formula is the most inherently powerful regardless of the audience's internal knowledge of narrative or notation - that's why it's so commonly used.
There's nuances and an art to pop though. Take Ocean's Eleven. It's fundamentally a crowd pleaser movie with a star studded cast, a conventional genre and a happy ending. But it's executed perfectly. Soderbergh has a mastery of the form that shows even when he's making pop. You see this with The Beach Boys or The Beatles or even Ed Sheeran, where the music is superficially enjoyable but there's a depth to it nonetheless. Take Jacob Collier's deconstruction of Stevie Wonder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZP6nogQYPg
Yeah, so the Beatles and The Beach Boys manage to take relatively complex music (chord choices etc) and have it still appeal on a fundamental level, which is much harder than just taking the easy route and following a formula. Often making complex music loses mass appeal (I'd put Jacob Collier in that category), making it less viable commercially than the simple formula approach.
My guess is that the serendipitous combination of high-level artistry + mass appeal + marketing dollars is simply much less common than the combo of "good at basic formula" + marketing dollars. Every now and then something really clever and different makes it into the top 40 just by sheer luck.
Seems like I was wrong above about the simple formula being the most powerful though doesn't it. Maybe a brand new formula can be even more powerful but is just that much harder to execute.
Subverting expectations also has larger downsides. A competently-made movie that just isn't that good is simply a boring movie that looks pretty. A subversion that goes wrong subverts your expectation of watching a good movie with one of watching an incoherent movie.
> written by a team constructed by a label to create the most generically likeable music possible, edited to the point where it doesn't matter that the models are bad singers.
Maybe it is just the case where team of experts created music many people like. People really don't mind generic when serving foods daydreaming or eating. Generic is often better, because it won't break flow of what they are doing.
I also don't buy this one. Modern pop is not meant to be tuned out. It's super loud and aggressive and in your face.
If anything it feels engineered (and I use that term literally) to break your attention and make you focus on it. There tend to be lots of weird and drastic pitch and key changes that are designed to grab interest.
There is tons of music that is better background music than modern pop.
I have a term for it, "Pepla". People who cant taste the difference between Pepsi and Coca Cola. I used to joke about this 10+ years ago. Until there are lots of YouTube video showing people really cant tell the difference.
I find this funny on HN because up to ~2017/18 the mainstream HN view was all these so called "taste" were people being mentally manipulated by advertising. There is no such thing as "taste", as PG's Dad said. And then gradually, somehow, HN changed. We have this [1]
>> Having taste makes you require more dollars to get the same level of satisfaction
I have carefully avoided trying excessively high quality things because once I've experienced something truly luxury then it becomes an ongoing expense to keep up that level of experience. The irritating part is that before I was perfectly happy in my ignorance of something better being available out there, but aftewards I feel like I'm "ruined" because I'm constantly disappointed and frustrated if I can't keep up the level of quality.
There are lots of people who couldn't tell the difference between 120hz screen and 60hz screen. High PPI and low PPI. Prime and Choice Ribeye. French Butter and Margarine. I mean lots of nerds only compare "spec", and fail to recognise there are lots of things beyond spec and numbers.
>One could argue that Steve Jobs was a product supertaster.
And that is why he was the low paying Beta tester and a yardstick of quality. And that was the reason why he was hard to work with. Most people simply dont have his "taste", at least not anywhere near the bar of Steve. And that is why we now have UI design decision devalued into A/B testing. Having an objective measure to prove something. In reality, without people demanding excellence, quality will quickly drift to the average of the team's taste. The results of design by committees.
I would extend that to include behavior. Getting spannered at a frat party is hardly in good taste, whereas a glass too many at afternoon tea is, assuming you're able to limit the effects to a giggle.
Similarly taking a bite of food, then a sip of a drink, and then chewing with a semi -open mouth is in extreme bad taste.
We aren't just the art we wear or aquire. Our tastes position us in a social heireachy.
> My theory is that taste is one quality that separates the academics from the business people. Academia doesn't necessitate a lot of taste. If you have it, great. If you don't have it, no big deal.
This might be true for academics in ancient Greek literature, but certainly isn't true for academics in CS nowadays. If you don't have good taste in research problems that are {important for downstream industry applications, scientifically interesting, tractable}, you won't get anything done, and you won't get published. If anything, the pressure for academics to develop good taste is stronger than for people designing product. You can have a product that provides just one utility that users desperately need and have terrible taste for all the other axes that make a product "good," and do just fine. Academic papers get judged (in peer review / traction after publication) purely against the taste and aesthetics of other people in your community.
This is where an ancient Greek professor butts in and says that you need good taste in ancient Greek, but it's those damn ancient Aramaic professors who don't need good taste.
I'm just kidding. I agree that it's not fair to make such an overarching statement about academics. I guess I was trying to express that I've noticed there's a difference between academic intelligence and taste, and my HN instincts told me that blaming academics would appeal to the crowd :P. More seriously, I think there's certainly a sense of taste in academia, but it's a very particular, very niche taste, as you've described. Someone who is tapped into the taste of the crowd will not be adept at understanding the taste of the few and vice versa.
The skill of distinguishment seems like something that could be learned with practice, or by having better observing tools (e.g. better eyesight, or more taste buds). This is the part that you could, in principle, program a robot to do.
Judging which of two thing is better (aesthetic taste) feels like something quite different.
I used to think that people who said they can't taste the difference between things were just being assholes. Then I got covid, and I lost most of my sense of smell, and my taste was reduced to the basics. Pepsi, and a ripe pear tasted identical to me, other than texture. They were both sweet and kind of sour. It made me think that some of these people might just have trouble tasting, and they don't realize it. Though I still think most of them are being assholes.
I wonder how much of this is physiological and how much is mental. I can't help but think you'd need some sort of color blindness for taste to genuinely not notice any difference between scallion pancakes. But perhaps my friend was exaggerating.
My theory is that taste is one quality that separates the academics from the business people. Academia doesn't necessitate a lot of taste. If you have it, great. If you don't have it, no big deal. On the other hand, stuff such as product design, user interfaces, even software engineering, requires taste. You need to understand what makes a good piece of software or a good product. One could argue that Steve Jobs was a product supertaster. He was finely attuned to stuff that the average user (or the average HN reader) would not see. As PG notes, taste is being attuned to the collective unconsciousness, to a collective aesthetic. If you can tap into that, you can attract customers.