The Tyranny of Taste

We like to talk a lot about privilege in America, and for good reason. Even though America is a land of incredible opportunity and prosperity, it’s also a place with high inequality of outcomes and a dark backstory. In some ways inequality can be seen as a good thing; a higher standard deviation in economic prosperity compared to somewhere like Europe could be a product of our innovation and dynamism. Nevertheless our higher highs than the social democracies come with lower lows. Many Americans don’t have intact families, stable housing situations, access to nutritious food, quality education, quality healthcare, or positive role models from a very young age. This does not deterministically guarantee a negative course for their life, but it feels like a strong current pushing against their future potential that they will have to swim many times harder to overcome.

And yet, often you will get two kids from the same relative economic circumstances, with supportive families and in good health, and they end up in wildly different economic tiers as adults. One will be making six figures in tech and the other will flunk out of college and scrape by doing low-skill labor. What could cause such divergent destinies as this? I suspect there are additional forms of privilege that we are not regularly considering that could better explain this gap.

Firstly: genetics. There’s not a lot as a society that we can do about those at this point so they’re not really worth lingering on, but obviously they contribute a lot to the variance between individuals and I have to at least mention it. Some of us must bear the burden of unearned beauty and intelligence and athleticism and that’s just the way it is. Life isn’t fair.

What I’m more interested in is the role that taste plays in shaping our experiences and competencies. Some taste likely has a genetic component and could be thought of as immutable. Humans tend to have a pretty strong preference against eating feces, for what should hopefully be crystal clear reasons of evolutionary fitness. For some strange reason we also see humans that lack that highly useful disgust reaction and suffer the lifelong consequences of being a coprophage. But most tastes are learned rather than innate. If they truly are an important form of privilege that you can influence in other individuals, it might be useful to understand how it works so you can leverage it to the advantage of you and your loved ones.

Preference Privilege

When I was in college I liked helping people with their homework. It probably has something to do with my top love language being acts of service. In the Computer Science major at BYU you had a couple of classes early on that served as “weeders”: deliberately difficult curricula that would convince large numbers of students to voluntarily drop the major. This design allowed the major to stay open enrollment instead of gating the university’s CS resources behind an arduous and potentially poorly calibrated application process.

Whenever I was helping someone with their homework, I felt like I could tell if they were going to wash out of the major. Even if they stuck it out to the end and graduated it seemed like these certain individuals wouldn’t have any incredible career in the industry. There was something impure to their motivation, because they didn’t seem to enjoy CS very much. Maybe they were in the major because of familial pressure, or choosing it arbitrarily, or worst of all: greed. Not everyone has a taste for STEM, but everyone likes money.

The poor souls didn’t have the sauce. “The sauce” is zoomer-speak for the je ne sais quoi necessary to succeed in some domain. E.g. lots of young people want to be YouTubers, very few of them actually have the charisma and discipline (aka the sauce) to make it a career. In my CS program, those that lacked the sauce simply could not wrap their head around pointers, the memory model, control flow, etc. Without a handle on these very foundational concepts, they struggled to glue them together to synthesize higher level constructs like data structures or algorithms. It was very naughty and fatalistic of me but sometimes I felt like telling them to give up now and avoid wasting a semester or more of pain just to discover the frontier where their understanding completely broke down.

My diagnoses were not always right. Sometimes they pulled themselves together and thugged their way through to the same degree as me. But the whole time they seemed terribly miserable while I on the other hand was having a lot of fun. I’m not a generational talent at programming or anything, but I find it engaging and pleasurable (to the point where I was using my very limited free time to help other people with their programming). While it perhaps required a similar amount of intellectual effort from me as it did them to complete a large lab assignment, my motivation to do so was through the roof. I needed zero discipline and spent zero willpower to sit down and do big programming assignments. It didn’t really seem fair for their chances in the major if they had to cajole themself to sit down and lock in while I could treat homework the same as I would watching Netflix.

And then you had the legions of humanities majors who would treat you like some sort of genius for being in a STEM major at all, and would go “oh I could never do that” if you ever suggested STEM as a more profitable route for them to take. I feel nothing but pity for people who go into student debt, emerge with a BA, and discover that they’ve been had. Their entire high school propagandization about tertiary education being the key to social mobility neglected to mention that getting a BA could just as easily leave you with nothing more than generational debt and a pat on the back. Quoth the last psychiatrist:

I don’t want to come too hard for the humanities majors in my microscopic audience… but you’re likely not supporting a family on your income (and if you are, it’s probably doing a job that doesn’t require your specific degree). If you manage to have a comfortable life nevertheless, it might be because somebody without a BA (maybe with a BS) is supporting you, and you have to face the music that your degree is what we call a luxury good.

For those BAs who manage to marry a STEM-head/professional, or have rich parents, or switch into a more profitable career track, or even make it into the tiny number of good jobs in media/publishing/academia: I have nothing but appreciation and respect for you. I think our country would be much lamer if all the liberal institutions turned into trade schools and we slowly lost our cultural pursuits in favor of raw capitalistic calculus. I want the fields of history and music and literature to continue advancing just as healthily as the fields of biotech and materials science and software.

But for those BAs who tell me “oh I could never do that” and then end up struggling to make ends meet… Deep in my heart I just wish you could do what I do and we could all pay our bills and be happy college grads and nobody would need to feel like they got scammed. At the end of the day, this divide comes down to taste. I am not more galaxy-brained for choosing a more viable major, I was merely lucky enough to enjoy something that our current market rewards. And if that’s not privilege, I don’t know what is.

And it’s not just your preference for a major that is economically rewarded. If you are a morning person, on average you’ll make more money than a night owl. If you like big cities, you’ll likely get paid more for the same type of job than you would in the hinterlands. If you don’t like fast food, you’ll probably live longer. The modern environment is profoundly optimized toward a certain type of person, and some people are just already that person. And it’s not like this exact set of characteristics is an eternal maximum either—only a couple millennia ago the wealthiest personality type was the strong charismatic leader who could more effectively wage war and cow his subjects than anyone else.

Scott Alexander calls this unfortunate state of affairs the Lottery of Fascinations. He explores what is rewarded socially, which is a whole can of worms that we’ll get into later. Gwern brings up that being considered the pinnacle of some field is often winning a triple lottery: raw talent (genetics), relentless passion (taste), and environmental luck (classic forms of privilege). Small variations can wildly dislodge somebody’s lottery chances so extremely that they may be perfectly suited to being the top speedrunner in a video game but would never accomplish anything of note in a “more productive” field.

In other words, talent and intelligence are not some fungible quantity that can transfer between domains. Worst of all, your tastes don’t necessarily line up with your talents. Some new-agey postwar Japanese writers explored this quest for winning the triple lottery—actually a quadruple lottery, they also consider “what the world needs” to be a valuable thing to seek—in the concept of ikigai.

Does every single human have an ikigai? I can’t say with too much confidence one way or the other, but my heart tells me yes. There are just too many possibilities out there for someone to reach a complete dead end. Nevertheless, if you’re not hungry and not willing to pay the price, you’ll most likely end up at a local maximum somewhere in the Profession zone. Pragmatically, I say you should prefer a Profession to a Passion. You really start dragging down other people’s dreams when you can’t provide for yourself and they have to pick up the slack.¹

What is there to be done about this tyranny of taste? Well, you can try to find your ikigai. You could also try to form your ikigai. But before we unpack that, we’ve got to explore the social side of this.

Highbrow Middlebrow Knees and Toes

If you want to understand the social dimension of taste, there’s no better voice to listen to than Bordieu. But if you don’t have time to ingest a bunch of dense academic prose, Dynomight has a highly accessible three part series decomposing and analyzing Bordeiu’s core theses. Still too much for you? Well then you’ll have to take my word for it that the gist is just that the struggle for cultural capital is a proxy struggle for normal capital.

Class lines were historically drawn and reinforced by the ruling class to insulate themselves against social mobility. For all of pre-industrial history a nation’s wealth was essentially zero sum (barring conquest or colonization), and so upward social mobility also implied downward social mobility for the upper classes. To create an uncrossable gulf between the ruling class and the poors, the concept of “good taste” was manufactured (unconsciously, it wasn’t like a conspiracy or anything).

Now in the modern era, in liberal societies, taste is having a weird moment. We’re basically all literate and numerate, we all have access to the same mass media, we can all eat the same exotic fruits and spices from our local supermarket. The upper classes have responded to this violent material disarticulation by clinging onto whatever slivers of inaccessibility they can and throwing up decoys to throw the proles off the scent. By slivers I mean foie gras/film festivals/the Ivies/good plastic surgery, and by decoys I mean Gucci/the Eiffel Tower/consumer electronics/regular plastic surgery.

From time to time we all have unkind thoughts, aimed both at those with higher and lower status tastes than us: “Everyone more mainstream than I is a philistine that lacks an inner monologue. Everyone more fringe than I is pretentious dork who tries too hard.” Even as you learn about taste and grow a meta-awareness of the whole game, it’s so difficult to stop experiencing your own tastes as completely authentic. No matter how hard I try, I can’t stop myself from feeling like Marvel movies are lame pop slop and euphemistic grayscale French movies are snoozers whose only purpose is to signal their viewer’s erudition.

I know how frustrating it feels to be middlebrow. Have you ever been on rateyourmusic or /mu/ (the music section of the accursed imageboard that I shall not link to)? Or listened to an Anthony Fantano review? Those are people with true enthusiasm for music and many more listening hours than me, but when you peek into their top albums you’ll find cacophonous noise. It makes me quiver with rage to think they look down their nose at me when my playlists sound NICER.

I also know how good it feels to be highbrow. I’ve mostly read classic literature in my adulthood, and I genuinely enjoy it (well, most of the time. Looking at you Wuthering Heights…). I am of the opinion that an overwhelming amount of literature (like, 99.999999%) written in the 21st century is an entirely unedifying waste of time. That’s true of the other centuries as well, but the advantage they have is there’s a selection pressure of the succeeding centuries filtering for the best and most timeless works. You could say I’ve mostly bought Gwern’s 100 Apples in a Barrel argument that there’s just way too much new media being wastefully created and the simplest and most effective heuristic to maximize the average quality of media you consume is to simply stick to enduring classics i.e. old books they make you read in school.²

I am very aware of the prestige afforded me for reading the Western Canon. There’s this cool little thing I can get away with in conversations where I make comparisons to plot points and characters in classic novels. If somebody tried to pull that move on you with something slightly more genre and obscure—for instance, saying “Your problem reminds me a lot of Boruto’s³ situation…” and then forcing you to sit through an explanation of an anime’s plot—you’d be ticked off. But if I say “Your problem reminds me of Raskolnikov’s situation…” and you go “Who?” and I go “You know, the protagonist of Crime and Punishment” then instead of getting mad at me you get mad at yourself for not having read the important high-status classic novel. I have genre interests as well (I love high fantasy like Wheel of Time), I just don’t bring them up around polite company. But classic novels? I feel unlimited license to allude to it around anybody and everybody.

On my first date with my future wife I quoted Shakespeare’s Leonato⁴:

I don’t remember the point I was making with the quote, something about intellectualizing colliding with the harsh realities of life, but it impressed her so much that she wrote it down in her journal (not the quote itself, just the fact that I had quoted Shakespeare) and then subsequently married me. Now let us pour one out for the poor fellows afflicted instead with a burning passion for model trains.

Remember that this is a stupid unsourced graph from TikTok that is definitely completely made up

So there are economic rewards for certain tastes and there are social rewards for certain tastes. These social rewards can—under the right circumstances—be cashed out into economic rewards, because of the previously discussed conspiracy between wealth and cultural capital. It seems like taste is… pretty important! Now that we have been made aware of this phenomenon, can we take advantage of it?

Mind Cultivation

I propose introducing an additional variable to your subconscious ranking algorithms when searching for new media: its interaction with the real world. Currently, you’re likely just considering how much you anticipate you’ll like some work (book, movie, show, song) when you endeavor to consume it. Instead, weight this against how it will affect you to be someone who has consumed it. The most obvious example of a situation where you might want to optimize for real world effects over pure enjoyment is when you want to connect with people over it. It’s why I watched Survivor with my wife, it’s why I read a truly bottom of the barrel Jane Austen-lite in high school (a girl I liked told me it was her favorite book), and it’s why people spend more time on their show’s subreddit than actually watching the show. It’s really quite beautiful how media can unite us after all the ways that it divides us.

Letting this new variable guide your decision making can help you consciously craft advantageous tastes. I’ve heard it said (without citation) that women do this all the time when they get fully invested in a man, pretending to care about his passions until they somehow start actually caring. I’ve watched my wife try to do this with the 49ers so she can connect with her family of crazy 49ers fans (we also live in a city of crazy 49ers fans). Maybe I did the same with classical literature because I wanted to be seen visibly reading an unabridged copy of the Count of Monte Cristo in 6th grade even though Ranger’s Apprentice was more entertaining to me (at least at the time, now I think Ranger’s Apprentice is doubleplusungood and anybody reading it in their twenties needs to ban themselves from the YA section of their library).

I’m currently trying to cultivate my taste in classical music. My sister has a Master’s degree in music (if you’re reading this, sorry about that earlier section on the humanities) and runs circles around me whenever composers and styles come up. My project is still ongoing, but it has been really fun so far to dive into this unfathomably deep reservoir of human expression. I now know what a cantata is (a choral arrangement conventionally of a scripture with an instrumental accompaniment), I know why Bach made so many of them (his day job was cranking them out every week for mass), I even had a genuine spiritual experience that moved me to tears the first time I heard Sederunt princpes by Pérotin, overwhelmed by a wave of otherworldly sound composed over a thousand years ago. Not only is my world more richly colored for doing this, but I can now farm free aura by casually letting slip my familiarity with the stylings of Hildegard Von Bingen. I still have a long ways to go before I can hold my own with somebody who actually knows what they’re talking about. A similar survey of something like anime would not bear such fruit, barring the local status boost of being “the guy that knows all the animes” in a niche anime enthusiast community.

If you are a parent of a young child, the opportunity is before you to give your kid some useful tastes with very little effort on their part. Visibly presenting as a person who enjoys high status things, even if it’s an act, will surely pass something down through cultural mimesis. That isn’t to say it’s a good idea—the cost of living inauthentically probably outweighs whatever marginal benefit your kid stands to gain from having high status tastes. But maybe if you could engage in some taste cultivation along with you child where you both learn to appreciate the classics… you might turn your home into a cool little esthete factory. Just an idea.

So that is my challenge to you: if you have even the least bit of interest in something classical, haute, vogue, etc. just take the plunge and see if you can’t spark a real passion for it. The upsides of such an effort certainly outweigh the downsides (except perhaps in the really resource intensive domains like fine dining). Similarly, if you are young and have a morsel of interest in something demonstrably economically viable like idk plumbing then just try to give it some air to breathe and see if something beautiful grows out of it.

Post Scriptum: Content

My analysis focused on pre-digital media: books, movies, music, food, fashion. One reason is that they have been around long enough to have a classical tradition in the first place, but another is that many of the forms of media that have arisen on the internet under the umbrella of “content”: videos, blogs, tweets, etc. are ephemeral in nature. They don’t have a long shelf life because they don’t take long to consume and don’t take long to forget, and there are just so many of them that they get buried in the pile (and sometimes the vicissitudes of link rot and platform collapse means they are randomly lost forever). A third important reason is that the algorithm has eroded the monoculture that produced the consensus classics in the first place, such that one man’s load bearing tweet is another man’s cringe.

I think the takeaway from this is unless you are trying to appeal specifically to a memey type of person, internet culture/content are by and large an anchor around your neck. It’s too balkanized and shifts too quickly to pay off with many real world benefits. But those zoomers who are indeed memesters will sure appreciate it when you nonchalantly mention that they have the sauce. And apparently Gen Alpha will think it’s funny if you say the number 67. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know either.