I'm also in the top percentiles of "O" scores and maybe that's why I think this article is absolutely spot on 100% correct on literally everything it says.
As an aside, didn't Scott once expressed a sentiment along the lines of "it's really hard to understand / relate to why people wouldn't want to feel blissfully good all the time"?
When my brain broke I lost the ability to "enjoy" (= want to engage with and get something desirable of) certain kinds of content on certain kinds of topics (chiefly, artistic treatments of atrocity, especially genocidal, but also other mass sufferings like war, famine etc and most body horror too, but also detailed factual descriptions of same), because the price (emotional reaction, lingering and then intrusive thoughts) became tok high. Six years on, it feels like probably THE biggest cost of broken brain. And most people don't understand this. "Well you can't deal with this, just don't engage with such topics/treatments".
But to pivot back to taste. I think OP is correct 100% but misses or ignores the class/signalling aspect that is very important in how "taste" works socially and culturally. I'm not going to launch into a big Bourdieu tangent here, but I think this is an important part in relation to BOTH the "objective" and "arbitrary" aspects and especially their learning.
So I'm going to finish this rambling comment with an example. I'm a middle aged, poor but fairly culturally snobby person who uses big Latin derived words in speech and likes modernist art and architecture (but can't stand Proust). I also mostly dislike so called ultra processed foods and much fast food. But I really like a lot of McDonald's savoury offerings, pretty much everything apart from their chips. And people react to this with (occasionally utter) disbelief.
I think the unifying thing between "taste as a language you learn" and "taste as a made-up set of rules for exclusionary class signaling" is that different modes of speaking languages are regularly used for class signaling.
An important correction about Gehry: The leaks and mold, though not the mazes, are in a limited but real and important sense Not His Fault. If built according to the blueprints, which include only things you are taught how to do in architect school, they do not leak or accumulate mold. Alas for Gehry, though: just because they teach it in architecture school doesn't mean construction crews remember how to execute it correctly. Construction crews are very competent at executing the joints and corners every normal building has, and considerably less competent at doing lots of weird things no one else has asked them for in a decade.
Corollary: If almost all buildings were Gehryesque, it would be the boring rectangles which were full of leaks and mold.
Ooo, but reading bad reviews and loudly trashing art is *so* much fun though.
I guess you could call me a bitter, burned aesthete. I score 67th percentile openness in one longer test, 91th in a shorter one. I'm also super high neuroticism which is probably relevant. And I just... no longer want to tolerate these bad experiences because it makes me more worldly or trendy or whatever? I mostly avoid fiction and non fiction that makes me feel bad now, unless I need a good cry. For every "yes I'm glad I experienced this new thing", there's another disappointment and waste of time (*fuck* rock climbing).
I also find the visceral hatred (almost) many aesthetes have for people who do not have the same tendencies very arrogant and rude. I remember a reddit post from someone who didn't enjoy music, and people went fucking nuts, like how dare this broken defect shell of a human being not enjoy music. Oh really, *your* particular hobby, that you likely never consviously chose, happens to be the most important thing in the history of the world and anyone who doesn't enjoy it is stupid? Okay...
Dance is a funny example. I do misc european folk dancing. It's dances so simple medieval peasants who've drunk beer as their main hydration source instead of water could dance them and have fun. The only reason it attracts high openness people is that it's no longer mainstream in Northern Europe where I am. I find it an extremely pleasant way to turn my brain off.
I love fashion but it's similarly brain off to me. It's more fun that way. And with my limited time on earth, I want to have fun more than I want to have deep.
I enjoyed this post quite a bit, but I still think the basic principle Scott Alexander is talking about applies here. That is, things ordinary people use should be designed in a way ordinary people will like. So we sort of have two axes here: good taste/bad taste and enjoyable/not enjoyable, and different use cases for each quadrant.
Bad taste/not enjoyable: Should not be used.
Bad taste/enjoyable: Okay for everyday things, although not ideal.
Good taste/enjoyable: Awesome, go right ahead and use it everywhere.
Good taste/not enjoyable: Sort of like the lovingly detailed amputee clown porn you were discussing. Put it in a modern art museum? Wonderful. Put it in everybody's house and all public buildings and give them no way to opt out, so that they must look at the very tasteful amputee clown porn from dawn to dusk? Less wonderful. Stop doing this.
Am I a dumbass for liking the picture of the outfit on the right more than the one on the left? If I try to analyze why, I think that I don't like the wrinkles in the jeans on the left and the shade of blue of the jeans is prettier than the black, but clothing and fashion is something I really don't know anything about / have taste in, and for all I know if I saw the outfits in person or at a different angle I might change my mind. Or maybe the model just looks better with a tighter shirt that's tucked in. 🤷♂️
I don't think so! Like I said, I only ~90% agree with Die Workwear. If most people usually prefer the outfits Die Workwear says are good, then that leaves a lot of scope for idiosyncratic responses.
I like the one on the right more too, but that’s probably because I have a bad association with rockers, while business casual people are familiar and comfortable. In retrospect, I can tell that the right one is a poor example of business casual while presumably the left one is a good example of rocker aesthetic.
I agree. I think it's hard to tell for many people if they reject a style or a particular execution of style, and they find it hard to separate the two.
I think most people do. I probably will just about be able to tell bad country and western from good, but put good c&w next to pretty much any genre whatsoever and I'll be so swayed by my fundamental dislike for the c&w aesthetic that the task will get very hard. And 9 out of 10 I'll choose to listen to mediocre other stuff than to the best c&w.
The best analogy I have is sexuality. I can tell a conventionally hot woman from less hot. But I'm 90% heterosexual so I'd ALWAYS choose even a very average dude as more attractive TO ME than the hottest woman in the world. And that will influence my judgment when trying to assess generally.
Also, that particular postmodern building looks terrible to me - visually, it's just a random asymmetric jumble instead of anything interesting, elegant, or otherwise aesthetically pleasing.
Personally I don't see any connection between skinny jeans and rock & roll; if anything, the opposite, baggy jeans and unnecessary chains go with goths, grunge, and rock. The guy on the right, by contrast, is performing Hipster flawlessly, which is good if you like that sort of thing. So I think he's full of shit, really, and making up arguments that don't make internal sense to justify it.
I also prefer the outfit on the right! To me it doesn't look like "failed attempt at maximally generic business casual", it's more like "business casual but also a little bit ~queer" (the outfit *slightly* raises my prior that the guy is gay, but not actually that strongly, it's just, a slightly queer direction of fashion, I guess by being closer to what *women's* business casual is like). I like it more than the left because I like the clean silhouette lines.
this is surprising because while neither fit really screams queer i kind of think the outfit on the left is more queer coded than the one on the right. the outfit on the left features leather pants, a cropped shirt (which i have never seen on a straight guy irl), and jewelry past the point of what most men think are acceptable to wear (the chain around the neck and the watch are ~normal, but peep the stack of ornate, thick metal bracelets and the sparkly, non-understated earrings). on the other hand the one on the right screams to me "type of guy who read r/malefashionadvice for a day and built a capsule wardrobe and then called it a day" (i swear i don't mean this in a derogatory way lol, those guys are great. they just dont strike me as having any real interest in playing the game.)
Okay, first of all: in that image of Red Square, the square doesn't look like a square. For a moment I wondered if it was an awkward camera angle but Googling the painting, it does not look square in most of the images I see online. I feel like that has to be deliberate? My first thought was that it's *meant* to be disconcerting, though maybe it's trying to make the square look alive or something, I don't know.
(N.b. maybe most people don't notice the square isn't a square—I apparently can notice if a room's floor is 1° off from being level, and apparently not everyone can do this.)
Also, I don't hate the outfit Wisdom is wearing on the right? Yeah it's dorky but it's *so* dorky I feel like that has to be deliberate. I looked up who Wisdom is and apparently he's model known for his posting against fashion, which confirms yeah it's deliberate.
I'd be a little cautious about conflating "highbrow" taste with avant-garde/modernist taste in this kind of discussion. Within the relatively small world of people who like "high art", plenty people reject deliberately ugly modernism, especially outside of prose literature*. If you go on a classical music forum you will find plenty people who think Beethoven or even Wagner (who is already challenging to normal ears) are far superior to "modern pop trash", but have the "Emperor's New Clothes" views of deliberately "ugly" modernist music. Plenty serious jazz fans find totally atonal free jazz a bit much. Lots of people who go to art galleries a lot hate weird conceptual art, and some even dislike most abstract paintings. In general, I'd guess *most* people who like highbrow art can point to *some* difficult modernist or postmodernist thing that is highly acclaimed that they personally have the same reaction to that Scott has to brutalism, and where they think at least *many* fans are poseurs who don't *really* like it. This isn't even necessarily a "middle-brow" or "relatively low-brow in highbrow circles phenomenon". The Black conservative jazz critic Stanley Crouch was one of the most distinguished writers about canonical "serious" jazz from the 20s-50s, but disliked most avant-garde stuff. Richard Taruskin was a distinguished enough musicologist that he got to write the entire 4000 pg Oxford History of Western Music by himself, and he was known for his relative skepticism of really avant-garde modernism (though he did like *some* of it). He also thought Tchaikovsky, who classical snobs generally considered the definition of middlebrow midwit, was underrated by "serious" scholars.
*And, Finnegans Wake aside, prose literature modernism tends to have more in common in my experience with before modernism stuff than modernist music or painting do with pre-20th century high art. Proust and pre-Finnegans Wake Joyce are far less "ugly" than Schoenberg or brutalism. Woolf is actually quite florid. All modernist novels still have-at least internal drama, and characterization, comprehensible social and moral and political themes etc., which are what people read 19th-century realism for. In comparison (some) modernist classical music attacks the very basic "grammatical" rules though which musical "sentences" are put together in other Western music.
It's hard for me to judge the Gehry building aesthetically because from the outside it doesn't look usable. I imagine misshaped rooms where stuff and people don't fit. Maybe if you take a wrong turn you end up in a Willy Wonka-esque hallway. If I were sure the building functions well as something other than an art piece then I'd probably enjoy the look. It would be quite impressive actually.
I basically agree. There's a whole language and subculture to things like speculative fiction and prose and you have to learn to appreciate them. And you do gain new experiences, though in retrospect I'm not sure it's worth coming off as 'nonstandard' to everyone else--but that's a decision everyone has to make for themselves, as they may place different value on conformity and earning power.
I hate Brutalism and think it looks ugly, personally, and prefer representational to abstract art, but I'm not that convinced I'm right in an objective sense. Maybe if I studied that stuff I would learn to appreciate it the way I appreciate other things. I just think this stuff is so ugly I'm not interested.
I wonder how much this is all tied up with political coding. I read someone claiming that abstract art was a 'fascist detector', because fascists would reliably go nuts about how much they hated it. Well, I don't like it but it doesn't drive me up the wall either, so I guess it's correctly signaling 'indeterminate' since I am neither fascist nor leftist (which makes me fascist-adjacent according to this person).
And, every time I take one of these Big Five tests, I'm usually at around the 55th-60th percentile in Openness--and yeah, my tastes are a weird mixture of conservative and liberal! Like I like representational art and old buildings, but also Surrealism.
As for the fashion thing--haha! So *that's* what I've been doing wrong all these years.
I'm also in the top percentiles of "O" scores and maybe that's why I think this article is absolutely spot on 100% correct on literally everything it says.
As an aside, didn't Scott once expressed a sentiment along the lines of "it's really hard to understand / relate to why people wouldn't want to feel blissfully good all the time"?
When my brain broke I lost the ability to "enjoy" (= want to engage with and get something desirable of) certain kinds of content on certain kinds of topics (chiefly, artistic treatments of atrocity, especially genocidal, but also other mass sufferings like war, famine etc and most body horror too, but also detailed factual descriptions of same), because the price (emotional reaction, lingering and then intrusive thoughts) became tok high. Six years on, it feels like probably THE biggest cost of broken brain. And most people don't understand this. "Well you can't deal with this, just don't engage with such topics/treatments".
But to pivot back to taste. I think OP is correct 100% but misses or ignores the class/signalling aspect that is very important in how "taste" works socially and culturally. I'm not going to launch into a big Bourdieu tangent here, but I think this is an important part in relation to BOTH the "objective" and "arbitrary" aspects and especially their learning.
So I'm going to finish this rambling comment with an example. I'm a middle aged, poor but fairly culturally snobby person who uses big Latin derived words in speech and likes modernist art and architecture (but can't stand Proust). I also mostly dislike so called ultra processed foods and much fast food. But I really like a lot of McDonald's savoury offerings, pretty much everything apart from their chips. And people react to this with (occasionally utter) disbelief.
Class is a hugely important part of this but I glossed over it because the post is already very long. :)
I think the unifying thing between "taste as a language you learn" and "taste as a made-up set of rules for exclusionary class signaling" is that different modes of speaking languages are regularly used for class signaling.
An important correction about Gehry: The leaks and mold, though not the mazes, are in a limited but real and important sense Not His Fault. If built according to the blueprints, which include only things you are taught how to do in architect school, they do not leak or accumulate mold. Alas for Gehry, though: just because they teach it in architecture school doesn't mean construction crews remember how to execute it correctly. Construction crews are very competent at executing the joints and corners every normal building has, and considerably less competent at doing lots of weird things no one else has asked them for in a decade.
Corollary: If almost all buildings were Gehryesque, it would be the boring rectangles which were full of leaks and mold.
Ooo, but reading bad reviews and loudly trashing art is *so* much fun though.
I guess you could call me a bitter, burned aesthete. I score 67th percentile openness in one longer test, 91th in a shorter one. I'm also super high neuroticism which is probably relevant. And I just... no longer want to tolerate these bad experiences because it makes me more worldly or trendy or whatever? I mostly avoid fiction and non fiction that makes me feel bad now, unless I need a good cry. For every "yes I'm glad I experienced this new thing", there's another disappointment and waste of time (*fuck* rock climbing).
I also find the visceral hatred (almost) many aesthetes have for people who do not have the same tendencies very arrogant and rude. I remember a reddit post from someone who didn't enjoy music, and people went fucking nuts, like how dare this broken defect shell of a human being not enjoy music. Oh really, *your* particular hobby, that you likely never consviously chose, happens to be the most important thing in the history of the world and anyone who doesn't enjoy it is stupid? Okay...
Dance is a funny example. I do misc european folk dancing. It's dances so simple medieval peasants who've drunk beer as their main hydration source instead of water could dance them and have fun. The only reason it attracts high openness people is that it's no longer mainstream in Northern Europe where I am. I find it an extremely pleasant way to turn my brain off.
I love fashion but it's similarly brain off to me. It's more fun that way. And with my limited time on earth, I want to have fun more than I want to have deep.
I enjoyed this post quite a bit, but I still think the basic principle Scott Alexander is talking about applies here. That is, things ordinary people use should be designed in a way ordinary people will like. So we sort of have two axes here: good taste/bad taste and enjoyable/not enjoyable, and different use cases for each quadrant.
Bad taste/not enjoyable: Should not be used.
Bad taste/enjoyable: Okay for everyday things, although not ideal.
Good taste/enjoyable: Awesome, go right ahead and use it everywhere.
Good taste/not enjoyable: Sort of like the lovingly detailed amputee clown porn you were discussing. Put it in a modern art museum? Wonderful. Put it in everybody's house and all public buildings and give them no way to opt out, so that they must look at the very tasteful amputee clown porn from dawn to dusk? Less wonderful. Stop doing this.
the way I think of it is like if the graphic designer of the new york times made all of the text wingdings to make an artistic statement.
Am I a dumbass for liking the picture of the outfit on the right more than the one on the left? If I try to analyze why, I think that I don't like the wrinkles in the jeans on the left and the shade of blue of the jeans is prettier than the black, but clothing and fashion is something I really don't know anything about / have taste in, and for all I know if I saw the outfits in person or at a different angle I might change my mind. Or maybe the model just looks better with a tighter shirt that's tucked in. 🤷♂️
I don't think so! Like I said, I only ~90% agree with Die Workwear. If most people usually prefer the outfits Die Workwear says are good, then that leaves a lot of scope for idiosyncratic responses.
I like the one on the right more too, but that’s probably because I have a bad association with rockers, while business casual people are familiar and comfortable. In retrospect, I can tell that the right one is a poor example of business casual while presumably the left one is a good example of rocker aesthetic.
I agree. I think it's hard to tell for many people if they reject a style or a particular execution of style, and they find it hard to separate the two.
I think most people do. I probably will just about be able to tell bad country and western from good, but put good c&w next to pretty much any genre whatsoever and I'll be so swayed by my fundamental dislike for the c&w aesthetic that the task will get very hard. And 9 out of 10 I'll choose to listen to mediocre other stuff than to the best c&w.
The best analogy I have is sexuality. I can tell a conventionally hot woman from less hot. But I'm 90% heterosexual so I'd ALWAYS choose even a very average dude as more attractive TO ME than the hottest woman in the world. And that will influence my judgment when trying to assess generally.
Also, that particular postmodern building looks terrible to me - visually, it's just a random asymmetric jumble instead of anything interesting, elegant, or otherwise aesthetically pleasing.
Personally I don't see any connection between skinny jeans and rock & roll; if anything, the opposite, baggy jeans and unnecessary chains go with goths, grunge, and rock. The guy on the right, by contrast, is performing Hipster flawlessly, which is good if you like that sort of thing. So I think he's full of shit, really, and making up arguments that don't make internal sense to justify it.
I also prefer the outfit on the right! To me it doesn't look like "failed attempt at maximally generic business casual", it's more like "business casual but also a little bit ~queer" (the outfit *slightly* raises my prior that the guy is gay, but not actually that strongly, it's just, a slightly queer direction of fashion, I guess by being closer to what *women's* business casual is like). I like it more than the left because I like the clean silhouette lines.
this is surprising because while neither fit really screams queer i kind of think the outfit on the left is more queer coded than the one on the right. the outfit on the left features leather pants, a cropped shirt (which i have never seen on a straight guy irl), and jewelry past the point of what most men think are acceptable to wear (the chain around the neck and the watch are ~normal, but peep the stack of ornate, thick metal bracelets and the sparkly, non-understated earrings). on the other hand the one on the right screams to me "type of guy who read r/malefashionadvice for a day and built a capsule wardrobe and then called it a day" (i swear i don't mean this in a derogatory way lol, those guys are great. they just dont strike me as having any real interest in playing the game.)
Okay, first of all: in that image of Red Square, the square doesn't look like a square. For a moment I wondered if it was an awkward camera angle but Googling the painting, it does not look square in most of the images I see online. I feel like that has to be deliberate? My first thought was that it's *meant* to be disconcerting, though maybe it's trying to make the square look alive or something, I don't know.
(N.b. maybe most people don't notice the square isn't a square—I apparently can notice if a room's floor is 1° off from being level, and apparently not everyone can do this.)
Also, I don't hate the outfit Wisdom is wearing on the right? Yeah it's dorky but it's *so* dorky I feel like that has to be deliberate. I looked up who Wisdom is and apparently he's model known for his posting against fashion, which confirms yeah it's deliberate.
I also immediately noticed that it isn't a square and that consumed the bulk of my attention. I did think it was a nice shade of red though.
I have no idea why I wrote "against fashion" when I meant "about fashion".
I would recommend https://practicaltypography.com/ to anyone interested in learning about typography. (Or https://typographyforlawyers.com/ by the same author, if the title sounds more appropriate for your needs.)
I'd be a little cautious about conflating "highbrow" taste with avant-garde/modernist taste in this kind of discussion. Within the relatively small world of people who like "high art", plenty people reject deliberately ugly modernism, especially outside of prose literature*. If you go on a classical music forum you will find plenty people who think Beethoven or even Wagner (who is already challenging to normal ears) are far superior to "modern pop trash", but have the "Emperor's New Clothes" views of deliberately "ugly" modernist music. Plenty serious jazz fans find totally atonal free jazz a bit much. Lots of people who go to art galleries a lot hate weird conceptual art, and some even dislike most abstract paintings. In general, I'd guess *most* people who like highbrow art can point to *some* difficult modernist or postmodernist thing that is highly acclaimed that they personally have the same reaction to that Scott has to brutalism, and where they think at least *many* fans are poseurs who don't *really* like it. This isn't even necessarily a "middle-brow" or "relatively low-brow in highbrow circles phenomenon". The Black conservative jazz critic Stanley Crouch was one of the most distinguished writers about canonical "serious" jazz from the 20s-50s, but disliked most avant-garde stuff. Richard Taruskin was a distinguished enough musicologist that he got to write the entire 4000 pg Oxford History of Western Music by himself, and he was known for his relative skepticism of really avant-garde modernism (though he did like *some* of it). He also thought Tchaikovsky, who classical snobs generally considered the definition of middlebrow midwit, was underrated by "serious" scholars.
*And, Finnegans Wake aside, prose literature modernism tends to have more in common in my experience with before modernism stuff than modernist music or painting do with pre-20th century high art. Proust and pre-Finnegans Wake Joyce are far less "ugly" than Schoenberg or brutalism. Woolf is actually quite florid. All modernist novels still have-at least internal drama, and characterization, comprehensible social and moral and political themes etc., which are what people read 19th-century realism for. In comparison (some) modernist classical music attacks the very basic "grammatical" rules though which musical "sentences" are put together in other Western music.
It's hard for me to judge the Gehry building aesthetically because from the outside it doesn't look usable. I imagine misshaped rooms where stuff and people don't fit. Maybe if you take a wrong turn you end up in a Willy Wonka-esque hallway. If I were sure the building functions well as something other than an art piece then I'd probably enjoy the look. It would be quite impressive actually.
I basically agree. There's a whole language and subculture to things like speculative fiction and prose and you have to learn to appreciate them. And you do gain new experiences, though in retrospect I'm not sure it's worth coming off as 'nonstandard' to everyone else--but that's a decision everyone has to make for themselves, as they may place different value on conformity and earning power.
I hate Brutalism and think it looks ugly, personally, and prefer representational to abstract art, but I'm not that convinced I'm right in an objective sense. Maybe if I studied that stuff I would learn to appreciate it the way I appreciate other things. I just think this stuff is so ugly I'm not interested.
I wonder how much this is all tied up with political coding. I read someone claiming that abstract art was a 'fascist detector', because fascists would reliably go nuts about how much they hated it. Well, I don't like it but it doesn't drive me up the wall either, so I guess it's correctly signaling 'indeterminate' since I am neither fascist nor leftist (which makes me fascist-adjacent according to this person).
And, every time I take one of these Big Five tests, I'm usually at around the 55th-60th percentile in Openness--and yeah, my tastes are a weird mixture of conservative and liberal! Like I like representational art and old buildings, but also Surrealism.
As for the fashion thing--haha! So *that's* what I've been doing wrong all these years.
Loved this - if people haven’t seen it, I recommend Contrapoints’ video on the topic: https://youtu.be/jD-PbF3ywGo?si=Gn1pKjUgeg4qxvyX