We often don't like what we say we like. We come to enjoy things we thought we hated and we are poor at predicting what we will possibly like.
We can't articulate the reasons we prefer one thing over another. We often decide we like something without cause or like something that was subtly suggested.

We don't know what we like

Self Improvement

Any action that entails a choice also entails a preference, for example, what to read, what to wear. We try to find work we like, entertainment we like, people we like.
Behind every preference is a combination of inputs including reasons, hunches, bodily needs, past experiences, unconscious desires, social pressures, and price point.

Choice and preference

<ul>
<li>Online marketing strategies have become very sophisticated. The Internet uses a huge amount of data collected from clicks to produce a taste fingerprint for every consumer that uses a Web site or app. </li>
<li>Customer reviewing is lay expertise and not trustworthy. We often find ourselves identifying with one-star hotheads. We want to know if things go wrong, how bad it will be. High number ratings may reflect &quot;positivity bias.&quot;</li>
</ul>

Taste today is a big business

With the Internet, we do not see reality. We&#39;re seeing what the algorithms want us to see. We spend half our days in the digital mall without borders doing work and errands. 
Digitalization promises to absorb existing technologies, from paper and vinyl to maps, newspapers, cameras, telephones, and lecture halls. With it comes some loss—the three-dimensionality of certain experiences, e.g., acoustic, theatrical, and the palpable such as a book.

The Internet does not produce reality

The Internet won&#39;t replace everything, and one day something else will replace the Internet. Then we will all be used to it, and we will miss it when it&#39;s gone.
If taste were not easily changeable and people only liked what they have always liked, we could never develop a taste for something else,

Changing tastes allow for progression

Two factors that influence our taste are social consensus and familiarity. We need time and help to appreciate a work of art. 
Art appreciation develops in the same way as other tastes. One person will comment on liking something, and a consensus builds that it is worth liking. Aesthetic appreciation is then supposed to be learned and shared.

Aesthetic appreciation is learned

Louis Menand on “You May Also Like,” by Tom Vanderbilt, and “Magic and Loss,” by Virginia Heffernan.

The subject of Tom Vanderbilt’s “You May Also Like” (Knopf) is taste, the term he uses for whatever it is that guides our preference for chocolate over vanilla, taupe over beige, “The Bourne Supremacy ” over “The Bourne Ultimatum,” and Artur Schnabel and Joseph Szigeti’s recording of Beethoven’s tenth violin sonata over Vladimir Ashkenazy and Itzhak Perlman’s rendering of the same work. Vanderbilt’s widely admired previous book, “Traffic,” examined a dangerous and complex activity that people pay about as much attention to while they’re doing it as they do to washing the dishes: driving a car. Making sense of driving was tough. Not nearly as tough, however, as taste.

Vanderbilt’s premise is: “We are strangers to our tastes.” He doesn’t mean that we don’t really like what we say we like. He means that we don’t know why. Our intuition that tastes are intuitive, that they are just “our tastes,” and spring from our own personal genome, has been disproved repeatedly by psychologists and market researchers. But where tastes do come from is extremely difficult to pin down. Taste is not congenital: we don’t inherit it. And it’s not consistent. We come to like things we thought we hated (or actually did hate), and we are very poor predictors of what we are likely to like in the future.

We have trouble articulating the reasons that we prefer the Schnabel to the Ashkenazy, or decide on the locally foraged fresh spring porcini mushrooms with roasted Sebastopol peaches, almonds, and crispy tempura—no, wait!, I’ll have the gâteau of Hudson Valley Moulard duck foie gras with roasted Chioggia beets, Brooks cherries, and Sicilian pistachios served with toasted brioche (thirty-dollar supplement). Just don’t ask me why.

Maybe “toasted” trumped “foraged.” Likes and dislikes can be triggered by random associations and can form in a split second. We make choices before we’ve had time to weigh the options. Vanderbilt tells us that the median amount of time spent looking at a work of art at the Met is seventeen seconds. Shopping for clothes, we say, “Oh, I love that!” before we have the first coherent idea about what it is that makes us love it.

And we are ridiculously, pathetically, embarrassingly suggestible. Cues that are barely liminal affect our preferences (which is why advertisers pay for product placement in films and TV shows). So do the choices we observe others making, the “I’ll have what she’s having” syndrome. We are also self-suggestible. “We seem to have a preference that we prefer our preference,” as Vanderbilt puts it. “There is a greater chance we will like something when we expect we are going to like it.” He calls this “a virtual law of liking.”

Vanderbilt is an intelligent writer, and there is a lot of interesting material in “You May Also Like,” but he has dived into a fathomless sea. He opens with an epigraph from Nietzsche, “All of life is a dispute over taste,” which pretty much sums up the problem. What does not, on some level, involve taste? Most of a day’s idle conversation is a sequence of thumbs-up, thumbs-down assertions expressed with varying degrees of sincerity and conviction. “Nice weather we’re having.” “I love your new haircut.” “This coffee is suboptimal.” “These are the best Sebastopol peaches I have ever eaten outside Sebastopol.” We don’t put a lot of thought into these judgments. They’re virtually automatic. Everything we experience gets an emoji.

And any action that entails a choice also entails a preference—what to read, what to wear, which brand of superglue to buy. Vanderbilt cites a researcher who estimates that people typically make two hundred food decisions a day. We try to find work we like, entertainment we like, people we like, shoes we like, political candidates we like. We want to sit at the best table, take the most scenic route, watch the funniest late-night talk show. Finally, there are what we think of as higher-order preferences, the astute critical appraisals we come up with when discussing the latest Don DeLillo novel or the new production of “Elektra.”

Understanding how traffic works is made exponentially more complicated by the fact that it’s not just one person who is barely paying attention; all the drivers on the road are barely paying attention, and they’re also reacting to each other. The same is true of taste. The reason stuff you don’t like is out there is that other people do like it. The continuously shifting array of “like” arrows emanating from you is reproduced billions of times across the planet and configured differently each time. Vanderbilt points out that someone who says, “I don’t want Thai food. I had some yesterday,” is forgetting that in Thailand people eat Thai food every day.

You can aggregate tastes, but only so far. Once you start lumping—once you declare that all x prefer y —you create the condition for splitting, since there will always be at least one x who is determined to stand apart from the herd. “Tastes can change when people aspire to be different from other people,” Vanderbilt says. “They can change when we are trying to be like other people.” Somewhere in America, there is a college professor who will never buy a Prius. The outlier is not extraneous to the type; the outlier is essential to the type. The outlier marks a boundary. Tastes are, by definition, things not universally shared.

In short, tastes are overdetermined, the upshot of many influences, and underdetermined, susceptible to change at, for example, the sight of the word “toasted.” Some combination of inputs including, but not limited to, reasons, hunches, bodily needs, past experiences, unconscious desires, social pressures, mystic chords of memory, and price point is behind every preference; they are weighted differently in almost every case; and they are highly malleable. It takes very little for me to swap out the porcini mushrooms for the duck foie gras, but it takes something , and trying to nail down that something plunges us into an infinite regress of reasons and reasons for reasons. We are in the flux, the very je ne sais quoi of existence. You might as well try to write a book about thought. As Nietzsche suggested, you might as well try to write a book about life.

Vanderbilt is intrepid; he is also fair. He desperately wants to find a non-circular account of preferences, something better than “People like this kind of thing because this is the kind of thing that they—or people around them, or people who are supposed to know—like,” but he has to admit defeat. There is no place outside the swirling galaxy of taste formation on which to rest a philosophical lever. “Taste is like traffic, actually,” he acknowledges, “a large complex system with basic parameters and rules, a noisy feedback chamber where one does what others do and vice versa, in a way that is almost impossible to predict beyond that at the end of the day a certain number of cars will travel down a stretch of road, just as a certain number of new songs will be in the Hot 100.”

Vanderbilt is not afraid to get into the theoretical thickets with Kant and Hume and Pierre Bourdieu, but he is much more interested in the practical side of the business. For taste today is a big business. The science of preferences dates back to the origins of the advertising and public-relations industries, but the Internet has provided it with a vast new field of operations. Compared with television, which basically had advertisers throwing tomatoes at barns labelled, for example, “Women eighteen to thirty-four,” the Internet is a precision instrument—as we all know from the lists, ads, and pop-ups on our screens that seem to know who we are and what we might be of a mind to pay for.

And they do know, sort of. Vanderbilt talked to a number of people whose job is to come up with the algorithms, derived from the staggering amount of data collected from clicks, that produce a taste fingerprint for every consumer using a Web site or an app. He finds that, in the past several years, online marketing strategies have become extremely sophisticated.

With television, even after we purchased the Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes or Popeil’s Pocket Fisherman or whatever product was sponsoring our show, we kept seeing commercials for it. That was a waste of our time and, much more important, of the advertiser’s dollars. Algorithms aren’t supposed to generate recommendations for products we’ve already bought (though we still see a lot of these). They also aren’t supposed to recommend products simply because millions of people have bought them. Netflix once made this mistake, which is why you were constantly being invited to watch “The Shawshank Redemption” (and probably did a few times before catching on to the game). Pandora can’t have “I Got You Babe” turning up on every playlist.

Netflix learned, further, that recommendations shouldn’t be based on what viewers say they watch, since people over-report the number of foreign films and documentaries they claim to enjoy after a delicious foie gras paired with a fun little Riesling. So the company now tries to figure out what we want to watch based on what we actually have watched. And not only does Netflix know what we have watched; it knows whether we watched the whole thing, and, if we didn’t, exactly where we stopped. Pandora works similarly. It’s like having a personal shopper with psychic powers whom you cannot replace.

Vanderbilt also looked into the Internet spectacle known as “customer reviews.” This is, let’s face it, an open sewer. Once, when venturing out to buy a much needed tube of superglue, we went into the store, eyeballed the packaging, and made a guess that the niftier presentation, combined with the most plausible price, correlated with the gluiest glue. (A lot of us still buy wine this way.) On the Web, we have instant access to the unsolicited opinions of hundreds of superglue buyers (mostly pseudonymous, one of the worst things about the Internet, IMHO), from the adhesives wonks who post “read more” commentaries on molecular compounds to the one-star hotheads on permanent caps lock and to hell with spell-check.

We don’t want to, but we often find ourselves identifying with the hotheads. We want to know, if things go wrong, just how bad it could be. I believe it was Tolstoy who observed that all five-star reviews are the same, but every one-star review is vicious in its own way. This gives a single sufficiently radioactive bad review a blackball effect—which is, of course, the most fervent hope of the person who posted it.

Customer reviewing is the land of “lay expertise,” a treacherous domain. Vanderbilt quotes the food writer Ruth Reichl: “Anybody who believes Yelp is an idiot. Most people on Yelp have no idea what they’re talking about.” Customer reviews appear to be governed by a combination of pack mentality and “My water glass wasn’t refilled promptly!!!” narcissism. Reviews tend to be asymmetrically bimodal; they form a J-shaped distribution, with many high ratings, a smaller number of low ratings, and not much in between. The higher number of high ratings may reflect “positivity bias.” Studies show that if the first review is a rave subsequent reviews are more likely to be positive. If you are selling a product online, it makes all the sense in the world for you to have a friend post a positive review the instant the page goes up. We can often tell—shopping for books on Amazon, for example—when someone has taken this wise precaution.

One explanation for the low proportion of mid-range ratings is that the tiny fraction of customers who bother to write reviews do it because they had either an exceptionally good experience or an exceptionally bad one—which is, by statistical definition, not the experience you are going to have. Reliability is also compromised by the phenomenon of ratings inflation, the result of allowing sellers to review buyers as well as vice versa, as happens on services like eBay and Uber. It’s all a mess. But, assuming the wisdom of crowds, it’s probably not that much more untrustworthy than the advice of the salesman in the store, and it beats staring at the label.

The engineered nature of the online experience makes Virginia Heffernan’s argument, in “Magic and Loss” (Simon &amp; Schuster), that the Internet is “a massive and collaborative work of realist art” a little puzzling. The Internet is the Truman Show. We’re not seeing reality, or even a simulacrum thereof. We’re seeing what the algorithms want us to see. We can browse elsewhere, we can turn the digital page, but, the moment we arrive, construction of a new personalized stage set gets under way.

Heffernan is a former Times television critic who has worked in and around the online world almost since the beginning. She started using computers back in the days of Dungeons and Dragons, and she became fascinated by the pantheistic aura that surrounds electronic communication—the sense that a collective consciousness is being formed out there in the ether. This fascination is still with her; it’s the “magic” in her title.

But the pantheistic moment was back when computing meant staring at blinking cursors and waiting endlessly for a line of teletype to start appearing, like Matthew Broderick in “WarGames,” and it was before virtually all of commerce moved online and the Web became the digital mall without borders that it is today. It was also before people spent half the day online doing work and errands. For most people, the Internet is a disenchanted place.

Still, Heffernan believes that we are living through a revolution. “The Internet is the great masterpiece of civilization,” she says. “As an idea it rivals monotheism.” And: “If it’s ever fair to say that anything has ‘changed everything,’ it’s fair to say so about the Internet.” Analog is dead. To understand the new regime, she argues, we need a new aesthetics, “a new hierarchy of values.” This is what she proposes to provide.

She doesn’t, really, and her book (thankfully) is more like an essay than like a treatise. Heffernan is smart, her writing has flair, she can refer intelligently to Barthes, Derrida, and Benjamin—also to Aquinas, Dante, and Proust—and she knows a lot about the Internet and its history. She is good company. But she has trouble extracting an aesthetics from the mishmash of information, entertainment, commerce, and distraction that is the Internet.

A lot of the Internet, and especially popular Web sites like Wikipedia, YouTube, and Twitter, is just ugly. Heffernan’s point is that the ugliness doesn’t keep us away, so there must be something compelling us to go on them. It might be the sensation that sites like those are incomprehensibly large, that we can never exhaust them. Ultimate unreadability is part of the aura of the Internet itself, the “postmodern sublime,” to use a term that Heffernan avoids. I can’t see all the books in a library at the same time, but I can go outside and look at the building. The Internet is a building that you can never look at.

What makes digitalization different from earlier changes in media, and the reason it is not wrong to call it a revolution, is that a single technology is promising to absorb a huge number of existing technologies, from paper, vinyl, and celluloid to clocks, maps, newspapers, radios, cameras, telephones, lecture halls. If it can be coded, it will end up on the Web or in an app. This is going to entail, Heffernan argues, some loss: for one thing, the three-dimensionality of certain experiences—acoustic, theatrical, and even palpable, as with the physical book. On a screen, experience is dematerialized and flattened out. But, she says, “we’re officially through the looking glass, everyone; we might as well stop to smell the music and hear the new air.”

The Internet won’t replace everything, of course, and one day something will replace the Internet. By then, we will all be used to it—the analog world will have gone the way of the typewriter and the milkman—and we, or our children, will miss it when it’s gone. For Vanderbilt is able to identify two factors that have repeatedly been shown to have a significant influence on taste. One is social consensus; the other is familiarity. We get attracted to things that we see other people are attracted to, and we like things more the longer we like them.

Heffernan is more comfortable with sliding standards for art and taste than Vanderbilt is. Vanderbilt is distressed that taste proves to be so fickle. “The picture I have presented of taste is hardly reassuring,” he concludes. But his picture is reassuring. If tastes were not easily changeable, if people could like only what they have always liked and could never develop a taste for something different, the species would have trouble surviving. One famished humanoid eats an oyster and does not immediately drop dead. Other, merely hungry humanoids observe this and think, Totally gross, but what the heck, and they eat some oysters, too. A social consensus grows that oysters are not just edible; they’re tasty. The species advances.

The malleability of taste has a similar adaptive utility when it comes to a subject that is largely missing from Vanderbilt’s book: mate selection. (How about the algorithms for sites like eHarmony and Match.com?) We’re drawn to possible mates for multiple reasons, from the intellectual to the pheromonal, but who will mate with whom is as unpredictable as traffic and as inexplicable as a preference for “The Bourne Supremacy.” We surprise even ourselves. If our preferences were fixed in advance, most of us would never find a mate. Having found one, though, familiarity helps lock the choice in place, which is why humans can remain with the same partner for a long time. We like what we’ve liked.

The way the story is usually told, it was in the eighteenth century that, for various unrelated reasons—sociological, religious, philosophical—it seemed important to distinguish personal likes and dislikes from disinterested appreciation. This is when Kant and Hume enter the picture, and when the category of the aesthetic (Heffernan’s subject) gets carved out from the larger category of taste (Vanderbilt’s). Aesthetic appreciation is supposed to be shared; it’s not supposed to depend on the background or the prejudices of the audience. The idea is based on the experience of natural beauty, which does seem predicated on an affinity between the mind and certain external forms. Why can’t works of art appeal to the same affinity?

Of course, aesthetic appreciation does have to be learned. A person who went to see “Elektra” having never heard Western music before would either be bored to death or run screaming from the opera house. And appreciation for art arguably develops in the same way as any other taste. Someone says, “Giotto. I like what he’s doing with perspective,” and a consensus builds that a certain style of painting is worth looking at. The fact that we need time and help to like a work of art doesn’t mean we don’t “really” like it. It’s just one more thing that has entered our lives to become an object of pleasure, edification, and disputation. We can philosophize about it if we want, but we should enjoy it for as long as it lasts. ♦

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Why We Like What We Like

We don't know what we like

Choice and preference

Taste today is a big business

The Internet does not produce reality

Changing tastes allow for progression

Aesthetic appreciation is learned

IDEAS ABOUT

MORE LIKE THIS

Taste: why we like what we like - Ness Labs

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It's time to

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A PRO!

Bite-sized knowledgeto upgradeyour career

Why We Like What We Like

We don't know what we like

Choice and preference

Taste today is a big business

The Internet does not produce reality

Changing tastes allow for progression

Aesthetic appreciation is learned

IDEAS ABOUT

MORE LIKE THIS

Taste: why we like what we like - Ness Labs

Science Explains Why We Have Favorite Colors

How to enjoy coffee | Psyche Guides

It's time to

READ

LIKE

A PRO!

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career