Hey there,
Happy (belated) Tihar for those celebrating. Wish you good health and the power to finish all those Selrotis.
I’m nearing the end of Day 3 of a five-day vacation which has been blissfully and painfully unproductive. I guess that’s good/okay.
I actually spent ~5 hours today—on a whim, after watching Christoph Niemann’s inspiring and hilarious TED talk—trying to create a Tihar Illustration. 3 of those 5 were spent staring at a blank page/screen and one in trying to create a minimal Selroti illustration, at the right abstract-o-meter.
I wasn’t getting anywhere and so decided to just make the first draft the final one:
Note: The bottom of the pot is supposed to be a smartphone emanating the whole projection, probably. I know this is like explaining a joke but given my design skills, it’s necessary, haha.
In this edition:
The Secret of Taste: why we like what we like
Fire and Motion — a military strategy generalized
In Defence of Reading Goals
[[Tech]] All the Little Things — on the virtues of code with many small things
The Secret of Taste - Why we like what we like
Tom Vanderbilt | 21 mins
Why do you like the music you like? Or the shows?
Are you a coffee person or tea? Or both? Or… neither?
You have certain likes and dislikes. Certain tastes. But why?
This article (edited extract from Tom’s book) explores some of the factors that influence our tastes. Spoiler: There is no one grand secret. It’s a mix of many fascinating factors.
Firstly, it’s difficult to predict what we’ll like in the future:
We may anticipate getting tired of something but we cannot anticipate all the things that we might start liking. There are just too many. "We do not anticipate the effect of experiencing things".
Another issue is Psychological "salience". Even when considering the same thing, we might pay attention to different aspects in the future. Maybe in our teens, we focus on “style” in our car purchases but later on focus on things like maintenance, comfort.
Novelty vs Familiarity
It’s also difficult to predict what we’ll like because our tastes are influenced by these quite opposite forces—novelty and familiarity.
We want newness. It’s part of the reason we can “learn” to like alcohol.
“If beer went on tasting to me the way the first sip tasted,” he writes, “I would never have gone on drinking beer.” Part of the problem is that alcohol is a shock to the system: it tastes like nothing that has come before, or at least nothing pleasant. New music or art can have the same effect.
Newness provides a jolt from the humdrum.
But we don’t want something too new, too unfamiliar. E.g. The architecture of the Sydney Opera House was initially very unpopular and disliked:
It now seems impossible to imagine, a few decades ago, the scandal provoked by the now widely cherished Sydney Opera House. The Danish architect, Jørn Utzon, was practically driven from the country, his name went unuttered at the opening ceremony, the sense of national scandal was palpable towards this harbourside monstrosity. Not only did the building not fit the traditional form of an opera house; it did not fit the traditional form of a building. It was as foreign as its architect.
Familiarity begets liking. Fluency begets liking.
So it’s a delicate balancing act between Novelty and Familiarity.
On the Selection Bias in History
Slight tangent:
“Why isn’t music as good as it used to be?” – reflects a historical selection bias, one colourfully described by the designer Frank Chimero. “Let me let you in on a little secret,” he writes. “If you are hearing about something old, it is almost certainly good. Why? Because nobody wants to talk about shitty old stuff, but lots of people still talk about shitty new stuff, because they are still trying to figure out if it is shitty or not. The past wasn’t better, we just forgot about all the shitty shit.”
Distinctness vs Conformity
Another struggle that defines our tastes is the desire to belong, to have commonalities with our in-group whilst also maintaining an individual distinctness.
Conformity. We want to be like other people. It’s why you might start liking something that someone you admire likes. It's an evolutionary mechanism to allow us to social learn—learning from others' experience. In fact, Culture can be thought of as the sum of this social learning.
Distinctness. But then individuals also want to be different. As a species, this seems to be helpful in order to spark innovation. If everyone conforms, nobody will find the big breakthroughs.
Perhaps some ingrained sense of the evolutionary utility of this differentiation explains why humans are so torn between wanting to belong to a group and wanting to be distinct individuals.
Tastes can change when people aspire to be different from other people; they can change when we are trying to be like other people.
Tastes as signaling mechanism and markers of Identity
Some (or a lot) of our tastes function as a signaling mechanism. This is analogous to Crony Beliefs.
It’s part of why things like the Editor wars and Browser Wars exist.
In essence, tastes can demarcate boundaries and borders:
What our tastes say about us is mostly that we want to be like other people whom we like and who have those tastes – up to a point – and unlike others who have other tastes.
The Internet as an amplifier
In today’s world, the factors discussed above have been amplified and sped up.
We are exposed to a lot of novelty every day. Their creators are incentivized to make them seem/feel familiar quickly to avoid the risk of obscurity. Filter bubbles and all the feedback loops around us means that, instead of weeks or months, it takes days or even hours for something to seem very familiar to us, to be assimilated into our tastes.
It’s easier than ever to exert our conformity (e.g. retweeting an opinion) and distinctness (the image of ourselves we formulate on social media).
And of course, it’s easier to signal—explicitly or implicitly—our belonging, or non-belonging, to certain groups i.e it’s easier to get together as well as to form divisions.
The ramifications of this can be a topic of discussion for some other day. But, either way, it’s worth keeping in mind some of the (psychological, evolutionary, social) forces at play underneath. Of course, it’s only a small part of the picture but it is a part nonetheless.
My Thoughts
This was such a great read. Yes, it didn’t provide a definite answer. Instead, just a bunch of factors at play. But still, lots of food for thought.
What resonated with me the most was the struggle between conformity and distinctness, of belonging whilst staying independent. I am periodically afflicted by that feeling of not quite belonging anywhere whilst also being uncomfortable with my uniqueness (in the general way in which everyone is unique).
Fire and Motion
Joel Spolsky | 7 mins
In this short essay, Joel touches upon the personal state where you seem to have absolutely lost the ability to be productive in any way.
The days when you just can’t seem to get to the task in front of you.
He posits that perhaps the key is to just get started and then links it with an infantry military strategy—fire and motion.
The main idea: you move towards the enemy while firing your weapon (which prevents them from firing at you).
He links it to personal productivity as such:
You have to move forward a little bit, every day. It doesn’t matter if your code is lame and buggy and nobody wants it. If you are moving forward, writing code and fixing bugs constantly, time is on your side.
At the individual level, he is advocating for consistency as the way to greatness.
That is (almost) common knowledge today (it probably wasn’t back when he wrote this) so it doesn’t provide a new useful way of thinking.
However, Joel then goes on to demonstrate this principle at the company level which I found very interesting. The idea that big companies (the incumbents) can knowingly or unknowingly engage in cover fire during which they move further ahead.
Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That’s probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features. Look closely at the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don’t have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up only on Windows XP.
In Defence of Reading Goals
Cedric Chin | 9 mins
In this essay, Cedric presents arguments in support of having Reading Goals (e.g. “52 books a year”).
It’s in response to the “number of books read doesn’t matter” argument against having such a goal.
Cedric contends that “Reading goals work primarily because they boost your reading volume”. And why can that be good? Here is the gist of his argument:
Certain career and skill types benefit from analogical reasoning
In order to use analogical reasoning well, you need to draw from a large set of patterns in your head. All else being equal, a human with more patterns in their head will beat a human with less patterns.
The best method to expand the set of patterns in one’s head is to experience it yourself. The next best method is to read.
Therefore, all else being equal, the person who collects more patterns more systematically will beat the person who collects less patterns.
For example, fields like investing and business can benefit a lot from collecting these wide “patterns”.
Of course, it might not be fruitful in certain other careers—lawyers, ML Researchers, Software Engineers, etc. Still, reading widely might help here too.
Cedric then notes how he combines the volume of reading generated by having the reading goal with the land and expand strategy for reading to answer questions he is interested in.
💻 All the Little Things
Sandi Metz | 37 mins
Awesome talk. Sandi primarily reinforces the common (but hard to implement) knowledge: Make small methods, classes and let them know as little about each other as possible.
Here are the main takeaways:
Prefer duplication over the wrong abstraction.
Reach for the open/closed principle.
Make small things. Classes, methods, everything.
When refactoring, we usually end up making things more complex before simplifying them. So refactor through that Complexity in order to get to simplicity.
Autodale
David James Armsby
Unsettling and thought-provoking Dystopian animated series. (Recommendation from Nish).
The eerie powers of conditioning, Totalitarianism, the price for “stability” and “conditioned happiness”, divisions of society and “out-grouping”,…
David also has “making of” videos showing the whole creative process. They are also interesting watches in and of themselves!
// Poetry
A Dream Within a Dream
Edgar Allan Poe
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.…
🎵 Music
Awesome song with an unusual backstory to say the least:
Although some folk songs and a few contemporary rock songs have unusual or even bizarre inspirations, there can't be many more offbeat than one that begins with being taken for a ride by a whale and then volunteering to be eaten by a boatload of hungry sailors.
Another classic that has been on repeat for me all week.
Carry on my wayward son,
There'll be peace when you are done,
Lay your weary head to rest,
Don't you cry no more.
// Wholesome
Ending Thoughts
I read The Trial this week. It was an intriguing book which left me with more questions than answers. Pretty much everything seemed pointless which I think was exactly the point. Recommended read (if you haven’t). I mean, here’s the opening line:
Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
Have a great week ahead.
With Love,
Bijay