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Everyone knows his or her favourite colour, the foods we most enjoy, and which season of The Sopranos deserves the most stars on Netflix. But what does it really mean when we like something? How do we decide what's good? Is it something biological? What is the role of our personal experiences in shaping our tastes? And how do businesses make use of this information? Comprehensively researched and singularly insightful, You May Also Like delves deep into psychology, marketing and neuroscience to answer these complex and fascinating questions. From the tangled underpinnings of our food choices, to the discrete dynamics of the pop charts and our playlists, to our non-stop procession of 'thumbs' and 'likes' and 'stars, ' to our insecurity before unfamiliar works of art, the book explores how we form our preferences - and how they shape us. It explains how difficult it is, even for experts, to pinpoint exactly what makes something good or enjoyable, and how the success of companies like Netflix, Spotify and Yelp! depends on the complicated task of predicting what we will enjoy. Like Traffic, this book takes us on a fascinating and consistently surprising intellectual journey that helps us better understand how we perceive and appreciate the world around us.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published May 10, 2016
171 people are currently reading
2930 people want to read
About the author
Tom Vanderbilt
13 books153 followersTom Vanderbilt writes on design, technology, science, and culture, among other subjects, for many publications, including Wired, Outside, The London Review of Books, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Wilson Quarterly, Artforum, The Wilson Quarterly, Travel and Leisure, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, Cabinet, Metropolis, and Popular Science. He is contributing editor to Artforum and the design magazine Print and I.D., contributing writer of the popular blog Design Observer, and columnist for Slate magazine.
His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller Traffic:Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K. and territories, and by publishers in 18 other countries. He is also the author of two previous books: Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America (Princeton Architectural Press, 2002; published in PB by the University of Chicago Press in 2010), an offbeat architectural travelogue of the nation’s secret Cold War past; and The Sneaker Book (The New Press, 1998), a cultural history of the athletic shoe (published in Italian and Swedish editions). His early writings for The Baffler have been collected in two anthologies, Commodify Your Dissent and Boob Jubilee (W.W. Norton, eds. Thomas Frank and Matthew Weiland), and he has also contributed essays to a number of books, including New York Stories: The Best of the City Section of the New York Times (New York University Press); Supercade: The Visual History of the Video Game Age (The MIT Press), Else/Where: Mapping (The University of Minnesota Press, 2006),Quonset Hut: Metal Living for a Modern Age (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005), The World and the Wild (The University of Arizona Press), and The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup (Harper Perennial, 2006).
He has consulted for a variety of companies, from ad agencies to Fortune 500 corporations, and has given lectures at a variety of institutions around the world, from the Eero Saarinen Lecture at Yale University’s School of Architecture to the Australasian Road Safety Conference in Canberra. He has appeared on a wide variety of radio and television programs around the world, including NBC’s Today Show, ABC News’ Nightline, NPR’s Morning Edition, Fresh Air with Teri Gross, the BBC’s World Service and The One Show, MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Fox Business, and CNN’s Business Today, among many others. He is a Visiting Scholar at New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management, and has received fellowships from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visiting Arts, the Design Trust for Public Space, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. He is also a member of the U.S. Department of Interior’s Cold War Advisory Committee, a group studying the identification of sites and resources significant to the Cold War.
Courtsey : http://www.tomvanderbilt.com/bio/
His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller Traffic:Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K. and territories, and by publishers in 18 other countries. He is also the author of two previous books: Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America (Princeton Architectural Press, 2002; published in PB by the University of Chicago Press in 2010), an offbeat architectural travelogue of the nation’s secret Cold War past; and The Sneaker Book (The New Press, 1998), a cultural history of the athletic shoe (published in Italian and Swedish editions). His early writings for The Baffler have been collected in two anthologies, Commodify Your Dissent and Boob Jubilee (W.W. Norton, eds. Thomas Frank and Matthew Weiland), and he has also contributed essays to a number of books, including New York Stories: The Best of the City Section of the New York Times (New York University Press); Supercade: The Visual History of the Video Game Age (The MIT Press), Else/Where: Mapping (The University of Minnesota Press, 2006),Quonset Hut: Metal Living for a Modern Age (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005), The World and the Wild (The University of Arizona Press), and The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup (Harper Perennial, 2006).
He has consulted for a variety of companies, from ad agencies to Fortune 500 corporations, and has given lectures at a variety of institutions around the world, from the Eero Saarinen Lecture at Yale University’s School of Architecture to the Australasian Road Safety Conference in Canberra. He has appeared on a wide variety of radio and television programs around the world, including NBC’s Today Show, ABC News’ Nightline, NPR’s Morning Edition, Fresh Air with Teri Gross, the BBC’s World Service and The One Show, MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Fox Business, and CNN’s Business Today, among many others. He is a Visiting Scholar at New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management, and has received fellowships from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visiting Arts, the Design Trust for Public Space, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. He is also a member of the U.S. Department of Interior’s Cold War Advisory Committee, a group studying the identification of sites and resources significant to the Cold War.
Courtsey : http://www.tomvanderbilt.com/bio/
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June 29, 2016
I picked this book for one reason: Tom Vanderbilt. I absolutely loved his book TRAFFIC, and bought copies to give or lend to other people. TRAFFIC is the sole reason I bought this book in hardback instead of seeing if they had it at the library.
Vanderbilt talks in the book about how liking other things predisposes people to want to like something. So, having read and liked his other book influenced me. Would I have liked it less had I known nothing about the author? Probably. If I hadn't known and liked the author, and if I hadn't paid twenty five bucks to buy the book, I might not have finished it.
I wanted to like it more. I wanted this to be a life-changing pop science book that everyone quotes from. Maybe it was the locale. He says in the book that sometimes you like that wine when you're in Italy, but you hate it at home, because what you really liked was being in Italy. Maybe I disliked it because I think of it as doctor's office waiting rooms in the apex of an especially hellious summer.
Or maybe I disliked it because of the bland, MS Paint cover, though I saw they also offered it in red. Would I have liked it more if it had a more dynamic cover? If I had read it on an idyllic beach? If it had blurbs from celebrities? Maybe I was jaded against it because it was mentioned so glowingly in The Week I was promised champagne and got Big Red.
Or maybe I just disliked it because it seemed so disorganized, a loose collection of factoids and anecdotes that didn't seem to draw any compelling conclusion or lead the reader to an epiphany about the world. Maybe I disliked it because it really needed some photos to go along with the extensive discussion of art, so that I didn't have to go and google the image. I wanted more specifics, more concrete examples, and something to draw from this experience besides the conclusion that research on taste is pretty much inconclusive. One of the things that made Malcolm Gladwell's work so compelling is how his deep understanding of one or two specific examples per chapter led the reader along his though process to draw the conclusion he drew. One of the things I liked about Stephen Johnson's HOW WE GOT TO NOW was how every chapter dealt with one cohesive theme. I don't want to read about inconclusive research and conflicting ideas unless I can be convinced to care through a compelling argument or a deep dive into the subject.
Or maybe I don't know why I only felt meh about this book. After reading it, I don't feel like I have a better understanding of why people like things and why they don't. Perhaps that's reason enough to dislike a book on liking things.
Vanderbilt talks in the book about how liking other things predisposes people to want to like something. So, having read and liked his other book influenced me. Would I have liked it less had I known nothing about the author? Probably. If I hadn't known and liked the author, and if I hadn't paid twenty five bucks to buy the book, I might not have finished it.
I wanted to like it more. I wanted this to be a life-changing pop science book that everyone quotes from. Maybe it was the locale. He says in the book that sometimes you like that wine when you're in Italy, but you hate it at home, because what you really liked was being in Italy. Maybe I disliked it because I think of it as doctor's office waiting rooms in the apex of an especially hellious summer.
Or maybe I disliked it because of the bland, MS Paint cover, though I saw they also offered it in red. Would I have liked it more if it had a more dynamic cover? If I had read it on an idyllic beach? If it had blurbs from celebrities? Maybe I was jaded against it because it was mentioned so glowingly in The Week I was promised champagne and got Big Red.
Or maybe I just disliked it because it seemed so disorganized, a loose collection of factoids and anecdotes that didn't seem to draw any compelling conclusion or lead the reader to an epiphany about the world. Maybe I disliked it because it really needed some photos to go along with the extensive discussion of art, so that I didn't have to go and google the image. I wanted more specifics, more concrete examples, and something to draw from this experience besides the conclusion that research on taste is pretty much inconclusive. One of the things that made Malcolm Gladwell's work so compelling is how his deep understanding of one or two specific examples per chapter led the reader along his though process to draw the conclusion he drew. One of the things I liked about Stephen Johnson's HOW WE GOT TO NOW was how every chapter dealt with one cohesive theme. I don't want to read about inconclusive research and conflicting ideas unless I can be convinced to care through a compelling argument or a deep dive into the subject.
Or maybe I don't know why I only felt meh about this book. After reading it, I don't feel like I have a better understanding of why people like things and why they don't. Perhaps that's reason enough to dislike a book on liking things.
June 3, 2016
Although Vanderbilt includes some interesting anecdotes and studies, he fails to answer the question "why do we like what we like?" Taste, he ultimately admits, is just too complicated to write about. He took me on a journey that led nowhere and left me with more questions unanswered. Perhaps I expected too much from this book.
With that being said, Vanderbilt provides some valuable lessons:
1. Resist the urge to "like" and "dislike" objects, instagram photos, people, situations, twitter posts, etc. Instead, practice verbalizing experiences--make a mental experience out of a physical one. Don't let your mind become lazy.
2. Taste is not the same thing as flavor.
3. Be aware of projecting current preferences onto your future self. Taste-our likes and dislikes-is constantly in motion. To some degree, we all want to be unique but also feel as though we belong to a like-minded community. This can cause a continuous revision of ourselves to keep up with everyone else doing this exact same thing.
4. Google can accurately guess my age (but also thinks I'm a baseball fan that enjoys deep sea diving).
With that being said, Vanderbilt provides some valuable lessons:
1. Resist the urge to "like" and "dislike" objects, instagram photos, people, situations, twitter posts, etc. Instead, practice verbalizing experiences--make a mental experience out of a physical one. Don't let your mind become lazy.
2. Taste is not the same thing as flavor.
3. Be aware of projecting current preferences onto your future self. Taste-our likes and dislikes-is constantly in motion. To some degree, we all want to be unique but also feel as though we belong to a like-minded community. This can cause a continuous revision of ourselves to keep up with everyone else doing this exact same thing.
4. Google can accurately guess my age (but also thinks I'm a baseball fan that enjoys deep sea diving).
September 21, 2016
I've been fascinated with taste for a long time, and Vanderbilt, whose previous work Traffic is a must-read for anyone with a commute, collected in this book almost everything I've ever wanted to say about it. He discusses what taste is, where it comes from, how it works, and how it relates to status - plus plenty of other aspects I hadn't thought of, all over such varied domains as food, wine, beer, music, art, film, architecture, pet breeds, and baby names. As you would expect for such a complicated, circular, and subjective topic, his analysis is somewhat digressive, but in a good way, with plenty of specific and well-chosen examples. He's careful to build upon the works of famous philosophers of taste like Pierre Bourdieu, Immanuel Kant, and David Hume, updating their thoughts about objectivity, social determination, and personal identity for the modern era. He investigates the act of judgment while being reasonably non-judgmental himself. Best of all, his conclusions are lots of fun to discuss: is our sense of taste a carefully curated expression of our innermost selves, or the circumstantial accumulation of stochastically-determined signaling indicators that are essentially meaningless in and of themselves? Both!
To cut to the chase, there's really nothing wrong with simply saying "there's no accounting for taste", when it comes to something like music preferences, and leaving it at that (book over, thanks for playing!). When you really confront the idea of taste as an aggregation of preferences or the value of an individual preference, any rigorous analysis is rather deflating from the traditional perspective of human personality. On the one hand, many things are preferred over others for essentially random reasons - you might like a particular song because it's associated with pleasant memories unique to yourself. On the other hand, many favorites follow predictable statistical patterns - lots of people might like that song too, and similar people like similar things, which is how they're defined as similar to begin with. It's not very emotionally satisfying to learn that you like something either because it was the first thing you saw, or just because everyone else likes something. Tom the Dancing Bug had a perfect satire in the June 16, 2007 comic: "Everything Was Better When You Were Twelve". And taste can especially seem arbitrary when you hear people disagree: "The closer people are to each other socially, the more pronounced taste disputes become;" similarly, "the less a choice serves some utilitarian function, the more it implies about identity."
Yet there's obviously not nothing to the idea of taste, because it has real effects in the world. Taste plays a huge role in meeting friends, selecting romantic partners, creating and defining social groups, and broadcasting information about yourself to other people. In 1979 Pierre Bourdieu wrote the still-fascinating Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, where he attempted to quantify who liked what and why, and as Vanderbilt says, we can move far beyond Bourdieu's data and conclusions. "Almost every aspect of human taste that Bourdieu was interested in is, every day, being cataloged online, in numbers beyond any sociologist's dream. What music do you like? (Spotify, Pandora). What is your ideal human face? (OkCupid, Match.com). What is the ideal subject of a photograph? (Flickr, Instagram)." With all of this data, can we finally untangle the role that feedback loops and circularity problems play in determining taste? What does it mean to be a data point? How do some people get to be so influential?
Again, those kinds of philosophical questions are not really answerable with data; the most data can do is give you a skeleton to hang a narrative on. Christian Bauckhage wrote an interesting paper, unfortunately not cited here, titled "Mathematical Models of Fads Explain the Temporal Dynamics of Internet Memes" that fit the popularity of various memes to various graphs as a function of time, but "explain" is a strong word - it's hard to say why one meme fits one exponential decay function and not another. "Taste is a space on a graph" might be a perfectly true sentence about the mathematical relationship between the set of things you like, but we're more interested in our relationships with those things, and with each other. Tastes are "categorical, contextual, constructed, comparative, and uncongenital". Take the question of food, and whether we should limit ourselves to pleasures within the confined of our established taste, as opposed to taking the risk on something new (assuming it turns out to be good):
"Are you better off ordering your favorite food off a menu or something you have never had? Rozin had suggested to me it might depend on where you want your pleasure to occur: before, during, or after the meal. 'The anticipated pleasure is greater if it's your favorite food. You've had it, you're familiar with it, you know what it's like. The experienced pleasure is probably going to be higher for your favorite,' he says. 'On the other hand, for remembered pleasures, you're much better off ordering a new food. If you order your favorite food, it's not going to be a memory - you've had it already.'"
That issue of how different your enjoyment can be depending on when it occurs reminds me of how mood affects pleasure as well. I've always been interested in how most people's "top 10" lists are high-brow things they've seen once, instead of the low-brow comedies they watch over and over again, and how that odd distance from the genre is reflected in how most lists of "greatest films ever" are mysteriously free of comedies (is comedy somehow more subjective than drama?). One reason is that movie taste is performative: "Think of the moment in Play It Again, Sam where Woody Allen's character is scrambling, ahead of a date, to array his coffee table with respectable books ('You can't leave books lying around if you're not reading them,' his friend complains, to which he replies, 'It creates an image')." You create a serious image by telling people you like serious films, even if the majority of the time you're not really in the mood for something serious. This affects ratings:
"As one expert says, 'Who's likely to rate The Sopranos? Not someone who watched five minutes and didn't like it because it wasn't really part of their life. It's the person who committed to it and spent a hundred hours of their life watching it.' On the other hand, 'who will rate Paul Blart: Mall Cop? It might not be a very good movie, but it's ninety minutes long. Your bar or criteria might be different.'"
There are all kinds of things I know that I'd probably like, but I just don't have the time to get to them. Even things that I do get to experiencing, I often don't give a fair chance (as in the chapter on how little time people spend in art galleries really looking and appreciating paintings). But how are those things made known to me? To that point about ratings and what gets rated, how should we interpret online reviews? There's a distinction between an "experience good (like a book or a movie) or a search good (a camera or replacement windshield wipers)", and experience goods are notoriously difficult to rate objectively. Is there such a thing as an expert? Vanderbilt drops his normally even-handed tone to offer one of his own strategies for "reviewing the reviewers":
"For as important as the question of whether they liked it is, Are they like us? One looks for signals of authority and a shared outlook. A red flag for me, for example, is the word 'awesome.' It is not simply that I think the word has lost most of its connotation. It is that I place less trust in the opinion of someone who uses it (for example, 'awesome margaritas' - and you may trust me less for not trusting it). The word 'anniversary' or 'honeymoon' in a review portends people with inflated expectations for their special night. Their complaint with any perceived failure by the restaurant or hotel to rise to this solemn occasion is not necessarily ours. I reflexively downgrade reviewers writing with syrupy dross picked up from hotel brochures ('It was a vision of perfection') or employing such trite abominations as 'sinfully delicious!'"
It's just inherently difficult to use impartial and "fair" language to describe subjective experiences, even for experts. Part of that has to do with what you're discussing: "As Garrett Oliver, the brewmaster of Brooklyn Brewery, had told me, beer people tend to talk like scientists - 'here's our EBV, here's our IBU, our final gravity' - while the 'wine guy is talking about rolling hills.'" Craft beer, which became popular fairly recently, is still dominated by nerds who talk like nerds, whereas wine has been prestige for a long time and there's a well-established, somewhat allegorical vocabulary of description (if you visit parody sites like vicioustasting.com you will see what craft beer fans think of overly flowery tasting notes). Instead of describing what it's like though, what about describing how it's used? Something like Pabst Blue Ribbon, "at least judged by the thousands of people who have weighed in on RateBeer.com, is described in grudging, almost apologetic terms: 'a decent lawn mower beer'; good 'for standing in the crowd at a concert'; the 'perfect college student brew, to drink while cranking out an essay.'" How do you describe what you like? As one brewery owner says, "People often ask me, 'What's your favorite beer?' I don't have A favorite beer. I usually say it's the one in my hand. It's what sounded good to me."
But come on, no one would ever say that their favorite song is "whatever's playing", especially to someone they cared about. Music is probably the single most common and important way, short of actual interaction, for two people to figure out if they're socially (not to mention romantically!) compatible. "Music is an exemplar of what the anthropologist Mary Douglas called the 'fences or bridges' quality of goods (or taste), unifying people even as it separates them." This is despite, or maybe even because of, the fact that most people have no idea what a chord is: "The way we talk about music is, it turns out, fairly predictable. 'We see people talking about its context related to everything else they know,' he said. 'That's exactly the kind of text you want.' Musicological detail is relatively unimportant; knowing the key or pitch of a song does not help guide listeners to the next song, Whitman suggested. You want to know where a band is from, what its influences are." More than almost anything else, your musical taste is a statement of personal identity; I wish Vanderbilt had gone into a little more detail on the "intimate" relationship between music and love, but for a romantic comedy take on this idea, just read/watch High Fidelity.
I use Spotify all the time, not only to serve me things that I know I like, but also show me new things I might like. Vanderbilt discusses how Spotify's acquisition of Echo Nest, whose technology powers their excellent Discover Weekly feature, has given them insight into who likes what, using my favorite band as an example: "Pink Floyd, it turns out, is one of the bands most liked primarily by Republicans (even if the band's members seem to be rather liberal in outlook). Whitman speculated this was mostly about the changing demographics of an aging fan base. But Pink Floyd itself changed with age, musically, and so Whitman was able to identify a split in which fans of the earlier, more psychedelic, Syd Barrett–helmed Pink Floyd tilted more Democratic." (To be clear, the Roger Waters period of the band is best and if you disagree You Are Wrong). But technology has changed how people navigate the unlistenably vast universe of music. As the scope of people's choices expands beyond the point of comfort, the power of curating rises, with predictable effects on bands. He cites the research of Duncan Watts (whose superb book Everything Is Obvious complements this one well) on how popular things get more popular as people consciously listen to what's popular. This obviously has vast ramifications for the music industry.
However, that increasing "long tail" inequality also holds true for all forms of art in a world of online feedback. Vanderbilt raises the question of the power of feedback in the context of the power of reviews: "There is a rather gloomy endgame looming here, though: the artist only producing art that people he likes will like, people only drawn to artists they think they will like. Does the world of online taste open us to new experience or simply channel us more efficiently into our little pods of predisposition?" Well, first of all, I think most artists have always aimed at some form of popularity. Secondly, people have always preferred things that are familiar. Third, the answer to the question has to be that it can do both: I wouldn't have even found this book itself without the internet, but then again I already knew who Vanderbilt was, but then, even more again, I found his book Traffic online. At some point I took a chance on this author and his work, and no matter how many self-reinforcing algorithmic processes are at work, there will be some element of serendipity at play.
I haven't even touched on many of the other great discussions of taste in this book: the issue of ironic art appreciation via the Museum of Bad Art; the social dynamics at play in Jonathan Touboul's "The hipster effect: When anticonformists all look the same"; fashions in baby names as taste markers (with appropriate citations to Baby Name Wizard); how aesthetic whims can change entire pet breeds over time; how artificial the entire idea of an impartial review is ("Judges drink in a way that no one else does: anonymously, in relatively small amounts, paying attention only to what is being consumed, not for pleasure but with a purpose."); the limitless ontological anxiety that some people express over simple acts of taste ("What did it mean when I thumbed a "like" on an Instagram post? That I liked the content of the image, the way it was shot, or the person posting it? Did my liking depend on how many others had or had not liked it? Was not "liking" it saying that I actually did not like it?"); or the 11th person game as a metaphor for your romantic history ("The next time you are in a public place, point to a random doorway and ask a friend to choose one of the next ten people who walk through the door as a potential romantic partner. There are two rules: You cannot return to any previous person you passed up, and if, when the tenth person comes through the door, you have not chosen anyone, the eleventh becomes your de facto choice."); and more.
So overall I thought it was fantastic. Vanderbilt explores how we come to express preferences, how those preferences change over time, how our preferences interact with those of friends and strangers, and how we use our preferences to appear certain ways to others. This is a superbly evenhanded book, anthropological without being polemical, seeking to understand why people make lists rather than impose them. Frequently I was reminded of what Berlioz wrote about Beethoven's symphonies: "Everybody is right. What to someone seems beautiful is not so for someone else, simply because one person was moved and the other remained indifferent, and the former experienced profound delight while the latter acute boredom. What can be done about this?… nothing… but it is dreadful; I would rather be mad and believe in absolute beauty." I think you can tolerate others' taste while still believing in the superiority of your own, but this book will make you a lot more fun at parties (neatly proving its own point about the social utility of taste) once you absorb its lessons.
He concludes with a useful "field guide to liking":
- You will know what you like or do not like before you know why
- Get beyond "like" and "dislike"
- Do you know why you like what you like?
- Talk about why you like something
- We like things more when they can be categorized
- Do not trust the easy like
- You may like what you see, but you also see what you like
- Liking is learning
- We like what we expect to like; we like what we remember
- Novelty versus familiarity, conformity versus distinction, simplicity versus complexity
- Dislikes are harder to spot but more powerful
To cut to the chase, there's really nothing wrong with simply saying "there's no accounting for taste", when it comes to something like music preferences, and leaving it at that (book over, thanks for playing!). When you really confront the idea of taste as an aggregation of preferences or the value of an individual preference, any rigorous analysis is rather deflating from the traditional perspective of human personality. On the one hand, many things are preferred over others for essentially random reasons - you might like a particular song because it's associated with pleasant memories unique to yourself. On the other hand, many favorites follow predictable statistical patterns - lots of people might like that song too, and similar people like similar things, which is how they're defined as similar to begin with. It's not very emotionally satisfying to learn that you like something either because it was the first thing you saw, or just because everyone else likes something. Tom the Dancing Bug had a perfect satire in the June 16, 2007 comic: "Everything Was Better When You Were Twelve". And taste can especially seem arbitrary when you hear people disagree: "The closer people are to each other socially, the more pronounced taste disputes become;" similarly, "the less a choice serves some utilitarian function, the more it implies about identity."
Yet there's obviously not nothing to the idea of taste, because it has real effects in the world. Taste plays a huge role in meeting friends, selecting romantic partners, creating and defining social groups, and broadcasting information about yourself to other people. In 1979 Pierre Bourdieu wrote the still-fascinating Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, where he attempted to quantify who liked what and why, and as Vanderbilt says, we can move far beyond Bourdieu's data and conclusions. "Almost every aspect of human taste that Bourdieu was interested in is, every day, being cataloged online, in numbers beyond any sociologist's dream. What music do you like? (Spotify, Pandora). What is your ideal human face? (OkCupid, Match.com). What is the ideal subject of a photograph? (Flickr, Instagram)." With all of this data, can we finally untangle the role that feedback loops and circularity problems play in determining taste? What does it mean to be a data point? How do some people get to be so influential?
Again, those kinds of philosophical questions are not really answerable with data; the most data can do is give you a skeleton to hang a narrative on. Christian Bauckhage wrote an interesting paper, unfortunately not cited here, titled "Mathematical Models of Fads Explain the Temporal Dynamics of Internet Memes" that fit the popularity of various memes to various graphs as a function of time, but "explain" is a strong word - it's hard to say why one meme fits one exponential decay function and not another. "Taste is a space on a graph" might be a perfectly true sentence about the mathematical relationship between the set of things you like, but we're more interested in our relationships with those things, and with each other. Tastes are "categorical, contextual, constructed, comparative, and uncongenital". Take the question of food, and whether we should limit ourselves to pleasures within the confined of our established taste, as opposed to taking the risk on something new (assuming it turns out to be good):
"Are you better off ordering your favorite food off a menu or something you have never had? Rozin had suggested to me it might depend on where you want your pleasure to occur: before, during, or after the meal. 'The anticipated pleasure is greater if it's your favorite food. You've had it, you're familiar with it, you know what it's like. The experienced pleasure is probably going to be higher for your favorite,' he says. 'On the other hand, for remembered pleasures, you're much better off ordering a new food. If you order your favorite food, it's not going to be a memory - you've had it already.'"
That issue of how different your enjoyment can be depending on when it occurs reminds me of how mood affects pleasure as well. I've always been interested in how most people's "top 10" lists are high-brow things they've seen once, instead of the low-brow comedies they watch over and over again, and how that odd distance from the genre is reflected in how most lists of "greatest films ever" are mysteriously free of comedies (is comedy somehow more subjective than drama?). One reason is that movie taste is performative: "Think of the moment in Play It Again, Sam where Woody Allen's character is scrambling, ahead of a date, to array his coffee table with respectable books ('You can't leave books lying around if you're not reading them,' his friend complains, to which he replies, 'It creates an image')." You create a serious image by telling people you like serious films, even if the majority of the time you're not really in the mood for something serious. This affects ratings:
"As one expert says, 'Who's likely to rate The Sopranos? Not someone who watched five minutes and didn't like it because it wasn't really part of their life. It's the person who committed to it and spent a hundred hours of their life watching it.' On the other hand, 'who will rate Paul Blart: Mall Cop? It might not be a very good movie, but it's ninety minutes long. Your bar or criteria might be different.'"
There are all kinds of things I know that I'd probably like, but I just don't have the time to get to them. Even things that I do get to experiencing, I often don't give a fair chance (as in the chapter on how little time people spend in art galleries really looking and appreciating paintings). But how are those things made known to me? To that point about ratings and what gets rated, how should we interpret online reviews? There's a distinction between an "experience good (like a book or a movie) or a search good (a camera or replacement windshield wipers)", and experience goods are notoriously difficult to rate objectively. Is there such a thing as an expert? Vanderbilt drops his normally even-handed tone to offer one of his own strategies for "reviewing the reviewers":
"For as important as the question of whether they liked it is, Are they like us? One looks for signals of authority and a shared outlook. A red flag for me, for example, is the word 'awesome.' It is not simply that I think the word has lost most of its connotation. It is that I place less trust in the opinion of someone who uses it (for example, 'awesome margaritas' - and you may trust me less for not trusting it). The word 'anniversary' or 'honeymoon' in a review portends people with inflated expectations for their special night. Their complaint with any perceived failure by the restaurant or hotel to rise to this solemn occasion is not necessarily ours. I reflexively downgrade reviewers writing with syrupy dross picked up from hotel brochures ('It was a vision of perfection') or employing such trite abominations as 'sinfully delicious!'"
It's just inherently difficult to use impartial and "fair" language to describe subjective experiences, even for experts. Part of that has to do with what you're discussing: "As Garrett Oliver, the brewmaster of Brooklyn Brewery, had told me, beer people tend to talk like scientists - 'here's our EBV, here's our IBU, our final gravity' - while the 'wine guy is talking about rolling hills.'" Craft beer, which became popular fairly recently, is still dominated by nerds who talk like nerds, whereas wine has been prestige for a long time and there's a well-established, somewhat allegorical vocabulary of description (if you visit parody sites like vicioustasting.com you will see what craft beer fans think of overly flowery tasting notes). Instead of describing what it's like though, what about describing how it's used? Something like Pabst Blue Ribbon, "at least judged by the thousands of people who have weighed in on RateBeer.com, is described in grudging, almost apologetic terms: 'a decent lawn mower beer'; good 'for standing in the crowd at a concert'; the 'perfect college student brew, to drink while cranking out an essay.'" How do you describe what you like? As one brewery owner says, "People often ask me, 'What's your favorite beer?' I don't have A favorite beer. I usually say it's the one in my hand. It's what sounded good to me."
But come on, no one would ever say that their favorite song is "whatever's playing", especially to someone they cared about. Music is probably the single most common and important way, short of actual interaction, for two people to figure out if they're socially (not to mention romantically!) compatible. "Music is an exemplar of what the anthropologist Mary Douglas called the 'fences or bridges' quality of goods (or taste), unifying people even as it separates them." This is despite, or maybe even because of, the fact that most people have no idea what a chord is: "The way we talk about music is, it turns out, fairly predictable. 'We see people talking about its context related to everything else they know,' he said. 'That's exactly the kind of text you want.' Musicological detail is relatively unimportant; knowing the key or pitch of a song does not help guide listeners to the next song, Whitman suggested. You want to know where a band is from, what its influences are." More than almost anything else, your musical taste is a statement of personal identity; I wish Vanderbilt had gone into a little more detail on the "intimate" relationship between music and love, but for a romantic comedy take on this idea, just read/watch High Fidelity.
I use Spotify all the time, not only to serve me things that I know I like, but also show me new things I might like. Vanderbilt discusses how Spotify's acquisition of Echo Nest, whose technology powers their excellent Discover Weekly feature, has given them insight into who likes what, using my favorite band as an example: "Pink Floyd, it turns out, is one of the bands most liked primarily by Republicans (even if the band's members seem to be rather liberal in outlook). Whitman speculated this was mostly about the changing demographics of an aging fan base. But Pink Floyd itself changed with age, musically, and so Whitman was able to identify a split in which fans of the earlier, more psychedelic, Syd Barrett–helmed Pink Floyd tilted more Democratic." (To be clear, the Roger Waters period of the band is best and if you disagree You Are Wrong). But technology has changed how people navigate the unlistenably vast universe of music. As the scope of people's choices expands beyond the point of comfort, the power of curating rises, with predictable effects on bands. He cites the research of Duncan Watts (whose superb book Everything Is Obvious complements this one well) on how popular things get more popular as people consciously listen to what's popular. This obviously has vast ramifications for the music industry.
However, that increasing "long tail" inequality also holds true for all forms of art in a world of online feedback. Vanderbilt raises the question of the power of feedback in the context of the power of reviews: "There is a rather gloomy endgame looming here, though: the artist only producing art that people he likes will like, people only drawn to artists they think they will like. Does the world of online taste open us to new experience or simply channel us more efficiently into our little pods of predisposition?" Well, first of all, I think most artists have always aimed at some form of popularity. Secondly, people have always preferred things that are familiar. Third, the answer to the question has to be that it can do both: I wouldn't have even found this book itself without the internet, but then again I already knew who Vanderbilt was, but then, even more again, I found his book Traffic online. At some point I took a chance on this author and his work, and no matter how many self-reinforcing algorithmic processes are at work, there will be some element of serendipity at play.
I haven't even touched on many of the other great discussions of taste in this book: the issue of ironic art appreciation via the Museum of Bad Art; the social dynamics at play in Jonathan Touboul's "The hipster effect: When anticonformists all look the same"; fashions in baby names as taste markers (with appropriate citations to Baby Name Wizard); how aesthetic whims can change entire pet breeds over time; how artificial the entire idea of an impartial review is ("Judges drink in a way that no one else does: anonymously, in relatively small amounts, paying attention only to what is being consumed, not for pleasure but with a purpose."); the limitless ontological anxiety that some people express over simple acts of taste ("What did it mean when I thumbed a "like" on an Instagram post? That I liked the content of the image, the way it was shot, or the person posting it? Did my liking depend on how many others had or had not liked it? Was not "liking" it saying that I actually did not like it?"); or the 11th person game as a metaphor for your romantic history ("The next time you are in a public place, point to a random doorway and ask a friend to choose one of the next ten people who walk through the door as a potential romantic partner. There are two rules: You cannot return to any previous person you passed up, and if, when the tenth person comes through the door, you have not chosen anyone, the eleventh becomes your de facto choice."); and more.
So overall I thought it was fantastic. Vanderbilt explores how we come to express preferences, how those preferences change over time, how our preferences interact with those of friends and strangers, and how we use our preferences to appear certain ways to others. This is a superbly evenhanded book, anthropological without being polemical, seeking to understand why people make lists rather than impose them. Frequently I was reminded of what Berlioz wrote about Beethoven's symphonies: "Everybody is right. What to someone seems beautiful is not so for someone else, simply because one person was moved and the other remained indifferent, and the former experienced profound delight while the latter acute boredom. What can be done about this?… nothing… but it is dreadful; I would rather be mad and believe in absolute beauty." I think you can tolerate others' taste while still believing in the superiority of your own, but this book will make you a lot more fun at parties (neatly proving its own point about the social utility of taste) once you absorb its lessons.
He concludes with a useful "field guide to liking":
- You will know what you like or do not like before you know why
- Get beyond "like" and "dislike"
- Do you know why you like what you like?
- Talk about why you like something
- We like things more when they can be categorized
- Do not trust the easy like
- You may like what you see, but you also see what you like
- Liking is learning
- We like what we expect to like; we like what we remember
- Novelty versus familiarity, conformity versus distinction, simplicity versus complexity
- Dislikes are harder to spot but more powerful
December 29, 2019
You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice - Tom Vanderbilt Here's a conundrum: how to review a book that's all about how people judge (and review) things? It's well-researched, really interesting, and has the potential to be widely popular. It's fascinating stuff about literal and figurative taste, what we like, and how we like. It is a dense book, full of information, but entertaining nonetheless. I also really like his book Traffic.What follows is a very specific example of how my attitude towards this book is colored by an unrelated aside, and is not intended to be part of the actual review of the book, but just the bit that sticks out at me as an illustration of some of the concepts he writes about, and that I feel compelled to write about because while I'm aware that other people might read my reviews, they are primarily a journal of reading for me to look back at. So feel free to skip the following.
Library copy
Library copy
June 9, 2016
Interesting examination of how we define "taste" and how it's been defined in the past. Not a lot of definitive answers about what makes something in "good taste" or "bad taste," but a thorough explanation of those ideas throughout history. Lots of information on how we come to like or dislike certain things, but not many definitive conclusions.
It did make me want to go to a fancy cat show in France, though, and the Museum of Bad Art outside of Boston, so kudos to Vanderbilt on that front.
It did make me want to go to a fancy cat show in France, though, and the Museum of Bad Art outside of Boston, so kudos to Vanderbilt on that front.
July 20, 2016
I was convinced I would love this book. I love pop-sociology and who isn't at least a little terrified of how good computers have become at predicting what we want? Unfortunately, this book was very, very dry. I can't fault somebody for writing at an academic level rather than one appealing to the masses, but the cover was certainly deceptive about just how much minutia would be discussed about the research of each topic. A friend told me she listened to it on audio, where it felt more like hearing NPR reports. That seems like a potentially more palatable way to digest this information, but 100 pages in I just didn't care enough to find out.
Recommend to people with patience for details (which I really generally do have!) and interest in the mechanics of the research, not just the results.
Recommend to people with patience for details (which I really generally do have!) and interest in the mechanics of the research, not just the results.
September 16, 2016
Uma feliz surpresa. Trata de um desafio bem ingrato, explicar porque gostamos do que gostamos, mas que traz muitos bons insights. Discute sobre gosto e status, o que nossas preferências revelam sobre nós, gosto de gosto (sabores e como sentimos), como adquirimos gostos, do que gostamos de ouvir e mais um monte de informação relevante e embasada por pesquisas recentes de cognição. Definitivamente não esperava tanto de um livro e me surpreendeu bem. Um ótimo passeio por como o cérebro funciona em torno de um tema interessante.
November 14, 2024
definitely a fan of this. very well written and well researched.
would recommend if you are interested in gaining a lot of extremely useless social science knowledge on personal preference and don’t mind a book where the answer to the central question is 🤷♀️it’s complicated🤷♀️🤷♀️
would recommend if you are interested in gaining a lot of extremely useless social science knowledge on personal preference and don’t mind a book where the answer to the central question is 🤷♀️it’s complicated🤷♀️🤷♀️
October 17, 2020
People enjoy things. On the other hand, people also dislike things. Tom Vanderbilt attempts to discover why we like the things we do with the power of science.
People also tend to have favorites. You might have a favorite color, a favorite food, or a favorite movie. Vanderbilt looked into this because his daughter asked him why the car he owned wasn't in his favorite color.
Food, movies, music, and art are all things that people have opinions on. Vanderbilt looked to the experts in each field to find out what they had to say on our preferences. Food was an interesting one because he looked into both a restaurant owned by Mario Batali and the humble MRE. MREs might not be four-star, but they are good enough.
As the internet came of age, it eventually allowed for streaming content, leading to the ubiquitous "Like" button. So where else do you go other than to Pandora, the Echo Nest, and Netflix? I remember when Youtube had a rating system of stars and wondered why they got rid of them. People were not using the middle star ratings, and it seemed pointless to have them. These sites attempt to recommend content as well, and this is a complicated problem.
Musical tastes are the most divisive, however. Vanderbilt talks about the Insane Clown Posse, a band that I have not listened to before. Critics loathe it, but it has a fanbase nonetheless. The internet has changed many things in our society, from how we consume music and movies, to how we shop for goods. It allows you to meet like-minded people on any subject.
Art is something with which I am less familiar. I have been to the local Art Museum once.
Tastes tend to change. Vanderbilt looks into this as well.
Finally, Vanderbilt explores expertise. Why did we trust Siskel and Ebert to deliver good reviews of movies when they were on television? What did they see in a film that a random movie-goer would ignore or overlook? The same questions crop up for professional judges.
With all of this, how is one meant to enjoy anything? Vanderbilt has pointers for enjoying and liking things.
People also tend to have favorites. You might have a favorite color, a favorite food, or a favorite movie. Vanderbilt looked into this because his daughter asked him why the car he owned wasn't in his favorite color.
Food, movies, music, and art are all things that people have opinions on. Vanderbilt looked to the experts in each field to find out what they had to say on our preferences. Food was an interesting one because he looked into both a restaurant owned by Mario Batali and the humble MRE. MREs might not be four-star, but they are good enough.
As the internet came of age, it eventually allowed for streaming content, leading to the ubiquitous "Like" button. So where else do you go other than to Pandora, the Echo Nest, and Netflix? I remember when Youtube had a rating system of stars and wondered why they got rid of them. People were not using the middle star ratings, and it seemed pointless to have them. These sites attempt to recommend content as well, and this is a complicated problem.
Musical tastes are the most divisive, however. Vanderbilt talks about the Insane Clown Posse, a band that I have not listened to before. Critics loathe it, but it has a fanbase nonetheless. The internet has changed many things in our society, from how we consume music and movies, to how we shop for goods. It allows you to meet like-minded people on any subject.
Art is something with which I am less familiar. I have been to the local Art Museum once.
Tastes tend to change. Vanderbilt looks into this as well.
Finally, Vanderbilt explores expertise. Why did we trust Siskel and Ebert to deliver good reviews of movies when they were on television? What did they see in a film that a random movie-goer would ignore or overlook? The same questions crop up for professional judges.
With all of this, how is one meant to enjoy anything? Vanderbilt has pointers for enjoying and liking things.
December 11, 2016
This was an interesting and in-depth analysis of many concepts to do with "liking", including what we like, why we like what we like and why our tastes change over time. I really *liked* (haha) how well-researched it is and how the author is able to explain these concepts by drawing on a wide range of examples where they are relevant (e.g. Netflix recommendations, online reviews, music tastes, craft beer tasting competitions, etc). His discussion moves naturally from one idea to another and incorporates many relevant theories from psychology, marketing, and neuroscience.
January 27, 2018
Deviates between insightful and poignant assholery. As Mark Twain says, "Anybody can have ideas–the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph." However, I do feel like I have learnt a few fun facts from this book.
Read
February 28, 2020Um livro bem interessante sobre o que influencia nossas preferências. Seria impossível dar uma resposta fechadinha de "você gosta de x por causa de y", claro, mas o autor fez um bom trabalho de costurar diversos estudos sobre os fatores biológicos, históricos e sociais que afetam nossas percepções sobre praticamente qualquer coisa. Eu poderia passar dias só indo atrás das pesquisas que ele menciona na bibliografia.
Minhas partes favoritas: o surgimento dos conceitos de "bom gosto" e "mau gosto" (totalmente atrelados a elitismo); o efeito que prêmios têm sobre a avaliação de livros (as notas dos livros ganhadores caem porque ele está chegando em leitores que talvez não sejam os corretos para aquele título, e porque todos chegam esperando que o livro "prove" que mereceu o prêmio. notas de livros finalistas às vezes sobem porque as pessoas se sentem descobridoras de um título injustiçado); avaliações de bens de experiência (filmes, livros etc) costumam ser mais rigorosas que de bens de busca (uma câmera, um armário etc) porque a pessoa sente necessidade de defender seu gosto (que está atrelado à percepção de si mesmo); a tendência de considerarmos mais agradável o que se encaixa em classificações conhecidas e aquilo a que já fomos expostos (e consequentemente, a dificuldade de coisas que saem do molde serem apreciadas logo de cara).
Minhas partes favoritas: o surgimento dos conceitos de "bom gosto" e "mau gosto" (totalmente atrelados a elitismo); o efeito que prêmios têm sobre a avaliação de livros (as notas dos livros ganhadores caem porque ele está chegando em leitores que talvez não sejam os corretos para aquele título, e porque todos chegam esperando que o livro "prove" que mereceu o prêmio. notas de livros finalistas às vezes sobem porque as pessoas se sentem descobridoras de um título injustiçado); avaliações de bens de experiência (filmes, livros etc) costumam ser mais rigorosas que de bens de busca (uma câmera, um armário etc) porque a pessoa sente necessidade de defender seu gosto (que está atrelado à percepção de si mesmo); a tendência de considerarmos mais agradável o que se encaixa em classificações conhecidas e aquilo a que já fomos expostos (e consequentemente, a dificuldade de coisas que saem do molde serem apreciadas logo de cara).
January 31, 2024
3.5 stars
The author looks at what people like, why we like those things, etc. Our “taste” so to speak (not the sense of taste, but our “taste” for what we like). He does, of course, discuss food, but there is also a chapter (I found this one particularly interesting) on online reviews and recommendations, etc. Other chapters include museums/art, ways to describe why we like something, and more.
Not too much to say about this. I found it (mostly) interesting and easy to read. Oddly, although I’m not really one for art appreciation, I remember that chapter a bit more than some of the others (also the online review chapter, but that may not be a surprise considering I am writing a review to post online…!).
The author looks at what people like, why we like those things, etc. Our “taste” so to speak (not the sense of taste, but our “taste” for what we like). He does, of course, discuss food, but there is also a chapter (I found this one particularly interesting) on online reviews and recommendations, etc. Other chapters include museums/art, ways to describe why we like something, and more.
Not too much to say about this. I found it (mostly) interesting and easy to read. Oddly, although I’m not really one for art appreciation, I remember that chapter a bit more than some of the others (also the online review chapter, but that may not be a surprise considering I am writing a review to post online…!).
July 15, 2016
This is a book about why we like what we like. The author explores major areas in which preferences are commonly shared, from food and restaurants, to books, movies, music, beer, and even cats.
For me, not all of the areas he discussed were of interest, or rather, they might have been had he not belabored them so much. In addition, I didn’t always find the studies he described persuasive. Basically he concludes that there are lots of reasons we have tastes for one thing or another, and it’s hard to tell what they are.
It could be related to our memories (we love something because it reminds us of happy times as kids); expectations (the wine is expensive, so it is “supposed” to be good); the influence of our culture (we grew up in Philadelphia so we love Philly cheesesteaks) or friends or “experts,” or even identity issues (e.g., I want to be seen as someone who likes highbrow things, or conversely, l want to be thought of as more avant garde, and so I want to choose lowbrow things). We both want to be like others and we want to be different from others. Which is it? It may well be both, but a theory for anything and everything doesn’t explain much. Similarly with our taste in books and movies: seeing positive ratings by others can influence people to upgrade their evaluations, and seeing negative ratings can induce them to downgrade them. Vanderbilt avers we crave novelty, but we also crave familiarity. What exactly does all that explain?
In other words, there are theories that explain every possibility, and therefore they provide no enlightenment whatsoever.
The author does include a few interesting vignettes about music and food and movies, but beyond being diverting, they just don’t say much. He also poses some thought-provoking questions. How exactly, for example, would you describe what a carrot tastes like, without using the word carrot? (Vanderbilt points to a paucity of words to account for taste, unlike the plethora of theories to describe it!)
This doesn’t mean the subject doesn’t have the potential for being fun. There are some hilarious videos on youtube, to list but a few, with people arguing about whether grits should have sugar or salt; which Jewish holiday dishes are better (“The Great Latke-Hamantaschen Debates”); and whether deep dish pizza is better than thin crust. But in this book, the strength of preferences and the reasons behind that vehemence was mainly discussed with respect to very, very esoteric types of music.
Evaluation: I hoped this would be better, but in spite of what I thought was a potentially interesting topic, it didn’t engage me much. But then again, it’s all a matter of taste. What I like not so much, other readers/listeners will undoubtedly like a lot.
For me, not all of the areas he discussed were of interest, or rather, they might have been had he not belabored them so much. In addition, I didn’t always find the studies he described persuasive. Basically he concludes that there are lots of reasons we have tastes for one thing or another, and it’s hard to tell what they are.
It could be related to our memories (we love something because it reminds us of happy times as kids); expectations (the wine is expensive, so it is “supposed” to be good); the influence of our culture (we grew up in Philadelphia so we love Philly cheesesteaks) or friends or “experts,” or even identity issues (e.g., I want to be seen as someone who likes highbrow things, or conversely, l want to be thought of as more avant garde, and so I want to choose lowbrow things). We both want to be like others and we want to be different from others. Which is it? It may well be both, but a theory for anything and everything doesn’t explain much. Similarly with our taste in books and movies: seeing positive ratings by others can influence people to upgrade their evaluations, and seeing negative ratings can induce them to downgrade them. Vanderbilt avers we crave novelty, but we also crave familiarity. What exactly does all that explain?
In other words, there are theories that explain every possibility, and therefore they provide no enlightenment whatsoever.
The author does include a few interesting vignettes about music and food and movies, but beyond being diverting, they just don’t say much. He also poses some thought-provoking questions. How exactly, for example, would you describe what a carrot tastes like, without using the word carrot? (Vanderbilt points to a paucity of words to account for taste, unlike the plethora of theories to describe it!)
This doesn’t mean the subject doesn’t have the potential for being fun. There are some hilarious videos on youtube, to list but a few, with people arguing about whether grits should have sugar or salt; which Jewish holiday dishes are better (“The Great Latke-Hamantaschen Debates”); and whether deep dish pizza is better than thin crust. But in this book, the strength of preferences and the reasons behind that vehemence was mainly discussed with respect to very, very esoteric types of music.
Evaluation: I hoped this would be better, but in spite of what I thought was a potentially interesting topic, it didn’t engage me much. But then again, it’s all a matter of taste. What I like not so much, other readers/listeners will undoubtedly like a lot.
June 29, 2016
I like books like this. Hard hitting social commentary on what we humans want, like and eventually do, does intrigue me. Tom Vanderbilt proffers evidence and science on how we pick and choose.
From judging cats in Paris, to beer tastings, to how Pandora chooses its playlists makes for fun reading. Vanderbilt uses all these examples of what judging takes place every moment, every instant, to illuminate the how and why of our decisions.
This work has made me think longer about my food and exercise choices. We must make these adjudications each and every day. We slip into laziness by so many times going with what we always have done before. Even optional quandaries such as music, entertainments and art allow us to default into no decision at all. This book serves as a tune-up for our senses and taste buds.
The title is correct--we live in an avalanche of choices, advertising and commercial goading. Our production/profit culture insists on, with a background din of the drumming of society's manicured nails, a manic force feeding of continuous consumption.
Push back. Savor the sheer art, the freedom of our choice. Before every bite, prior to every purchase, think about what we are doing. Ask "why" five times. I have been finding less is indeed more.
From judging cats in Paris, to beer tastings, to how Pandora chooses its playlists makes for fun reading. Vanderbilt uses all these examples of what judging takes place every moment, every instant, to illuminate the how and why of our decisions.
This work has made me think longer about my food and exercise choices. We must make these adjudications each and every day. We slip into laziness by so many times going with what we always have done before. Even optional quandaries such as music, entertainments and art allow us to default into no decision at all. This book serves as a tune-up for our senses and taste buds.
The title is correct--we live in an avalanche of choices, advertising and commercial goading. Our production/profit culture insists on, with a background din of the drumming of society's manicured nails, a manic force feeding of continuous consumption.
Push back. Savor the sheer art, the freedom of our choice. Before every bite, prior to every purchase, think about what we are doing. Ask "why" five times. I have been finding less is indeed more.
December 7, 2020
Having preferences is one part of who we are, to go deeper into why we have them and exploring taste in a thoughtful way is what this book aims to do. It's a great introduction to learning about taste and preferences.
Wow. I thought that this book was such an interesting and insightful read, making me reflect deeper on myself and my preferences in a way that I've only scratch the surface of doing. So much of the information in here is relatable to the reader, the reader can easily find themselves thinking about things such as favorite songs or food they like, seeing things in a new and different way. I really enjoyed reading it and felt like I gained a lot from it. The book was full of research from psychology, history, science, culture, blending them all together in order to try and come up with an answer of why we like things. Tom does a good job at researching these topics and integrating them into his ideas and the narrative of this book. Some of the information was interesting to me and stuff that I did not know about. I like how Tom talked to people and went to places, so that he could further deepen his research and his ideas. That was just something that I found cool and interesting to read about. Hearing from people that were considered experts and their thoughts on the topic was insightful in knowing how they came to liking something or how they judge it.
Sometimes Tom got off-topic, talking about one topic or going off on something that I felt didn't fit the narrative of the book. But then most times, he would tie it together and things would make sense. I found myself having a hard time taking in some of the information, and some of the sections I wasn't as interested in.
But overall, it was an enjoyable read that I felt like I learned a lot from and allowed me to reflect on myself and society as a whole.
Wow. I thought that this book was such an interesting and insightful read, making me reflect deeper on myself and my preferences in a way that I've only scratch the surface of doing. So much of the information in here is relatable to the reader, the reader can easily find themselves thinking about things such as favorite songs or food they like, seeing things in a new and different way. I really enjoyed reading it and felt like I gained a lot from it. The book was full of research from psychology, history, science, culture, blending them all together in order to try and come up with an answer of why we like things. Tom does a good job at researching these topics and integrating them into his ideas and the narrative of this book. Some of the information was interesting to me and stuff that I did not know about. I like how Tom talked to people and went to places, so that he could further deepen his research and his ideas. That was just something that I found cool and interesting to read about. Hearing from people that were considered experts and their thoughts on the topic was insightful in knowing how they came to liking something or how they judge it.
Sometimes Tom got off-topic, talking about one topic or going off on something that I felt didn't fit the narrative of the book. But then most times, he would tie it together and things would make sense. I found myself having a hard time taking in some of the information, and some of the sections I wasn't as interested in.
But overall, it was an enjoyable read that I felt like I learned a lot from and allowed me to reflect on myself and society as a whole.
October 30, 2021
I liked it. so something about the book seemed monotonous to me and I really wanted a larger discussion on how the internet and algorithmic sites and influencers have changed our tastes but this book is from 2014 so, alright, things weren't as drastic as they are today. I'd read a follow up on those topics.
"And yet culture often lurks behind supposedly 'natural' preferences."
"Buyers' remorse, it's said, happens because we buy something in an affected state of mine ('I really want this') then reflect in a more cognitive state ('what was I thinking?')."
Call something what it is - people like something better when it's what they're expecting.
"They got it in their mouth and were like 'bleh!' - they were not told how to like it."
"When someone knows he is influenced by another and that other person knows it, too, that is persuasion. When someone is unaware he is being influenced and the influencer is unaware of his influence that is contagion."
"As Bentley put it to me, 'By my recent count there are 3,500 different laptops on the market. How does anyone make a utility maximizing choice among all those?' The cost of learning which one is truly best is almost beyond the individual. There may actually be little that separates them in terms of quality. So any one purchase over another might simply reflect random copying."
"In the world of sensory testing the words like and dislike are discouraged. Why? Because they may throw off the very judgement of taste panelists. Liking and Disliking can be top down concepts that often get in the way of our actual experience of something. Asking whether you like something or not often puts a premature end to a more interesting conversation....Language can unlock liking."
"And yet culture often lurks behind supposedly 'natural' preferences."
"Buyers' remorse, it's said, happens because we buy something in an affected state of mine ('I really want this') then reflect in a more cognitive state ('what was I thinking?')."
Call something what it is - people like something better when it's what they're expecting.
"They got it in their mouth and were like 'bleh!' - they were not told how to like it."
"When someone knows he is influenced by another and that other person knows it, too, that is persuasion. When someone is unaware he is being influenced and the influencer is unaware of his influence that is contagion."
"As Bentley put it to me, 'By my recent count there are 3,500 different laptops on the market. How does anyone make a utility maximizing choice among all those?' The cost of learning which one is truly best is almost beyond the individual. There may actually be little that separates them in terms of quality. So any one purchase over another might simply reflect random copying."
"In the world of sensory testing the words like and dislike are discouraged. Why? Because they may throw off the very judgement of taste panelists. Liking and Disliking can be top down concepts that often get in the way of our actual experience of something. Asking whether you like something or not often puts a premature end to a more interesting conversation....Language can unlock liking."
June 19, 2024
As a person with biases and tastes, this book was a very enjoyable excursion into why we like or dislike the things we do, and why it's often so difficult to put it into words. Knowing about things allows you to appreciate them in a way that is often better and worse than when you first encountered them. Attending a concert because you like classical music casually without having learned to play an instrument is a vastly different experience than having performed a piece yourself, whether or not you've read the program and know the historical context for the piece. Going to a museum to look at oil paintings is not the same when you paint with oils yourself. This bias goes even further because you can't possibly know how to play all the instruments in the orchestra and your ear will be attuned to one you're most familiar with. Alternatively, if you paint in a different medium, like watercolours, you may know the theory of painting with oils and appreciate the technique in the abstract but have no actual feel for it. And so it goes for every art form. A similar phenomenon seems to overshadow wine, beer, coffee and chocolate appreciation. Our knowledge will always be limited, tainted by a myriad of circumstances out of our control, from our past personal experiences to social trends.
An interesting point was made about guilty pleasures being shameful rather than guilty and its social absolution through the atonement of admitting to them, and investigating whether the enjoyment of this guilty pleasure derives some or most of its pleasure from the mild stigma that comes with it. In its inception this expression referred to doing things for which one "should" feel guilt and go to confession to be absolved from sin and how it's morphed into its current use.
An interesting point was made about guilty pleasures being shameful rather than guilty and its social absolution through the atonement of admitting to them, and investigating whether the enjoyment of this guilty pleasure derives some or most of its pleasure from the mild stigma that comes with it. In its inception this expression referred to doing things for which one "should" feel guilt and go to confession to be absolved from sin and how it's morphed into its current use.
March 25, 2023
As a 10 year old, my lucky number was 72 and my favorite color was blue; I even intentionally made a switch to orange for about 6 months when I was 12 or so. After reading this book I now know this is not at all unique!
This is an interesting read about human preferences across a range of topics. It pivots well across categories and gives just enough information to not feel like Vanderbilt dragged on too long in one area. While I won't remember all of it for the long run, certain parts will stick with me. The Netflix information, when our music preferences generally solidify, and the influence of color on professional tasters are among the highlights for me. This is a good read if you have an interest in psychology or random facts, and the audiobook was well read.
This is an interesting read about human preferences across a range of topics. It pivots well across categories and gives just enough information to not feel like Vanderbilt dragged on too long in one area. While I won't remember all of it for the long run, certain parts will stick with me. The Netflix information, when our music preferences generally solidify, and the influence of color on professional tasters are among the highlights for me. This is a good read if you have an interest in psychology or random facts, and the audiobook was well read.
September 11, 2020
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This is the first book of this type that I've read, and did not know quite what to expect. While a lot of it seems like simple common sense (for example, why we choose certain foods), much of it was surprising. Recommended for those with an avid interest in popular culture and time to digest the message.
Rachel - The Book Grocer
This is the first book of this type that I've read, and did not know quite what to expect. While a lot of it seems like simple common sense (for example, why we choose certain foods), much of it was surprising. Recommended for those with an avid interest in popular culture and time to digest the message.
Rachel - The Book Grocer
April 17, 2017
For a while I have been interested in what makes people like different things, especially seemingly arbitrary things like names. I was so excited to find a book that focused on just that. Basically what I learned is that likes are so influenced by external factors, categories and associations that it's almost as if you can't be sure that what you like truly comes from you.
Read
January 13, 2024I thought about abandoning this book until the chapter on Netflix’s recommendations and star ratings started.
Although I have eschewed star ratings here for a few years, I had recently thought about using them again. After reading that chapter, nope, not doing it.
I finished the book and got something out of some parts, but overall it didn’t do it for me.
Although I have eschewed star ratings here for a few years, I had recently thought about using them again. After reading that chapter, nope, not doing it.
I finished the book and got something out of some parts, but overall it didn’t do it for me.
did-not-finish
March 12, 2024DNF. i enjoyed the time i had with this book well enough, but not really enough to keep reading it. maybe ill pick it back up again someday
July 1, 2016
A broad-ranging look at why we like the things we like. He touches lightly on the philosophy of aesthetics (mostly Kant, Hume, Bourdieu), interviews people in the business of trying to analyze and predict what people will watch on Netflix or listen to on services like Pandora and Echo Nest, and refers to dozens of studies on the psychology and neuroscience of preference.
There are lots of fun tidbits. For example, it turns out that while exposure generally tends to make people like paintings more, the opposite is true of Thomas Kinkade. A speculative explanation: Kinkade's paintings are so packed with sentiment and the desire to make people feel, they're the visual equivalent of a sugary drink. It may be initially pleasing, but quickly becomes cloying. Subtler works reward repeat viewings. Another fun section muses on the "critical period of maximum sensitivity" to music, which some researchers have pegged at 23.5 years old. Is this a biologically fixed period, like the critical period for language acquisition, or is it that the music gets associated with the events and changes of late adolescence/early adulthood that have such a formative impact on us, or is it that music is cheap and accessible and so becomes the currency of status and identity for teenagers and adults without a lot of other kinds of capital?
But both the individual chapters and the book as a whole lack good, coherent arguments. It seems a bit like he gathered up a lot of thematically related material and crammed it together without giving quite enough thought to what it adds up to. He does come away with some overarching principles, like "liking is learning" and "we like things more when we know how to categorize them," but these often don't account for the counterexamples. If liking is learning, why doesn't people's estimation of Kinkade grow on repeat viewing, too? Entertaining, but underdeveloped and ultimately unsatisfying.
There are lots of fun tidbits. For example, it turns out that while exposure generally tends to make people like paintings more, the opposite is true of Thomas Kinkade. A speculative explanation: Kinkade's paintings are so packed with sentiment and the desire to make people feel, they're the visual equivalent of a sugary drink. It may be initially pleasing, but quickly becomes cloying. Subtler works reward repeat viewings. Another fun section muses on the "critical period of maximum sensitivity" to music, which some researchers have pegged at 23.5 years old. Is this a biologically fixed period, like the critical period for language acquisition, or is it that the music gets associated with the events and changes of late adolescence/early adulthood that have such a formative impact on us, or is it that music is cheap and accessible and so becomes the currency of status and identity for teenagers and adults without a lot of other kinds of capital?
But both the individual chapters and the book as a whole lack good, coherent arguments. It seems a bit like he gathered up a lot of thematically related material and crammed it together without giving quite enough thought to what it adds up to. He does come away with some overarching principles, like "liking is learning" and "we like things more when we know how to categorize them," but these often don't account for the counterexamples. If liking is learning, why doesn't people's estimation of Kinkade grow on repeat viewing, too? Entertaining, but underdeveloped and ultimately unsatisfying.
September 29, 2016
This book contains myriad talking points. I bookmarked over 20 different pages because I want to share the information with others, yet I must confess to skimming chunks of chapters.
Here are some of the tidbits I want to chat about with someone:
page 25
Anticipated pleasure is greater for those ordering a favorite food, but the experienced pleasure is increased for plates of food that are new to us. We remember firsts.
page 36
Flavor is influenced by lighting, expectations, and names of dishes or drinks. People enjoyed steak less when the lighting in the room was bluish.
page 40
We frequently eat the same breakfasts, but insist on variety later in the day.
page 79
It's possible for algorithms to determine truthful reviews from fake reviews. So many algorithms. So much illusion of choice.
page 81
Google, you scare me.
page 107
Taste freeze.
There is an opportunity cost to consider regarding the time spent discovering new enjoyments when we already know what we like and are at an age of nostalgia.
page 165
It's exhausting to continually strive toward being different, cutting edge, and groundbreaking...and there is almost always a safe group of others who are also being different in the same way.
page 174
The popularity of biblical baby names does not parallel high church attendance rates.
page 225
Julian Barnes "called anticipation 'the most reliable form of pleasure,' for it cannot be dashed before it happens. Memory provides a similar safe haven." There it is: why I relish planning a vacation just as much as I enjoy being away and exploring, and idly re-living the experiences later.
Here are some of the tidbits I want to chat about with someone:
page 25
Anticipated pleasure is greater for those ordering a favorite food, but the experienced pleasure is increased for plates of food that are new to us. We remember firsts.
page 36
Flavor is influenced by lighting, expectations, and names of dishes or drinks. People enjoyed steak less when the lighting in the room was bluish.
page 40
We frequently eat the same breakfasts, but insist on variety later in the day.
page 79
It's possible for algorithms to determine truthful reviews from fake reviews. So many algorithms. So much illusion of choice.
page 81
Google, you scare me.
page 107
Taste freeze.
There is an opportunity cost to consider regarding the time spent discovering new enjoyments when we already know what we like and are at an age of nostalgia.
page 165
It's exhausting to continually strive toward being different, cutting edge, and groundbreaking...and there is almost always a safe group of others who are also being different in the same way.
page 174
The popularity of biblical baby names does not parallel high church attendance rates.
page 225
Julian Barnes "called anticipation 'the most reliable form of pleasure,' for it cannot be dashed before it happens. Memory provides a similar safe haven." There it is: why I relish planning a vacation just as much as I enjoy being away and exploring, and idly re-living the experiences later.
December 6, 2019
Vanderbiltova kniha s názvem „Mohlo by se vám také líbit“ byl náhodný výběr v regálech ústřední knihovny. Nechala jsem se zviklat názvem. Představovala jsem si, že by kniha mohla psát o tom, jak fungují algoritmy, které nám doporučující nejrůznější věci na sítích. V dnešní době je najde skoro všude. Je to zajímavé téma a čekala jsem případové studie. Bohužel moje očekávání bylo liché. Kniha popisuje spíše naše chutě, to jak můžeme a rozpoznáváme jednotlivé chutě a příchutě. Což nebylo úplně to, co jsem hledala. Nicméně aspoň částečně moje touhy uspokojila kapitola 4 o tom, jak předvídatelný je náš vkus, kde se také rozebíralo, jakým způsobem Netflix určuje, na co se budeme dívat, bez ohledu na to, co říkáme (co si dáváme do svých wishlistů, neboli seznamů přání).
Mnohokrát lidé ani nevědí, co chtějí, dokud jim to neukážete, říkal Steve Jobs.
Ale i potom, co jim to ukážete, se jim to nemusí chtít. I když dnes zařízení Applu Newton PDA v době smartphonů, jež se v zásadě staly lidskými protézami, vypadá kuriózně, bylo pravděpodobně v čase svého vydání příliš novátorským, vyžadovalo potřeby a chování, které ještě nebyly plně rozvinuté. Jak to popsal Wired, šlo o „úplně novou kategorii zařízení spouštějící úplně novou architekturu sídlící ve faktoru formy, který představoval úplně nový a smělý jazyk designu“.
Pamatujte: co se lidem líbí, či nelíbí, je alchymie, kterou není jednouché ovládnout, protože na krátkou chvíli se může stát trendem i naprostá pitomost.
Mnohokrát lidé ani nevědí, co chtějí, dokud jim to neukážete, říkal Steve Jobs.
Ale i potom, co jim to ukážete, se jim to nemusí chtít. I když dnes zařízení Applu Newton PDA v době smartphonů, jež se v zásadě staly lidskými protézami, vypadá kuriózně, bylo pravděpodobně v čase svého vydání příliš novátorským, vyžadovalo potřeby a chování, které ještě nebyly plně rozvinuté. Jak to popsal Wired, šlo o „úplně novou kategorii zařízení spouštějící úplně novou architekturu sídlící ve faktoru formy, který představoval úplně nový a smělý jazyk designu“.
Pamatujte: co se lidem líbí, či nelíbí, je alchymie, kterou není jednouché ovládnout, protože na krátkou chvíli se může stát trendem i naprostá pitomost.
May 28, 2016
The book is about tastes and preferences, and how they come about. How are they determined and what can affect them. It's interesting. The first section is on food choices. I had noticed a few years back that everywhere I looked "Sea Salt Caramel" recipes were popping up. It really perplexed me. One of the tidbits I picked up in the book explained that for me - chefs have discovered that putting 'sea salt' in the title leads consumers to expect the saltiness, and they'll like it, but if they aren't warned, they won't like it. Aha! I still am not completely clear on why every magazine featured that sort of recipe month after month for several months.
Another section I really liked concerned online reviews and online reviewers. Where does bias come into play, what causes it, and what does it have the most effect on, that sort of thing. The book goes further onto how consumers review reviewers. The notes at the back have links to a lot of studies on bias and taste making in regards to reviews.
I think anyone interested in psychology or marketing might enjoy this book, as well as the simply curious. The book is well written, and examples are so relatable that they really add to the enjoyment of the book- often making difficult concepts easier to grasp.
Another section I really liked concerned online reviews and online reviewers. Where does bias come into play, what causes it, and what does it have the most effect on, that sort of thing. The book goes further onto how consumers review reviewers. The notes at the back have links to a lot of studies on bias and taste making in regards to reviews.
I think anyone interested in psychology or marketing might enjoy this book, as well as the simply curious. The book is well written, and examples are so relatable that they really add to the enjoyment of the book- often making difficult concepts easier to grasp.
January 3, 2018
Good book, a bit long so I skimmed a bit. I liked the point that the more bland the food is, the less quickly people tire of it because the memory of bland food fades more quickly than exciting food....unless, like me, almost all your food is exciting - that too starts to all blend together.
Summary points:
- you will know what you like or do not like before you know why
- get beyond "like" and "dislike", use better language to talk about why
- we like things more when they can be categorized
- do not trust the easy like
- you may like that you see but you also see what you like
- liking is learning
- we like what we expect and we like what we remember
- 3 oppositions: novelty vs familiarity, conformity vs distinction, simplicity vs complexity
- dislikes are harder to spot for are more powerful and reveal more
- "trying to explain or understand any one person's particular tastes, including one's own, is always going to be a maddeningly elusive and idiosyncratic enterprise. But the way we come to have the tastes we do can often be understood through a set of psychological and social dynamics that function much the same...the more interesting question is not what we like but why we like it." (p.226)
Summary points:
- you will know what you like or do not like before you know why
- get beyond "like" and "dislike", use better language to talk about why
- we like things more when they can be categorized
- do not trust the easy like
- you may like that you see but you also see what you like
- liking is learning
- we like what we expect and we like what we remember
- 3 oppositions: novelty vs familiarity, conformity vs distinction, simplicity vs complexity
- dislikes are harder to spot for are more powerful and reveal more
- "trying to explain or understand any one person's particular tastes, including one's own, is always going to be a maddeningly elusive and idiosyncratic enterprise. But the way we come to have the tastes we do can often be understood through a set of psychological and social dynamics that function much the same...the more interesting question is not what we like but why we like it." (p.226)
July 25, 2016
I picked up this book for two reasons: 1. I had liked his previous book, TRAFFIC, and felt like I learned a lot from it, and 2. I was very curious about how we each develop our individual tastes. A look at the 60+ pages of footnotes, makes it seem like it will be a very scientific book and quite heavy. As I read though it, I was disappointed because while I was hoping for anatomical reasons for why we like or don't like something, the book was all based on marketing and psychological explanations. So in looking back at the two books of his that I have read, I liked TRAFFIC because it really added to my knowledge on the topic, while this book gave me few answers and I liked it a lot less.
April 3, 2017
The book explores why we like the things we like, and how we justify liking the things we like. It's interesting how easy it is to manipulate people into liking something, and that 'taste' is not something that you should trust or take pride in since ~surprise!~ it changes and is unreliable.
Furthermore, Vanderbilt advises that it is okay not to like or dislike something, and rather focuses on explaining or understanding why we feel the way we feel.
In a world filled with likes and 5-star rating systems, this is somewhat relieving: you can have an opinion about something without having to like or dislike it.
Furthermore, Vanderbilt advises that it is okay not to like or dislike something, and rather focuses on explaining or understanding why we feel the way we feel.
In a world filled with likes and 5-star rating systems, this is somewhat relieving: you can have an opinion about something without having to like or dislike it.
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