Or don't, and cultivate taste, which is about having a rationale for separating the good from the bad -- and disliking stuff. It might not make you popular at parties though.

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williamdclt a day ago | parent | next [-]

I think that's orthogonal. The author is not saying that everything in every field is good: their TV example explicitly calls out bad TV.

What they are saying is that you can make yourself enjoy a field _at all_, in which you can then apply taste. For example I don't like whisky, but that's not a matter of me applying "good taste": I would never claim that whisky is bad in general and if I really tried I'm pretty sure I would start being able to enjoy whisky and separate the good from the bad (at least subjectively).

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manfromchina1 a day ago | parent | next [-]

> I think that's orthogonal.

One time on 4chan I mentioned I liked how users on HN like to pepper their speech with little math words like so: "Love is orthogonal to distance, modulo trust, and the parameters aren’t marginal". People wouldnt believe me this was normal talk. Case in point. Although this was more prevalent on HN about 10 years ago. Or maybe now as well. I dont read comments as much these days.

	▲	mythrwy a day ago \| parent [-]
		It was an "order of magnitude" more prevalent on HN about 10 years ago. But this is orthogonal to the original topic.

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xenobeb 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Taste isn't static over time either.

My favorite thing is to rediscover something I thought in the past was terrible only to now find I love it.

	▲	harperlee 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		What about the converse: showing your significant other e.g. the best film ever, only to discover with horror how bad your taste was a number of years ago?

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esafak a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Absolutely! One can also recognize the good and the bad in a field that one dislikes, judged by its own criteria.

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rfrey a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But remain open to the possibility it's not your good taste that is making you unpopular at parties.

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celeries a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I like plain oatmeal. I wouldn't say it's "good" in most qualitative senses.

"Cultivating taste" might mean less capacity to tolerate or enjoy things that are fine-but-not-great.

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tripletpeaks a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s fine to like trash.

It’s best to be able to tell it’s trash, because if you can’t then it means you’re missing what you need to fully appreciate really good things, which is less than ideal.

But it’s totally fine to like it. Zero shame.

And it doesn’t make people bad who can’t tell the difference between trash and good stuff, they’ve just prioritized different (and, maybe, less, but who cares) stuff than you have. Though when they try to make recommendations it’s fair to totally ignore them. Even if you are looking for a particular kind of trash, you need a critic who can tell good from bad (but appreciates that even bad things have an audience) if you want a good hit-rate. And when those sorts start to opine that actually good things are bad (because they haven’t developed the ability to appreciate them) it’s fine to regard that behavior as boorish, because it is. It’s basically the inverse of snobbery, and yeah, it’s also shitty.

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aklemm a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Good taste should be intriguing, so you might be doing it wrong.

	▲	zwnow a day ago \| parent [-]
		Its also very subjective and dismissing people because they have "bad taste" is silly behavior

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praptak a day ago | parent | prev [-]

No, fuck taste. It's either a class shibboleth or just a game of Calvinball where snobs trying to one up each other.

	▲	a day ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]