Taste, Scarcity and Curation
Whenever I'm sitting at home looking for something to read, or watch, or browse; these thoughts tend to pop into my mind: I could read / watch / listen / browse something I'm already familiar with, or look for something totally new. If I find something new that I deeply enjoy, this will bring a lot of happiness to me and could potentially improve my life over a long period. However, most (but not all!) stuff isn't worth the time to consume it, and there's an effectively infinite flow of stuff of dubious quality that either makes no difference or may actively reduce my happiness out there.
So, given limited time, sticking with familiar stuff seems rational given the limited information I have about all the other stuff I could be watching. But, sometimes, after a long time of being aware of its existence, I finally decide to consume something that I know is critically acclaimed and I know people with similar tastes enjoy and shockingly it's actually really good and well worth the time!1 As someone who sincerely believes themselves to have Taste, why don't I use it to find something totally new to experience every day?
Some responses to this might be:
- Really good stuff is genuinely quite scarce and so I have a (maybe totally rational!) scarcity mindset about really good stuff, so I stick with the stuff I know I enjoy and get a satisfactory amount of happiness from it.
- Looking for new things to experience for most people is a case of satisficing, where once you have enough stuff you simply don't feel as much of a need to seek out new things. As long as you are not actively bored by whatever you're looking at, you're probably fine sticking with what you know.
- Or time is the scarce quantity here. There may be an ocean of good stuff somewhere, but without any guide (or a flawed guide) to what is excellent and totally worth your time and what is mediocre or bad, the time it takes to sort out what's actually worth the time is prohibitive to anyone but the most engaged.
This seems to lead to an argument that we need better curation, at least of a sort the omnipresent recommendation algorithms can't (or won't) provide. High quality human curation can pick out the genuinely good stuff at a high success rate2 and reduce the 'activation energy' of finding something genuinely great. Of course, then the problem becomes finding the high quality curators themselves...
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On a totally unrelated note, you should listen to Japanese band Fishmans' Long Season.↩
Though never perfect, taking into account idiosyncrasies of the curator themselves. The point is that it's consistently better than whatever online rating systems or the average of the internet discourse can provide.↩