I’m not suggesting that we believe things because others do—that’s enormously different! My reasoning is as follows: Pleasure is among my terminal values; listening to this music gives me pleasure; so in the absence of important other factors in the expected utility calculation, it’s A Good Thing. In this particular case, are there, in fact, other important important consequences?
True, and it is the arbitrary, non-epistemic nature of aesthetics that justifies my judgment that you do little harm by permitting the influence you describe.
But what’s actually happening is that the music initially doesn’t give you pleasure—as you said, you would not be able to distinguish it from another “Radiohead” imitator that you now “don’t like”—and then you have consciously permitted (in the sense of not resisting a known phenomenon) yourself to make a path-dependent update in your tastes through a (so-called) “bandwagon” effect.
Really, you would be better off simply listening to music that you independently like, rather than spending finite resources to change your aesthetic preferences in a different arbitrary direction, and that cost is the consequence. My point, then, is that I agree with you in that there are instrumental reasons to permit such hysteresis in your aesthetic preferences, such as the improved ability to relate to others—and this likely outweighs the above harm.
In the more general case, though, it would not help you to permit such a “bandwagon” adjustment in the direction of, for example, “liking” to listen to materials science lectures filled with incorrect models. Though you may think that you can “draw the distinction”, and avoid absorbing the incorrect materials science into your beliefs, the reality is that ape brains are very poor about handling this kind of dissonance.
I hope my position and concerns are clearer and more intuitive now.
I think we agree on the “broad brush” aspects of the problem (in particular that it’s really about the specifics here).
Thank you for the example of fashionable materials science lectures, I now agree on that point.
The specifics here are interesting, though, so I’ll take it further.
Discounting values for path-dependency has an appealing elegance, but as a general principle it is, I think, unsound. Any value that saturates has such a path-dependence: I enjoy eating, then I become full, then I no longer enjoy eating. I enjoy learning about linear algebra, then I master it, then I no longer enjoy learning about linear algebra. If you appeal to the underlying value of “not being hungry” or “learning new mathematics” then I can equally appeal to “enjoying fashionable music”.
That ignores the specific social component of bandwagons, though, which I have already said that I agree with you on.
Really, you would be better off simply listening to music that you independently like, rather than spending finite resources to change your aesthetic preferences in a different arbitrary direction, and that cost is the consequence.
This assumes that the cost of finding music that appeals to one’s innate preferences is lower than the cost of changing those preferences to match what’s commonly available. This is not necessarily the case—in fact, I generally find it not to be. (Pandora music service’s AI comes close, but it can still only play music that’s actually been produced and entered into its database, and even in that case it takes a fair amount of effort to teach the AI what I like in each general category of music that I like, plus I suspect it’s incapable of learning certain nuances like ‘I only like this instrument when it’s paired with one of these other instruments’.)
Although there may be people who never heard a piece of music that they actually liked, while still having the ability to like some music, I thought such cases are so rare that they can be disregarded. I generally dislike most of the modern music (where “modern” means something like “less than 50 years old”), and have no problem to find something which fits my preferences. In purely financial costs, non-fashionable music is probably much cheaper.
Setting up a status-effect-free “clean room” from which to evaluate new music would be far more costly than just letting the mostly-autonomous bandwagon effect produce the same amount of aesthetic satisfaction.
That may hold for a certain class of human situations. However, User:alexflint’s story indicates that User:alexflint did endure a gross cost [1] greater than what would have resulted from not applying filters for popularity. The alternative to allowing one to be influenced in this matter is not to impose an impermeable “clean room”, but to simply avoid avoidable expenditures when the source of the bias is noticed.
[1] though as I’ve made clear, not necessarily exceeding the benefits to terminal values
I’m not suggesting that we believe things because others do—that’s enormously different! My reasoning is as follows: Pleasure is among my terminal values; listening to this music gives me pleasure; so in the absence of important other factors in the expected utility calculation, it’s A Good Thing. In this particular case, are there, in fact, other important important consequences?
True, and it is the arbitrary, non-epistemic nature of aesthetics that justifies my judgment that you do little harm by permitting the influence you describe.
But what’s actually happening is that the music initially doesn’t give you pleasure—as you said, you would not be able to distinguish it from another “Radiohead” imitator that you now “don’t like”—and then you have consciously permitted (in the sense of not resisting a known phenomenon) yourself to make a path-dependent update in your tastes through a (so-called) “bandwagon” effect.
Really, you would be better off simply listening to music that you independently like, rather than spending finite resources to change your aesthetic preferences in a different arbitrary direction, and that cost is the consequence. My point, then, is that I agree with you in that there are instrumental reasons to permit such hysteresis in your aesthetic preferences, such as the improved ability to relate to others—and this likely outweighs the above harm.
In the more general case, though, it would not help you to permit such a “bandwagon” adjustment in the direction of, for example, “liking” to listen to materials science lectures filled with incorrect models. Though you may think that you can “draw the distinction”, and avoid absorbing the incorrect materials science into your beliefs, the reality is that ape brains are very poor about handling this kind of dissonance.
I hope my position and concerns are clearer and more intuitive now.
I think we agree on the “broad brush” aspects of the problem (in particular that it’s really about the specifics here).
Thank you for the example of fashionable materials science lectures, I now agree on that point.
The specifics here are interesting, though, so I’ll take it further.
Discounting values for path-dependency has an appealing elegance, but as a general principle it is, I think, unsound. Any value that saturates has such a path-dependence: I enjoy eating, then I become full, then I no longer enjoy eating. I enjoy learning about linear algebra, then I master it, then I no longer enjoy learning about linear algebra. If you appeal to the underlying value of “not being hungry” or “learning new mathematics” then I can equally appeal to “enjoying fashionable music”.
That ignores the specific social component of bandwagons, though, which I have already said that I agree with you on.
This assumes that the cost of finding music that appeals to one’s innate preferences is lower than the cost of changing those preferences to match what’s commonly available. This is not necessarily the case—in fact, I generally find it not to be. (Pandora music service’s AI comes close, but it can still only play music that’s actually been produced and entered into its database, and even in that case it takes a fair amount of effort to teach the AI what I like in each general category of music that I like, plus I suspect it’s incapable of learning certain nuances like ‘I only like this instrument when it’s paired with one of these other instruments’.)
Although there may be people who never heard a piece of music that they actually liked, while still having the ability to like some music, I thought such cases are so rare that they can be disregarded. I generally dislike most of the modern music (where “modern” means something like “less than 50 years old”), and have no problem to find something which fits my preferences. In purely financial costs, non-fashionable music is probably much cheaper.
Setting up a status-effect-free “clean room” from which to evaluate new music would be far more costly than just letting the mostly-autonomous bandwagon effect produce the same amount of aesthetic satisfaction.
That may hold for a certain class of human situations. However, User:alexflint’s story indicates that User:alexflint did endure a gross cost [1] greater than what would have resulted from not applying filters for popularity. The alternative to allowing one to be influenced in this matter is not to impose an impermeable “clean room”, but to simply avoid avoidable expenditures when the source of the bias is noticed.
[1] though as I’ve made clear, not necessarily exceeding the benefits to terminal values