fashionable isn’t a two-place word http://lesswrong.com/lw/ro/2place_and_1place_words/ but you can treat it like one if you instead of “fashionable” you use the word “appealing to”. Things that are fashionable are appealing to more people on average but once you realize that you’re optimizing for being appealing to someone you can tune things to whoever that is.
Unless I misunderstand you, then this is what I meant to address with my parenthetical statement. Of course we must take the audience into account. The question is whether the audience’s expressed preferences (ie. ‘fashionable’ meaning doing what’s popular to that audience, not meaning what is most effective wrt that audience) matches what actually gives the best impression.
In the past, I had implicitly assumed that these two coincided (after all, if you want someone to prefer something you should do what they think they prefer, right?) but I just noticed that I the case isn’t closed, so to speak.
fashionable isn’t a two-place word http://lesswrong.com/lw/ro/2place_and_1place_words/ but you can treat it like one if you instead of “fashionable” you use the word “appealing to”. Things that are fashionable are appealing to more people on average but once you realize that you’re optimizing for being appealing to someone you can tune things to whoever that is.
Unless I misunderstand you, then this is what I meant to address with my parenthetical statement. Of course we must take the audience into account. The question is whether the audience’s expressed preferences (ie. ‘fashionable’ meaning doing what’s popular to that audience, not meaning what is most effective wrt that audience) matches what actually gives the best impression.
In the past, I had implicitly assumed that these two coincided (after all, if you want someone to prefer something you should do what they think they prefer, right?) but I just noticed that I the case isn’t closed, so to speak.