I expect good second order taste comes from good first order taste.
That is, you know what good looks like, and you know what it looks like when someone is able to evaluate what's good. Then you can pattern match and say "yeah, if I was really into thing X, I'd probably come to similar opinions as person Y, so I'm going to trust person Y's taste here".
If you don't have good taste yourself then I expect it to be much harder to evaluate good second order taste because you don't have a strong conviction about what good looks like.
Second-order taste seems like a multiplier, or filling in the gaps, of the first-order taste.
If you have no idea about what is good or bad, then you have no idea whose advice it is better to follow. Even if you choose, you probably do it using criteria such as "high status" or "talks convincingly".
But if you can tell that some things are good and some things are bad, you can find people who consistently call the good things good and the bad things bad... and then you can follow their advice about the things you are not sure about.
Last year I got my friend a gift card to Beast and Cleaver for his wedding, a local butcher shop and restaurant.
I was pretty proud of the gift. He and his wife said the meal was amazing and I wouldn't expect them to say that if it weren't true. Getting something on the wedding registry or perhaps a gift card would have been safer, but I don't think it would have yielded as much joy.
I can't take too much credit though. As a Yelp Elite food critic with over a decade of experience churning out high quality restaurant reviews, I like to think I have pretty good taste in food. But this time it wasn't me. It was Kenji.
I was watching a YouTube video by Kenji Lopez-Alt, a food writer who actually does have good taste in food. In his video he mentions Beast and Cleaver and says[1] that it's a very good butcher shop. I've read, watched and listened to a ton of Kenji's content over the years and think very highly of him.
So really what's happening here is something I'll call second order taste. First order taste would be me eating at Beast and Cleaver and determining it to be good. Second order taste is me identifying Kenji as someone with good first order taste.
I think that having good second order taste is pretty important. And I'm talking about taste more generally, not just as it relates to food. The world is complex. We can't evaluate everything ourselves. We don't have the time or the skills. For better or for worse, we often have to figure out who the trustworthy people are and listen to them.
Over the years I've identified a handful of people in various domains who I respect and see as highly trustworthy. Paul Ingraham for pain. Tori Olds for therapy. Ben Felix for personal finance. Ben Taylor for basketball. Demand Curve for marketing. Peter Attia for health. I think all of these people are quite smart and really know their field.
And then there's websites like The Best Bike Lock. I bought a moderately expensive e-bike recently. I store it in my apartment complex's bike room but historically there's been a fair amount of theft in that room, including my own electric scooter. I was dumb and only used a cable lock to secure the scooter, but there are also two U-locks that have been cut through and left sitting there in the bike room as well, so the theft is clearly going beyond low hanging fruit like cable locks.
Anyway, I wanted to do some research into how I can secure my new bike. I spent time on YouTube, googling around, prompting around. Eventually I stumbled across The Best Bike Lock. That site stood out to be as being particularly thoughtful and trustworthy.
As an example, I thought the author's take on bike trackers (GPS, bluetooth) was well reasoned. In short, you want (amongst other things) a tracker that is hard for a thief to notice and remove but easy for you to take off and charge. No product currently does a good job of this, and so the author says he doesn't think we're there yet but that he's got his eyes open for new products that do a better job.
Makes sense to me. That said, I wouldn't feel confident betting on the author if he were to go toe-to-toe in an epistemics battle with a median rationalist.[2] I'm not that high on him.
But that's ok! Second order taste is about more than identifying the A-list-level people to follow. It depends what context you're in. With psychotherapy the stakes are high so I'm glad I found an A-lister in Tori Olds to follow. With basketball the stakes are even higher, so I'm doubly glad that I found Ben Taylor. But in buying a bike lock, I think a B-lister like The Best Bike Lock will suffice.
I feel like these sorts of mundane situations where you need to identify someone with good taste really do happen all the time. Like when I was buying my electric scooter, I thought Electric Scooter Guide was a very solid B-lister[3]. To understand what's going on in Ukraine, I see Institute For The Study of War as another solid B-lister. And back when I followed Covid closely, I was grateful to have an A-lister in Zvi to follow.
There are also situations where you need to go beyond second order taste. You might find yourself needing to wield the power of third order taste or fourth order taste. For example... actually, I'm struggling to come up with a good example of this. And now I'm questioning how important higher order taste is.
And along those lines, I don't think I did a good job of arguing that second order taste is important. To do a good job in this argument I think what I'd want to do is come up with maybe 10+ real world examples, across a variety of domains, of second order taste being meaningfully helpful.
Not that such an argument would be airtight or anything. I'm not even sure I'd call such an approach an argument. It's more like an intuition pump that prompts people to think something like, "Oh yeah, I see what you mean. Reflecting on my own life experiences, that strikes me as true."[4]
I'm also struggling to find anything useful to say about how to develop good second order taste, or what it means to have good second order taste. I'm tempted to shrug and say that it's mostly about having good epistemics in general. Yeah, I think that's where I'm at on this question.
In sitting down to write this post I was hoping to have various useful and insightful things to say. I guess I'll pivot to treating it as more of a conversation starter, sorta like the old discussion posts on Less Wrong 1.0. In retrospect, I think I (and others!) should be much more willing to publish such posts.
So how do you guys feel about the topic of second order taste? Is it important? For mundane things? Important things? Why? Any examples come to mind? Stories you'd like to share? Do you feel like you have good second order taste? Any thoughts on what makes good second order taste beyond general epistemics? Is higher order taste actually important?
Well actually, I'm reading between the lines here. He said he got the steak from a friend of his who owns the butcher shop Beast and Cleaver. And he said that the steak was incredible. I'm struggling to articulate what exactly my world model is here, but my world model says that this all means that Kenji thinks Beast and Cleaver is a very good butcher shop.
And it turns out that I was right. I just watched a video from Kenji today where he explicitly says that he thinks it's probably the best in the country.
I would on the other hand feel relatively comfortable betting on someone like Kenji or Ben Taylor if they were to engage in such a battle.
Sorry... this feels so pretentious.
I think this is a really interesting topic, by the way. What would these "arguments" be called? I actually don't think "intuition pump" is right. "Intuition pump" I think is more about a singular thought experiment. Maybe what I'm pointing at can be described as a sort of "extensional argument" along the lines of extensional definitions? I'd love to discuss this. I'd love to see someone write a blog post about it.