I don’t know if it’s a counterpoint or not, but I both know and appreciate a lot about coffee and enjoy instant or—especially—that black tarry sludge at the bottom of the gas station carafe, the sort that’s getting ever harder to find. One doesn’t diminish the other, they’re different things.
Similarly consider the people who build world-class systems in their day jobs, yet spend their weekends running Doom on potatoes or battling janky bots to the death.
Cultivating taste doesn’t have to be the same thing as developing snobbery or becoming jaded.
I drink things that taste bad. No, not always. But when an option exists that I think might taste bad, I always choose it. Someone has determined that it is a worthy drink and unless I explore their thinking, I will never know whether or not I agree. Once explored, I have some data that I can use to compare with other implementations of such an horrific recipe. At once, I am a connoisseur of this awful thing.
Let me know if you are interested in the worst place to get a bean-paste mojito with a cactus apple sidecar. I still search for the best.
Why yes I am! Both of those sound suited to a deliciously wide range of interpretation. I’ll raise you a pair of excellent and abject chòu dòufu served within about 5 blocks of each other (oddly enough, in a Puerto Rican section of New York)…
It seems like, in most domains of aesthetic appreciation, it doesn’t take all THAT much “trying stuff” before you get off a “bad-to-good” axis and onto a “varieties of experience” plane… (mumble mumble decommodification etc)
Then again perhaps you and I are showing our hand as people whose aesthetic preferences are not to be trusted :)
Similarly consider the people who build world-class systems in their day jobs, yet spend their weekends running Doom on potatoes or battling janky bots to the death.
Cultivating taste doesn’t have to be the same thing as developing snobbery or becoming jaded.