Preferences are signals

From It's Not About 'The Dress' by Megan McArdle.

If you believe Duncan Watts, a sociologist who works for Microsoft Research, that’s no accident. In his terrific book "Everything Is Obvious (Once You Know The Answer)," he argues that popularity really does have a significantly random component. For example, he constructed an experiment, which I describe in my own book, to determine how songs become popular in different social networks. If you randomly assigned people to groups that could listen to music and display their preferences, would groups converge upon the same songs as most popular, or would they each pick their own sets of “best” and “worst”?

The answer is that there was no clear “best” song; instead, each group picked their own best. It doesn’t seem to be completely random -- the highest-ranked song in one group was never the absolute bottom choice of another -- but high-ranked songs in one group could certainly end up near the bottom of another’s list. We can theorize that there is some quality threshold, but beyond that, social effects take over: Knowing that someone else likes something makes you more interested in it, and so some combination of early rankings and random variation among the groups creates a unique outcome in each social network. It’s our old friend path dependence in viral form.

Post-hoc, of course, we construct all sorts of reasons that popular things are popular. But as Watts points out, what we’re often doing is not so much explaining the popularity as describing the attributes of the popular thing: The Mona Lisa is popular because it’s so, well, Mona Lisa-esque. And those explanations tend to leave out the more random elements -- like the fact that the Mona Lisa wasn’t that popular until it was stolen in a famous museum robbery.

There are many issues which rest, not on empirical and objective data but upon subjective, normative judgments. What's the best movie, book, song, painting, moment in football history, etc.? The answers depend not on objective criteria but on personal opinions which are in turn subject to all sorts of outside influences and contextual circumstances.

In the case of books, there are objective things we can report. The most number of editions, the most copies sold, the most checked out from libraries, most popular with readers, the longest in print, the most frequently cited, etc. But none of this information tells us which is best because best has no meaning outside of the personally subjective opinion.

In many ways, I think the subjective judgments are one of the ways that communities begin to create their own boundaries between Us and Them. We listen to this type of music, read these types of books, sing these types of books. We may still like you even if you do not share those tastes, but regrettably, you are not one of Us.

These arguments regarding best (and worst) are an elaborate form of social signalling and have no sustainable connection with reality no matter how much we might wish they did.