favourites

[sigmaleph]

(this was originally written as a self-reblog on a question that asked me about favourite sci-fi novel)

“favourites are fake“ is a phrase I use a lot but I don’t think I’ve expanded on what it means before, which is “I am not especially confident I can make arbitrarily finely grained comparisons of things to rank them all in a line. I can often say that some things are better than others but on the high end of things I like it all muddles together into a category of ‘things that are really good’ and finer distinctions within them can at best be ‘this one is better for a particular mood’ or ‘was more meaningful at a particular time of my life’ or ‘accomplishes one specific thing really well’. Even if I could do that, it’s not how my brain natively stores that information and asking for favourites cannot return a result other than ‘something I thought was very good and is in the relevant category’ without a lot of extra work to compare it to other things, unless i’d for some reason spent a lot of time doing that work beforehand (hasn’t happened yet) or the category has very few examples I have experienced. most of the time if you ask me for a favourite and I reply, the answer is either the first result returned by my brain for that search or something I have ‘cached’ as my favourite for that category”

i know I’m not the only person whose brain works roughly like this yet questions about favourites are so common that either it is a relatively rare trait or there is an implicit assumption that you shouldn’t take ‘favourite’ questions literally I have missed, in which case oops but also someone should have mentioned that before.

Comments

[contrarianarchon]

This all seems about right, yeah. I think most people more or less reply with either their One Big Thing for that category of media or just retrieve whatever's currently in cache for "Was good and in that category".

I think the questions serve two/three purposes: Either to start a conversation about the relative merits of works in that category, or to solicit recommendations about such works, or to prompt you to start talking about something you're enthusiastic about. So being able to prove and give the same answer every time is basically pointless.

(This doesn't mean people don't *think* you should take them literally.)

[lunartulip]

I run on similar architecture, I think, but with more pre-processing sunk in such that there are at least a few domains (favorite TV show and various subcategories thereof, favorite color, favorite author, probably a couple others I'm forgetting right now) where I can return a definitive result. As far as I can tell, what's going on with that pre-processing is that one of my longrunning projects involves improving my models of my aesthetics, and ordered lists of favorites are relevant to that project and thus Interesting and worth spending the time to develop.

[thetransintransgenic]

Yeah.

I often deliberately try to trip people's normal processing of this up (for things, like, within frameworks of interacting with small children under your authority (e.g. summer camp), where those sorts of questions are expected) by asking "What's your fourth favorite ___?"

It's as meaningful a question and answerable by the same token as "favorite", but...,