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

[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.