The Taste-Habit Trap

Hi Friends, 

Greetings from Stanfordville, New York where I’m spending the weekend. 

What a week! To my 61 new subscribers this week, welcome! I know many of you decided to join this newsletter after stumbling on my article about Agnes Denes. It was such a pleasant surprise to find out Substack featured it in their new series At Length. 

I hope you enjoy the 17th edition of the Practical Polymath.

Until next week, 

Florian 

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The Taste-Habit Trap

Why do we like what we like? 

The other day I ordered a Cappuccino. It’s my favorite type of coffee. Or is it? 

I started thinking “What is it that I find so appealing about the frothy beverage?” It always seems to come out lukewarm. The espresso and milk sort of cancel each other out. It’s nothing like the silky drink I remember from my Italian summers visiting my family as a kid.   

I don’t order it because I love it, I order it because it became a habit. Because some past version of myself decided Cappuccino was coffee in its most glorious form. And that feeling was never updated. 

I call this the "Taste-Habit Trap”. It’s when we get caught into choosing something out of habit rather than out of taste.    

There are some obvious reasons why we do this. A study led by behavioral economist Kathleen Vos showed that making choices depletes our effectiveness at making future decisions. Take it from Obama: 

“You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits. I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” 

Wanting to save up your cognitive energy is fair game. But there is a cost. We’re passing on an opportunity to interrogate our taste. After all, what makes us unique if not the mosaic of flavors, sounds, shapes and colors that we elect? The more we trap our taste into habits, the more the mosaic fades out.   

How do we break this cycle? Try asking yourself these question: 

• Why am I choosing this? Maybe you’ll come to seriously question your relationship with a preference you’ve been faithfully sticking with. If so, give your brain a kick in the butt and call for a breakup. 

• What do I like about this? But it could be that you just needed a second to tell yourself “Gosh, I love Margherita pizza. The simple contrast between the tomato sauce and the mozzarella is poetry for my tastebuds”. Affirming our taste is just as important as revisiting it. 

• What might I want to try instead? You don’t need to look very far. Interestingness lies at the edge between the familiar and the unknown. Look for that boundary. 

I'm writing this last line enjoying the refreshing sweetness of an iced coffee. Cheers, taste, it's nice to see you again!

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Weekly Wisdom

🏵️ Beauty and Science: We treat art and science as disciplines with irreconcilable lenses to interpreting the world. Art seeks beauty while science looks for logic. Not so fast, says Richard Feynman in this beautifully illustrated video of an interview he gave to the BBC.  

🧠 Rationality and Belonging: I’m a big fan of Julia Galef and really enjoyed her conversation with Coleman Hughes this week. She talks about how argumentation is couched in the language of war where you “defend” your position “poking holes” in your opponents’ claims. This underlying tendency to stick to our beliefs at all costs because they are foundational to our identity impairs our judgement. She proposes an alternative mindset where we feel proud, not ashamed when we are proven wrong and where we feel intrigued, not defensive when we encounter information that contradicts our beliefs.  

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Lateral Thought

“The earliest evidence of recognizable human art is forty thousand years old. The earliest evidence of human agriculture, by contrast, is only ten thousand years old. Which means that somewhere in our collective evolutionary story, we decided it was way more important to make attractive, superfluous items than it was to learn how to regularly feed ourselves.”

Elizabeth Gilbert