In this post Scott Alexander uses AI fiction, school-essay “wow words,” children’s songs, poetry, architecture, and orange juice to build a theory of taste: bad taste as the overuse of cheap tricks that reliably delight unsophisticated audiences, and good taste as the difficult art of making space for subtler pleasures. It’s funny, wide-ranging, and unusually generous about why “lowbrow” joys can still be genuinely joyful.
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