本文探讨了“二阶品味”的概念，即通过识别拥有良好“一阶品味”的人来指导自己的选择。作者分享了自己在美食、健康、个人理财等领域的经验，并讨论了如何培养和应用这种能力，尤其是在信息爆炸的时代，快速辨别可靠信息源的重要性。文章还探讨了“二阶品味”的局限性，以及在不同情境下选择不同“层级”的专家的策略，并呼吁读者共同探讨和分享经验。

🤔 **“二阶品味”的核心定义：** 指的是通过识别和信任在特定领域拥有良好“一阶品味”的人，来指导自己的选择。作者举例说明，例如，通过认可美食作家Kenji的品味，从而相信他推荐的餐厅。

💡 **“二阶品味”的应用场景：** 在信息过载的时代，由于时间和技能的限制，我们无法亲自评估所有事物。因此，需要找到值得信赖的专家，例如在健康、理财、篮球等领域中，作者分享了自己信任的专家列表。

🧐 **不同层级的专家选择：** 作者认为，在不同领域和情境下，选择专家的标准可以有所不同。对于重要的事情，如心理治疗，可能需要寻找A-list级别的专家；而对于购买自行车锁等日常事务，B-list级别的专家可能就足够了。

🤔 **“二阶品味”的局限性与思考：** 作者承认，关于如何培养和衡量“二阶品味”以及“高阶品味”的重要性，目前尚没有明确的答案。文章更像是一个开放的讨论，鼓励读者分享经验和见解。

Published on June 7, 2025 8:26 PM GMT

Last year I got my friend a gift card to Beast and Cleaver for his wedding, a local butcher shop and restaurant.

I was pretty proud of the gift. He and his wife said the meal was amazing and I wouldn't expect them to say that if it weren't true. Getting something on the wedding registry or perhaps a gift card would have been safer, but I don't think it would have yielded as much joy.

I can't take too much credit though. As a Yelp Elite food critic with over a decade of experience churning out high quality restaurant reviews, I like to think I have pretty good taste in food. But this time it wasn't me. It was Kenji.

I was watching a YouTube video by Kenji Lopez-Alt, a food writer who actually does have good taste in food. In his video he mentions Beast and Cleaver and says^[1] that it's a very good butcher shop. I've read, watched and listened to a ton of Kenji's content over the years and think very highly of him.

So really what's happening here is something I'll call second order taste. First order taste would be me eating at Beast and Cleaver and determining it to be good. Second order taste is me identifying Kenji as someone with good first order taste.

I think that having good second order taste is pretty important. And I'm talking about taste more generally, not just as it relates to food. The world is complex. We can't evaluate everything ourselves. We don't have the time or the skills. For better or for worse, we often have to figure out who the trustworthy people are and listen to them.

Over the years I've identified a handful of people in various domains who I respect and see as highly trustworthy. Paul Ingraham for pain. Tori Olds for therapy. Ben Felix for personal finance. Ben Taylor for basketball. Demand Curve for marketing. Peter Attia for health. I think all of these people are quite smart and really know their field.

And then there's websites like The Best Bike Lock. I bought a moderately expensive e-bike recently. I store it in my apartment complex's bike room but historically there's been a fair amount of theft in that room, including my own electric scooter. I was dumb and only used a cable lock to secure the scooter, but there are also two U-locks that have been cut through and left sitting there in the bike room as well, so the theft is clearly going beyond low hanging fruit like cable locks.

Anyway, I wanted to do some research into how I can secure my new bike. I spent time on YouTube, googling around, prompting around. Eventually I stumbled across The Best Bike Lock. That site stood out to be as being particularly thoughtful and trustworthy.

As an example, I thought the author's take on bike trackers (GPS, bluetooth) was well reasoned. In short, you want (amongst other things) a tracker that is hard for a thief to notice and remove but easy for you to take off and charge. No product currently does a good job of this, and so the author says he doesn't think we're there yet but that he's got his eyes open for new products that do a better job.

Makes sense to me. That said, I wouldn't feel confident betting on the author if he were to go toe-to-toe in an epistemics battle with a median rationalist.^[2] I'm not that high on him.

But that's ok! Second order taste is about more than identifying the A-list-level people to follow. It depends what context you're in. With psychotherapy the stakes are high so I'm glad I found an A-lister in Tori Olds to follow. With basketball the stakes are even higher, so I'm doubly glad that I found Ben Taylor. But in buying a bike lock, I think a B-lister like The Best Bike Lock will suffice.

I feel like these sorts of mundane situations where you need to identify someone with good taste really do happen all the time. Like when I was buying my electric scooter, I thought Electric Scooter Guide was a very solid B-lister^[3]. To understand what's going on in Ukraine, I see Institute For The Study of War as another solid B-lister. And back when I followed Covid closely, I was grateful to have an A-lister in Zvi to follow.

There are also situations where you need to go beyond second order taste. You might find yourself needing to wield the power of third order taste or fourth order taste. For example... actually, I'm struggling to come up with a good example of this. And now I'm questioning how important higher order taste is.

And along those lines, I don't think I did a good job of arguing that second order taste is important. To do a good job in this argument I think what I'd want to do is come up with maybe 10+ real world examples, across a variety of domains, of second order taste being meaningfully helpful.

Not that such an argument would be airtight or anything. I'm not even sure I'd call such an approach an argument. It's more like an intuition pump that prompts people to think something like, "Oh yeah, I see what you mean. Reflecting on my own life experiences, that strikes me as true."^[4]

I'm also struggling to find anything useful to say about how to develop good second order taste, or what it means to have good second order taste. I'm tempted to shrug and say that it's mostly about having good epistemics in general. Yeah, I think that's where I'm at on this question.

In sitting down to write this post I was hoping to have various useful and insightful things to say. I guess I'll pivot to treating it as more of a conversation starter, sorta like the old discussion posts on Less Wrong 1.0. In retrospect, I think I (and others!) should be much more willing to publish such posts.

So how do you guys feel about the topic of second order taste? Is it important? For mundane things? Important things? Why? Any examples come to mind? Stories you'd like to share? Do you feel like you have good second order taste? Any thoughts on what makes good second order taste beyond general epistemics? Is higher order taste actually important?

1. ^{^}

   Well actually, I'm reading between the lines here. He said he got the steak from a friend of his who owns the butcher shop Beast and Cleaver. And he said that the steak was incredible. I'm struggling to articulate what exactly my world model is here, but my world model says that this all means that Kenji thinks Beast and Cleaver is a very good butcher shop.

   And it turns out that I was right. I just watched a video from Kenji today where he explicitly says that he thinks it's probably the best in the country.

2. ^{^}

   I would on the other hand feel relatively comfortable betting on someone like Kenji or Ben Taylor if they were to engage in such a battle.

3. ^{^}

   Sorry... this feels so pretentious.

4. ^{^}

   I think this is a really interesting topic, by the way. What would these "arguments" be called? I actually don't think "intuition pump" is right. "Intuition pump" I think is more about a singular thought experiment. Maybe what I'm pointing at can be described as a sort of "extensional argument" along the lines of extensional definitions? I'd love to discuss this. I'd love to see someone write a blog post about it.

Discuss