Years ago, this line formed in my head, and has stuck around - it has been long enough that I can't remember if I read it somewhere or if I came up with it myself, but I think it's relevant here:

"There are only two ways to find good new music - listen to a lot of bad new music, or outsource your listening choices to someone else - and the second doesn't protect you against the first."

Outsourcing your listening choices can look like lots of different things: that friend who goes to lots of concerts and always has an amazing new band they've heard recently, radio DJs, algorithmic suggestions like Pandora or Spotify, the Billboard Top 100, your local bar's live band choices, the Grammy Awards, going to clubs where DJs play new music, etc - but ultimately they come down to the same thing, letting someone else decide what you listen to.

And while my pithy version mentions "bad new music", included in there is anything which is not "good new music", including lots of mediocre or inoffensive stuff which doesn't rise to the level of being "good".

I first thought about it in the context of music, as I was looking for new songs to choreograph to, but it's true of discovering any new products where the quality is a matter of taste or subjective assessment.

- Want to find new food you like? You either eat lots of weird foods, or you find someone (a friend, a food blogger, the NYT food reviews, your mum, anyone) to recommend you try something they've discovered.

- Want to read a good new book? Either pick up random books, most of which will be trash, until you find something you like, or find someone to filter down the books (a small bookshop which carefully curates its titles, a library's recommended reading list, the best sellers lists, Oprah's book club, etc).

- New TV shows? Watch many bad shows until you find a good one, or wait for recommendations or awards nights.

- Restaurants, clothing designers, shopping malls, Youtube channels, content creators, movies, directors, websites, etc - the story is the same.

The only places where this does not apply, is in contexts which have objective measures which can be used as filters: if you want a new monitor, you can go to any store and filter or sort the options they have by objective measures like "display size", "resolution", "response time", "weight", "connectivity" etc, and find new products which meet the criteria. This is still dependent on someone to go and collate the information about all the products, but you are not forced to try lots of incorrectly-sized monitors to find one which optimises your preferences. Similar for microcontrollers, CPUs, car trailers, light bulbs, etc.

But even things with objective measures often have subjective qualities which have to be assessed - you can filter laptops on weight, RAM, clock speed, and storage, but how it feels to hold, whether the keys have a nice feel, whether the machine overheats too quickly - so you're often back to the original observation on these matters too.

Everything we like is a psyop?