Berman feels there’s something fundamentally unromantic about the narrowing of options that’s baked into collaborative filtering. It locks in what it thinks are your preferences early on, “which makes statistical sense but it doesn’t necessarily lead to serendipity”. And as Joel explains, this sort of paring away of desire is the opposite of how attraction actually tends to work over the course of our lifetimes: we don’t always know what we like until it’s put in front of us.