The Taste Report™: Ben Dietz

When I ask people what they mean by “taste,” they’ll stumble around for a bit and eventually land on something like “you know it when you see it,” or “it’s in the eye of the beholder.” I understand. Words like taste are hard to pin down, perhaps because they describe a sensibility more than any particular quality, a particular thing.

When I try a wine and I HATE it, but I can totally understand that it's good wine (no flaws, I can see why others might like it), I think that's what having "taste" is.

Apart from my subjective judgment, I can usefully apply the label "beautiful" to things I observe. To taste is to be a living being, but to have taste is to be human.

Taste—in books, music, clothing, people—is notoriously hard to define without resorting to a string of examples. I find it hard to put words to the kind of books I like to read, but I can tell you that I enjoy Vladimir Nabokov , David Sedaris , and Jon Krakauer —three wildly different writers. An LLM, however, detected underlying patterns across th

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