Escaping the Algorithm (developing taste)
Jerry Seinfeld nailed it when he called “taste” and “discernment” the twin skills of a quality artist. He says: “It’s one thing to create. [You also] have to choose. ‘What are we going to do? What are we not going to do?’ This is a gigantic aspect of artistic survival.”
David Perell • Annual Review 2022
taste > skills
taste seems more scarce these days, and increasingly differentiating in the age of AI where so much of skills-based productivity is offloaded to compute.
makes me think about the development of taste, and how we nurture taste for the next gen of humans.
scott belskyx.com“We’ve never had more freedom, more choices. But in reality, most people are subtly funneled into the same streams, the same pools of ‘socially approved’ culture, cuisine and ideas.... You might think you’re choosing, but you never really are. When your ideas, interests, and even daily meals are largely inspired by whatever was already approved,... See more
320 / Resisting algorithmic comfort
On Sublime, the best way to consume ideas is to set an intention: you put in a thought or idea, and we construct a feed of related ideas around that. The Internet molds around your intentions. It's conducive to creation, not passive consumption.
Sari Azout • #82: Connecting dots, cultivating intention, and building a more human internet
Embrace Shades of Gray
- Sublime embraces the idea that the world exists in shades of gray, requiring a mental map of various ideas.
- Avoid categorizing things into polarizing viewpoints of agreement or disagreement.
- Instead, explore the idea space and synthesize concepts into a coherent view over time.
- Acknowledge that contradictory ideas can coexist,
Stories of Growth • Sari Azout on Nurturing a Public Digital Garden
Beware the Curators
zine.kleinkleinklein.com
So there is this way in which it doesn’t feel to me that the algorithms have created more monoculture. It does push you in a direction. But there are more directions now than ever. I mean, I don’t know how I would find a bunch of the music I find now if I couldn’t start playing radio from any random thing that I get served up.
So I’m curious about
... See more‘The Ezra Klein Show’ • Opinion | How to Discover Your Own Taste - The New York Times
This is a tension, however optionality does not mean taste. Those are two different conversations...
It’s almost like boredom doesn’t exist, like difficulty doesn’t exist, scarcity doesn’t exist. And a feeling I’ve been having a lot lately is that scarcity is often what creates meaning. When you’re surrounded by infinite possibilities, when you know around the next corner is another video that might be funnier, you’re never going to sit with the
... See moreA tradeoff occurs every time you get feedback. You become slightly more mainstream, slightly more aligned with the zeitgeist. You become marginally more of an exploiter than an explorer, standing on the shoulders of the giants who conceived the paradigm you’re striving to build upon. This is very effective when you want to align your work with... See more