On taste
“Why did I love that essay and not this one? What about that painting made me stop and stare?
Someone’s sense of taste also involves recognizing the gap between what they have made and what they intended to make.
To train our own taste, we must become cooks who aren’t scared to make food that may end up tasting terrible. To live in ‘the gap’ as Ira
... See moreSteve Jobs, on Microsoft:
The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste, and I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their product.
From Ezra Klein:
AI might be able to churn out content faster than we can, but we still need a human mind to sift through and figure out what’s good. In other words, A.I. is going to turn more of us into editors. But editing is a peculiar skill. It’s hard to test for, or teach, or even describe. But it’s the crucial step in the creative process that
... See more“One of the misconceptions about AI is that it lessens the need for skill and expertise. I think the opposite is true: the more I use ChatGPT, the more I realize how valuable expertise is. Chatbots excel with specific prompts. If you ask it to challenge your brand positioning strategy, you'll get a generic answer. But if you ask it to challenge it
... See moreno amount of process can replace taste.
Because what’s demonstrated here is that tasteis actually a function of all kinds of contextual information, including information wholly extrinsic to the thing itself. (This is why wack people can ruin something you love.) There is no purely inherent value that exists in a vacuum, separate from cultural information. Context is always... See more
Masked and anonymous
But “good” taste is all relative — or, even more devastating, it’s all incredibly arbitrary. So many of the things people associate with “good” taste are just white bourgeois taste. They aren’t better or smarter or more beautiful or creative, they’re just at a price point that says “good taste,” or at least orbits in the same aesthetic universe. Is
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One of my (many) contrarian beliefs is that we do not have strong enough preferences. We often blame social media or the speed of information as the reason why we’re easily distracted, but the real reason behind our inability to focus has less to do with the sheer quantity of media and more to do with our laziness when it comes to distinguishing... See more