Taste or something like that

As Mumford observed almost a century ago, the world loses its soul when we place too much weight on the ideal of total quantification. By doing so, we stop valuing what we know to be true, but can’t articulate. Rituals lose their significance, possessions lose their meaning, and things are valued only for their apparent utility.

Taste and craft are not about endless design reviews. Taste is finely-tuned intuition for what differentiates good from great — and perhaps more importantly, the ability to explain why.

Looking closely is valuable at every scale. From looking closely at a sentence, a photograph, a building, a government. It scales and it cascades — one cognizant detail begets another and then another. Suddenly you’ve traveled very far from that first little: Huh.

I’d say that that huh is the foundational block of curiosity. To get good at the huh... See more

If your "taste" doesn't cost you something, it's not taste. It's preference.

Movies beckon different tradeoffs today. Seeing the movie isn’t enough reward to justify the cost. Social capital used to mean time given to friends in physical spaces where friendship was solidified. It now means attention given to me that can be used to grow personal social followings and participate in online fandom. The reward of going to see a... See more

Clear taste acts as a decision-making accelerant. Every choice becomes obvious when filtered through a coherent point of view.