taste
musings on taste
sari and
taste
Relativism is fashionable at the moment, and that may hamper you from thinking about taste, even as yours grows. But if you come out of the closet and admit, at least to yourself, that there is such a thing as good and bad design, then you can start to study good design in detail. How has your taste changed? When you made mistakes, what caused you... See more
Paul Graham • Taste for Makers
Alison Roman: “People are so brand-conscious now, and I think they’ve become that way about food. ‘Are those the Fishwife anchovies?’ No, it’s Cento. Or some Spanish brand you’ve never heard of, but it’s the same anchovies inside the tin. People are too conscious about choosing the ‘right’ thing that signifies their taste level, or who they are as
... See moreBlackbird Spyplane • Everyone's Disrupting and It's Exhausting
We have been co-evolving with ravenous attention predators forever. This is not a fight we can, or should want to, opt out of. We already live in a universe with church, slot machines, and Rhianna. The Sorrows of Young Werther. The Beatles. The bigger and more successful they get, the more boring they become, and the easier they are to ignore.
Frank Lantz • Unpluggers, Deflators etc. pt 3: Why Not Both?
taste is the business end of attention - we will need to learn how to use it to survive. humans are not helpless creatures who must be protected from the grindhouse of optimized infotainment. we are attention warriors.
I think of finding high-leverage work as having two interrelated components:
Agency: i.e. some combination of the initiative/proactiveness to try to make things happen, and relentlessness and resourcefulness to make sure you’ll succeed.
Taste: you need a good intuition for what things will and won’t work well to try. Taste is important both “in the large” (picking important problems) and “in the small” (picking approaches to solving those problems that will work well); I usually see people first become great at the latter, then the former.