taste

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.

Taste is easily defined as the ability to discriminate between the valuable and the expandable. It’s another word for Good Judgment. When you decide whether to eat sushi or calamari for dinner, you're in fact erecting a hierarchy of value, and passing judgment according to said hierarchy. If you choose sushi, that is because you've deemed it best... See more

Insight from Patrick O'Shaughnessy podcast episode with the Collison brothers: Software is this intersection between creative work and mechanical industrial work, which is why there's a lot of people who have tried to put $1 billion dollars into software but it hasn't resulted in high quality software. ... See more

Taste is the bone-deep feeling that you’ve made something good. It is a sense, inexplicable and ephemeral.

The hipster was an information-sorting algorithm: its job was to always have good taste . The hipster listened to bands you’d never heard of. The hipster drank beers brewed by Paraguayan Jesuits in the 1750s. The hipster thought Tarkovsky was for posers, and the only truly great late-Soviet filmmaker was Ali Khamraev. The hipster bought all his... See more