if you do not like reading, made a video

transcribed notes on taste: If you want taste, you're gonna have to eat. I think now, as AI has allowed more and more people to create things, the biggest differentiation, the biggest skill people are lacking, is taste itself. What does that mean, right? Taste is a little bit of aesthetic judgment, knowing what's beautiful. But I think taste is really your ability to model out what people will like. And a lot of that requires you to not just consume, right? Like if you want to be a good chef, you have to eat at people's restaurants. You can't just look at the menu. It's curation versus consumption. And with AI there's so much more volume of work now, so it's really easy to regress to the mean. In which case it's not really taste. Taste is a kind of risk-taking. You're choosing to deviate from the safe average. There's this story about Kobori Enshū, the tea master who came after Rikyū. A student told him, your taste must be even better than Rikyū's, because everything you collect, everyone agrees is beautiful. Rikyū's collection, only Rikyū could appreciate. And Enshū said no, that's exactly why I'm the lesser man. I was just picking what most people would like. Rikyū had the courage to love things only he could see. I felt this in art school. My taste exceeded my ability. I could see what good work looked like, I just couldn't make it yet, and I didn't have the words to describe what was going on. Now AI flips that. Ability is basically free, so for most people, ability exceeds taste. You can make anything, and you don't know what's worth making. Walter Benjamin talked about mechanical reproduction stripping the aura from art. I think AI does something worse. It gives you the destination without the hours of noticing that used to get you there. In music, transcribing a solo forces you to listen deeply, right? You sit there rewinding the same four bars over and over. AI can just give you the chart. But it gives you the chart, not the ear. So AI doesn't just strip the aura from art, it strips the aura from learning. The felt distance that made a skill feel earned. This has been true for how I learned pottery, right? I can't mechanistically learn pottery. I just have to feel and listen to my intuition. You know, there are video games that don't allow minimaps, because the designers felt that by having waypoints, players would just walk from one area to another and not really notice where anything is. And we don't really wander down streets anymore. We take Ubers that take us there directly. We used to learn places by wandering. Now we follow the blue line. So if AI shifts the bottleneck from making to noticing, then apprenticeship has to be reinvented around attention. Taste grows with attention. If the tools remove the attention, you have to put it back.

the subtitles got COOKED

You’re watching me figure out content in real time.

taste is about knowing what you like, why you like it, and (+1 on this) taking the risk to own it

Enshu cooked.

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incredible. please make more vids

Love this: "Because we lose this sense of wandering. If you think about going from point A to point B you're primarily focused on the consumption – the destination. But my friends with great taste, they wander." Makes me think of playing games like Satisfactory or WoW, where much of the enjoyment of playing comes out of the time elapsed from the distance of traveling and traversing new fields rather than creating the factory or raiding – also very fun but not what makes the game. It's always travel distance and what that travel experience is like.

So basically, from the video; AI creates abundance because it erases the technical skills needed to make stuff. Now, any idiot can make stuff. In a context of abundance, curation is the new desirable skill. But such skill is obtained by those who developed technical skills in the first place. The very thing AI erased. So, in order to have/keep taste, you can't just be content with creating by using the big shortcut that AI is. The shortcut is better used after you know how to do it yourself, the same way you shouldn't give a calculator to someone who can't divide or multiply by hand, with a pen & paper.

thank you for sharing, Jason. please make more essay monologues! this sparked some thoughts and I spent a good hour making entries in my notes: taste is having its zeitgeist moment; so much emphasis has been placed on taste recently that people forget it’s less a predictor of success than a signal of value (ask Zuck/Gates, then ask Jobs!). some of the most valuable companies within the last several decades have been demonstrably subpar in taste and style. it was always possible to brute-force success by providing the bare minimum, because the bottleneck was not taste but simply working. the concept of taste was a superficial novelty. i imagine it’s why apple made a cult-like distinction by imposing a superior emphasis on this intangible asset that execs and industry leaders at the time (re: Ballmer, most notably) sneered at. why take the time to craft 10 tasteful products if you could ship 100 subpar ones for much less effort than that? this approach assumed, after all, people didn’t care. it was a misread. it wasn’t so much that people didn’t care as it was simply a constraint born of a lack of alternatives. wasn’t a surprise when apple showed up and stole the smartphone and notebook market from under everyone. there will always be a premium on taste. taste is deceptively tied to ability, not so much the other way, interestingly (although that’s a different conversation). one way to build it is through obsessive exposure to the surfaces where expressions of it live. unironically, this drives you to acquire ability as part of your toolkit, to validate your taste profile by exploring your interpretations of what you’ve “tasted,” running experiments, and critiquing them. but then again, it begs the question: how much of the working definition of taste reduces to pattern recognition? heck, maybe that’s the point. pattern recognition at that density isn’t cheap, it takes obsessive exposure over time to build, which is why it’s even more of a big deal now, which is what makes it scarce, which is why it’s only going to get even more valuable. if we assume everyone can access the same surfaces now, it therefore follows to assume that fewer would put in the reps to actually see the differences that matter. the exposure is abundant; the discernment isn’t. historically, scarcity has (and will) always be a feature of value; doesn’t matter how much abundance tries to replace scarcity, the bottleneck simply moves upstream, or further out. maybe i'll try to distill my thoughts even further into an essay sometime.

Please make more videos,love this.

bro i was reading your tweets with the wrong voice all the time

How so

Read them with the voice of a tech bro got the voice of an artist! 😁

i was an artist first

The 2 energies are a rare mix but work well :) ✌️

might be biased. artist first too

rewinding the same four bars is the whole point

very important video taste becomes more & more important as the days go by

How do you think one should acquire a global taste instead of personal taste. I find some things aesthetically good but no one likes them. How to improve

Learn those words. Ask “Do you think my food needed more salt? Or more pepper?”

Interesting take, I need to train more on such perspectives actually. Thanks🤟

Watched the whole thing and I’m glad I did

"where do I bring in the friction of learning" is something I've found myself asking a LOT lately and it's cool to see someone arrive at it in a completely different context AI feels like the most insane force-multiplier for activities that require learning-scaffolding

Really good thoughts. Friction is essential to growth. These days, the only real friction I feel is the constant struggle to get Codex to do exactly what I need, but even that will not last for long. The real question is, and has always been, how to identify what is actually valuable. Infinite technical prowess creates the illusion of value, or at least a kind of cognitive dissonance: “This should be valuable. It used to be valuable before AI.” Because the paradigm has not fully shifted yet, and what replaces it has not become clear. Taste was always the most reliable way to create value without getting trapped in technical cul-de-sacs. It helped us know what was worth building, what was worth refining, and what was worth ignoring. But we cannot all simply become tastemakers or creatives. Value itself has to be redefined, not around what makes us useful, but around what makes us human.

Enjoyed this

you cooked!

or you can put the book section wise in chatgpt and have a talk with it and ask it to quiz you as well

This is a very thoughtful video man. AI doesn't have to be what determines the quality of your output.

Kinda reminds me of Anthony Bourdain and his way of exploring/doing. You really cooked, but please use less salt next time.

Amazing content. Keep it up

more of this format

i learned iMovie last week and i realized i can just ask codex to do it. any topics

Chet Baker Sings - that’s good taste

Nice video. So in summary: to express ur thoughts u need the vocabulary and one very good way to have thoughts u need to feel the thing

Really cool enjoyed this

Learning from the best. Thanks for sharing. I need to try this out!!

enjoyed the vid btw thx :)) might I add that arguably more important than going to eat at competitor restaurants is sitting at the table with your guests in your own restaurant, (incognito if possible, to bypass the mom test) understanding their experience, iterating, testing new recipes with them and creating good community vibes

This is quite a documentary style. You should try some scifi montage. Like 宇宙编辑部

This really hits with what I'm building with Pretty Bench. It's an arena for benchmarking taste in AI models. The first bench is human attractiveness, but I'll be adding architecture, fashion, art, and a lot more benches (all with curated datasets).

so basically i need to have "the best words" lol

Dude. You gave us the words. Really great!

You said wander enough times to remind me of this song

shot on RED? love the production quality, almost like a documentary 🤌 (maybe it will soon compile to one using HyperFrames? 😉)

good watch, thanks for sharing. on the format - as people are saying, you cooked. a small thing i liked is the white border. i've always liked the white borders on pictures, something about it adds to the image. same is true for video. to me, this hits harder, and captures my attention more than if you had made it full screen. good inspo, thanks.