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.