Defining Taste | XCancel

Defining Taste

Mitchell Hashimoto

@mitchellh<br>11h

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“Taste” is the ability to consistently make high-quality qualitative judgments where no objective metric exists. It’s the creation of something that feels right intuitively, with no real justifiable way to measure that. But when you do it, people feel it.

A person with “good taste” is someone who can do this repeatedly, consistently. The funny thing about taste is that it’s hard to create, but its result is very easy to copy. Once someone makes a tasteful decision, others can imitate it almost immediately.

This is usually an argument against the existence of taste: “look how easy I can copy your work!” And yet, you couldn’t create the work without first having someone to copy it from. One has taste, the other doesn’t.

There have always been people with consistently good taste. But taste is coming up more regularly than ever before. It is becoming a critical differentiator.

For most of history, the ability to convert an idea to reality was itself valuable. Today, production is arguably rapidly becoming abundant. A single person with a defined vision (from anyone) can create what once required an entire team. This is, of course, largely driven by AI and partially driven simply by higher levels of abstraction.

Production is being commoditized much much faster than taste. It’s an open question of whether AI will be able to produce “taste.” For now, the ability to create qualitatively new judgments remains distinctly human.

Taste isn’t valuable because it’s impossible to copy. Taste is valuable exactly because it defines what everyone else chooses to copy. Taste has always existed! But now we value it more.

As always, I’ll disclaim that this article was completely hand written. This time in Apple notes while I had no airplane WiFi!