If You Want Taste, You're Gonna Have to Eat - Jason Liu Skip to content

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If You Want Taste, You're Gonna Have to Eat&para;<br>There are songs that make me cry that you'll never hear about. There are poems I read while my mother lay dying in front of me, and unless I tell you, you'll never know which ones. My taste in music, in food, in art, all of it is private by default. You'd have to eat with me to know I'd happily live on fried chicken. Nobody reads my diary unless I show them. Nobody comes into my home unless I invite them in.<br>But the moment I step outside, they're looking at you. Before I speak, before you know what I do, before you know anything about how I think, you've already seen my taste. Personal style is the most front-loaded expression of taste there is. Every other form you get to keep to yourself. This one you have to subject everyone to. Some days I feel terrible and I put on a fucking blazer. Some days I want to wrap myself up and hide in the shadows, and some days I want to command the room. The clothes go out ahead of me.<br>So style is where I want to start, because it's the honest lab. But this essay is really about taste, and why I think it's become the thing most people are missing.<br>Bottlenecks&para;<br>As AI has allowed more and more people to create things, the biggest differentiation, the biggest skill people are lacking, is taste itself.<br>What does that mean? 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. It's curation versus consumption. And with AI there's so much more volume of work now that 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.<br>Art School&para;<br>I felt the old version of 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.<br>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.<br>Eating&para;<br>If you want to be a good chef, you have to eat at people's restaurants. You can't just look at the menu.<br>Same with clothes. So many people I know refuse to try things on because they're not going to buy them. This is exactly the wrong way to approach it. Go into the store. Try on a bunch of shoes. Try on the weird jacket. Move around in it. Some days you learn something and buy nothing, and that's a fine day.<br>Vocabulary&para;<br>In art school I didn't have the words. This is how you get them.<br>As you eat, start asking why you like what you like. Do I like the way this touches my skin, or the way it drapes over my skin? Those are different things. I rarely think about items of clothing in isolation. I'm thinking about materials and draping first, structure and form first. Then lines. Color, for me, is simple: gray, blue, black, red. That's it. Your hierarchy will be different. You only find it by putting things on your body and paying attention.<br>That's the whole method, honestly. Eat widely, notice what you notice, and keep a record of why.<br>Transcribing&para;<br>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.<br>In music, transcribing a solo forces you to listen deeply. 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.<br>This has been true for how I learned pottery. I can't mechanistically learn pottery. I just have to feel and listen to my intuition.<br>Wandering&para;<br>There are video games that don't allow minimaps, because the designers felt that with waypoints, players would just walk from one area to another and not really notice where anything is.<br>We do the same thing to ourselves. We don't 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.<br>If taste grows with attention, and the tools keep removing the attention, then you have to put it back on purpose.<br>Authorship&para;<br>The same collapse happened to the things we consume.<br>Think about what TikTok did. On YouTube, on early Instagram and Twitter, you followed a person. The person made things, and you saw the things because you'd chosen the person. TikTok inverted it. You don't follow anyone. The content just floods in, and the creator is secondary to the content. It's like never reading books, only screenshots of pages. Songs are a minute long now because the algorithm optimized them down, and people listen to forty-second soundbites without ever learning the...