on developing taste

I recently read this great piece on taste. this one by ben kuhn is fantastic as well:

Taste in the context of tech-adjacent circles, usually means making good choices around design. It has slowly become about judgement as I understand it. The problem is that taste is seen as some platonic, objective ideal to strive towards. It can be weaponized to say — you’re wrong — this choice you made is in “poor” taste.

But that’s not how taste works. Taste just ends up conforming to whatever the in-group thinks. People afraid of being on the outs begin to imitate choices that they perceive as high-status (memetic desire). For instance, wearing whatever today’s equivalent of the Steve Jobs turtle neck is (may be Mark Zuckerberg Greek T-shirts and silver chains?).

However, good taste is some mish-mash of courage/confidence/conviction. You might over years hone your sense for see certain phenomena, in people, in products - whatever it may be. You can’t quite articulate it, so it’s called taste. there’s probably a level of detail I’m missing here. Like what are the discrete steps to build taste in something. For instance, you could get really good at seeing skillful uses of technique x in paintings. Over time you synchronize this with appreciation of other factors of good paintings. You end up with some sort of authority you can call taste here.

You have developed taste (good) in certain areas. In the sense you have fine-tuned the world around you to meet your ends. There is some objectivity around it but it’s mostly subjective. There could be people with less developed taste (bad), who have similar experiences than you because they might not be as open to experience or inquisitive. Because of your history (family, influences, experiences) you might have more tuned receptors to taste.

Taste is a bundle of objectively defined aesthetic judgements bundled with social value patterns. This is partially due to two reasons:

• heuristics, or shortcuts your brain makes in pattern recognition. For instance, you see a dish that is a horrible combination of flavours but is plated skilfully to look like a expensive dish so you assume it is.
• social pressures, or seeing others value a thing and tricking yourself into valuing it as well. You could be missing some piece of information and it’s probably safer to align with the in-group as there’s safety in numbers (lizard brain). Taste becomes a sort of club which you gain access to by making the right visible choices.

In closing true taste is slowly developed over years. Often poorly, embarrassingly at first, and refined over time. Taste is not objective, but there are gradients of objectivity in good taste. Things like training your ear to hear music a certain way or your nose to have more nuanced sense of smell is better than less discernment always. The courage in developing taste is willing to make choices that everyone may not agree with at the time but trusting that your senses are fine-tuned to a reality that others might be overlooking or missing.