How to Develop Taste

Developing taste & judgement are an essential skill in the AI era. # #

But taste is different from knowledge and takes more time.

Gaining knowledge is a software upgrade. It strengthens existing synapses. It’s fast, reversible, no new “cables” required.
Taste is a hardware upgrade. It destroys inefficient pathways, grows neurons for new pathways, and wraps axons with myelin speeding up signals 100x. (London cab drivers literally have a larger hippocampus.) Taste takes time.

How we acquire taste depends on the environment.

In kind environments (with clear, immediate, accurate feedback, like sports, surgery) is easier. Practice at the edge of competence. #
In wicked environments (investing, hiring, politics, strategy) confidence can be misleading. So, audit prediction reasoning: write your predictions with reason. Months later, if you were right for the wrong reasons, treat it as failure.

Practices that help:

Taste requires complexity and understanding #. So, when bored, complicate; when confused, study by copying, comparing, asking why, and prototyping a vocabulary. # #
Argument Mapping: create granular mind-maps of arguments, find hidden assumptions, and evaluate evidence.
Watch experts: watch experts at work, guess their next moves, explain your reasoning, and copy but with extra constraints.
Perceptual Learning: learning by comparing examples and prototyping a vocabulary.
Brain Trust: have peers critique your work against a goal at early stages (to focus on core, not polish).
Mindfulness: to reduce sunk-costs and other biases/blindspots. Helps with post-mortems.
Communities of Practice: find where experts in your field hang out, curate ruthlessly, and absorb the vocabulary.
Project-Based Learning: solve a real problem you have, fail + learn + iterate, with other people.

Ancient wisdom (Stoicism, Buddhism, Confucianism, etc.) broadly aligns, but there are a few differences.

Slow vs fast. Ancient wisdom suggests that judgement must develop slowly. Science is optimistic about acceleration, e.g. perceptual learning, simulation, etc.
Moralility. Ancient wisdom anchors judgement in morality. Science is more agnostic.

Sometimes “taste” is just “elitism”. That’s not going away, and offers another way to develop taste: via “club membership”.

AI, like most automation, erodes skills. This has happened in the past and we deal with it differently.

Autopilots eroded flying skills - which is dangerous. So we enforce flight simulators. Same for surgical knots (robotic surgery), celestial navigation (navy), manual dosing (nurses).
Spreadsheets eroded calculation skills. We leveled-up from sums to strategy. Same for CAD, electronic trading, spell-check.
Photography eroded painting skills. We switched value to impressionism, cubism, etc. Same for vinyl records, luxury watches, craft coffee.
GPS eroded navigation skills. We accepted this and don’t care much. Same for phone numbers, spelling, mental maths.

Think about how the skill we lose will evolve. Then enforce, level-up, switch, or accept accordingly.