taste on S Anand

How to develop taste

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 14:12:28 +0800

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.

Source: I used Claude Deep Research and asked Gemini to interpret it.

23 Mar 2026. Taste may not matter as much as I thought. I see AI learning & acquiring good taste in code (e.g. architecture) and art (e.g. writing, visual design). Accountability may be more important.

Hot cookies

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 20:36:03 +0800

I ordered a Caramel Cashew Cookie - Soft & Chewy at the Chennai airport, an hour before my flight.

I’ve had cookies before, but not heated. The person at the counter put it in the microwave for 30 seconds before handing it to me.

It was the best discovery I made in Jan 2026!

It is crumbly. It is chewy. It melts. It soaks. It bends when you pick it up. It’s warm. It’s sweet. It’s nutty. It’s gooey. Oh, I could go on. It’s heavenly.

Since then, I’ve had a few cookies - all heated. They always taste better hot - especially if they’re almost melting. (The taste of the more buttery ones improves more.)

There’s a reason for it.

~80% of taste is actually smell. When heated, cookies vaporize carrying the smell of vanilla, caramel, butter, etc from the mouth to the nose.
TRPM5, a taste “valve”, opens when hot. That’s why melted ice cream tastes sweeter. So do hot cookies.
Heat melts fat, which coats the mouth evenly. That carries the flavors to every corner of the mouth.

Some other foods that taste better hot are:

Brie or Camembert cheese
Peaches, plums, and nectarines
Dark chocolate (like in a sizzling brownie sundae or a choco lava cake)
Banana bread (or any dense loaf / cake)
Pecan pie
Cinnamon rolls
Leftover pizza

I haven’t tried them all, but I repeat: hot cookies are my best discovery this month!

Source: Gemini

Touch people over the Internet

Wed, 30 Oct 2002 12:00:00 +0000

You can hear people over the Internet. You can see people over the Internet. Now you can touch people over the Internet. When can we smell and taste them? Or are these senses too mundane to worry about? I, for one, would be very happy to be able to taste recipes online. via Ravikiran