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The irony of an article about taste displaying little of it.
I used to resonate with the word "taste" as a distinguishing factor between good and bad quality, but a comment on HN some months ago about one of the many blog posts that talks about taste really nailed it: "Taste" is just the degree to which two people value the same things. When someone is rated as having "good taste" it just means that the person rating them values a lot of the same qualities. The more I thought…
1. How good or bad something is relative to some standard.
2. How well you're able to understand the medium and identify the differences between things.
I used to resonate with the word "taste" as a distinguishing factor between good and bad quality, but a comment on HN some months ago about one of the many blog posts that talks about taste really nailed it: "Taste" is just the degree to which two people value the same things. When someone is rated as having "good taste" it just means that the person rating them values a lot of the same qualities. The more I thought…
I understood “taste” here to mean opinions. It’s not “good taste” it’s just “some taste”. IMO there are many ways to express taste that are not tinkering, such as preferentially selecting things and my personal favourite, complaining :) Nevertheless I think he means opinions rather than some universally good taste.
Things I HATE:
1. complaints
2. lists
3. strong opinions
4. hypocrisyThat, and the judgmental humblebrag tone leads me to believe the author is young. I suggest they focus more on learning than writing these vapid articles.
Consequently, maybe taste can be acquired by impersonation or purchased, but could be more superficial than taste acquired through deep iterative tinkering and repetition. Much like someone watching a youtube video that tells them so and so is the correct way to do something, therefore it is, and it may be true, but they didn't necessarily learn that organically or in a way that they could analytically discuss.
Incidentally, the person without this type of curiosity is extremely dull to engage in conversation with from the perspective of the curious person, and in the reverse the curious person would seem to be wasting the incurious person's time because they aren't getting to the point and there's no tangible benefit in the conversation.
Incurious people seem like they're the typical tourist or the consumer, eliminating as much inconvenience as possible but not necessarily interested the exploration of the what or why of either the problem or solution, making it hard to identify where the depth is. Good at delegating, but terrible managers.
I’d like to tinker with that font, it burns my eyes to try and read the words styled like that, maybe that’s the intent?
I used to tinker with fonts, colors, etc but as I’ve gotten older I just accept the defaults in most things. You can waste any number of hours on that stuff and in the end it makes very little difference.
What exactly does "taste" mean in this context? Taste is about artistic quality. Aesthetics is generally a tertiary concern when it comes to software or hardware tinkering. That assumes it's a concern at all. And while I'm talking about artistic quality on HN, I have to take some obligatory potshots at the website in question. When I have to use Safari's reader mode to see what you wrote, something has gone terribly…
I know everyone is busy but the author provides the definition explicitly: > And what I mean by taste here is simply the honed ability to distinguish mediocrity from excellence. This will be highly subjective, and not everyone’s taste will be the same, but that is the point, you should NOT have the same taste as someone else. Concisely, discernment. So your comment about “artistic quality” may apply. But from your en…
If you could indulge me a bit, the author in me wants to be pedantic about this. :)
In my defense, changing the definition of a term at the end of the article is begging to be misunderstood.