Discrimination
Philosophy has taken taste seriously for centuries. The world I work in mostly hasn’t.
Not because it doesn’t matter, but because it’s hard to measure, hard to formalize, and uncomfortable to admit as a real driver of outcomes. We prefer to talk about intelligence, skills, tools, and incentives—things that fit neatly into frameworks.
Taste doesn’t.
Taste is the ability to recognize what matters before it can be justified—before metrics stabilize, before categories form, before consensus exists.
For most of my career, I thought intelligence was the bottleneck. If I could just understand the system better, reason more clearly, execute more precisely, things would work out.
Sometimes they did.
I built things that were technically correct and strategically wrong. Features that were “supported” but irrelevant. Systems that optimized beautifully around assumptions that later stopped being true. When they failed, it wasn’t because I didn’t work hard enough or think deeply enough.
What failed was judgment.
That’s where taste stops being abstract and starts becoming expensive.
As intelligence becomes abundant, taste becomes decisive. Not because intelligence no longer matters, but because it no longer differentiates. The hard part now isn’t doing the work. It’s choosing the right work to do—and knowing when not to act at all.
Saying this is not original anymore. Everyone is writing about taste now, which by this essay’s own logic should give me pause. The take is easy; the practice is rare.
None of this means taste is mystical or innate. Like intelligence, it can be crafted—trained through exposure, comparison, and failure. It sharpens when you see many attempts and notice what lasts.
Exposure isn’t evenly distributed, though. Getting to see many attempts is a privilege of its own, and some of what gets called taste is just access wearing a nicer name.
Taste is not speed. It is discrimination.
Inefficiency
Efficiency is the obvious virtue. Cut the waste, smooth the friction, take the fastest path. It sounds strange, then, to say that taste often points the other way—toward keeping things a machine would optimize out.
This matters most where the ground keeps shifting.
Most real environments are governed not by competition, but by attrition. Attention decays. Markets converge. Advantages get copied. Under attrition, pure efficiency becomes fragile.
Machines are rewarded for removing inefficiency—for compressing, smoothing, converging. Anything that looks like waste tends to get trained out. This makes them powerful—and brittle.
Humans, at their best, do the opposite. They take slower paths, keep redundancy, preserve friction and ritual.
What looks like waste early often becomes leverage later.
But not all inefficiency is the same. Some is accidental—drag left by work not yet finished. Some is load-bearing, quietly holding the structure up. Taste is what tells the two apart.
Taste also governs timing.
People with taste are comfortable waiting. They don’t rush to signal or force clarity too early. Acting too early dissipates energy. Acting too late turns insight into imitation.
I’ve felt both sides of that mistake.
Metrics always lag taste. By the time something is obvious, the opportunity is already crowded. When I’ve relied on dashboards alone, I’ve arrived late. When I’ve trusted judgment without discipline, I’ve arrived early and burned energy.
Taste lives in the tension between those two failures.
Taste isn’t permanent. It can be lost. It has to be relearned. Like intelligence, it improves with practice—but only if you’re willing to sit with ambiguity instead of collapsing it too early.
Machines can act instantly.
Taste lives in the pause before action.
The renaissance
We all have taste. We may be entering an age that rewards cultivating it.
If there is a renaissance ahead, it won’t be led by those who move fastest.
It will be led by those willing to slow down long enough to choose well.
That is a hopeful note, not a nostalgic one. The machines will keep getting faster, and that race was never ours to win. What remains ours is the slower work: noticing, comparing, waiting, letting go of almost everything.
Taste, in the end, is just knowing what to keep.