# My screed against capital-T Taste 2/15/26 I think Taste — at least as deployed by median tech commentator, Paul Graham is of course correct on it — is a lot of things that round up to “pretense” and “cope”. * Taste is desensitization. You’ve seen so much, that you’ve developed a sense for which of the “much” is rarefied and good, and which of it exists in excess, isn’t good compared to the other stuff, etc. To become someone with taste, you have to become someone disgusted by more things than everyone else. No wonder high-openness Bay Area types piss you off - you have taste! I agree with [Vinod Khosla](https://medium.com/@vkhosla/i-have-always-said-it-is-better-to-not-have-too-much-experience-in-old-industries-ba4622defedb) on this one — this is a liability re: thinking about problems from scratch, and in a way that is likely to produce any sort of alpha. * Taste is extremely convenient. How wonderful is it, that in a world that is rapidly evolving to automate away the concrete hands-on-keyboard I spent tens of hours a week on, it turns out that my *tenure* in doing so produced *taste* as its byproduct, and *taste* is all that matters now that my labor product is automated away! Turns out I don’t need to learn anything new, or find something new to contribute — it was always my *taste* that made my contributions valuable! I’m good exactly how I am - I already did my time, and it produced the most valuable commodity of all: taste. * Taste means that my senses are attuned to what’s good, and what’s not. Turns out reality is never counterintuitive, beautiful things and people are good, ugly things and people are bad — what *tastes* good *is* good! What I find repulsive won’t succeed; what naturally attracts me, almost without effort, will! Taste is both a thing that people tout as scarce, and something that they imply them and their friends have — without proof, rubric, or particular, novel (scarce!) convictions. I think “taste” is a pleasant — to me, sickly sweet — alternative to the reality that: 1. The future is more alien to us from where we stand than we’d like it to be. The things that “work” in the future won’t coincidentally appeal to our nostalgia or the aesthetic preferences of smart Stanford graduates. 2. The alpha will move towards **harder**, higher-complexity problems: ones in the physical world, ones of failed / deadlocked social coordination, ones of politics and state capacity, etc. ones that taste like shit, ones in which you will continually plug your nose and do the hard thing, ones in which you can certainly *dream* of a better future but must become familiar with mounds of trash to get to the other side of, ones that don’t explain well at Thanksgiving, etc. 3. The people who will win those problems are people willing to chew on rocks (which don’t taste great), bare with the inelegant ugly underbelly of most of reality outside of tech (while resisting the idea that it can merely be ignored or leapfrogged), and start with no taste and earn it along the way. Not only will you have to pursue those problems: you’ll probably also have to care about them, if you want to have an outsized impact. What you actually mean by “taste” — to the extent you’re correct that it counts for something — is *desire*. You have to *want* the things you’re working on — there has to be actual *[care](https://www.natural.co/blog/honor-the-work)* in it for it to matter. Anyone else can do the version of someone who doesn’t actually *care* about the problem being solved. Paul Graham dresses in a manner that demonstrates he *cares* about what he wears; because he *cares* on how well it gets out of the way and allows him to focus on the things he cares about *most!* I promise you, the *original* culture of the Valley — the one that didn’t dress super well or doesn’t know that fancy food isn’t gold flakes on pizza — *wants* orders of magnitude more from life and the future — *cares* more about them — than the yuppie who has contented himself with nice clothes, an apartment is a cool/historic neighborhood, regular status at some place with great croissants, has paid for a font before, or whatever else you people *wish* made the difference. You’d do great to try to incept those desirous Valley monsters with your high-taste ideas so things keep some semblance of *beauty* and humanity: but what do *you* even desire so much that you’d sacrifice and plug your nose for it, such that they, or for that matter we, should listen to *you*?       %% I keep tweeting and deleting hate tweets about this new AI-era meme in tech commentary, and the corollary that it’s used to launder into discussion. - In a world abundant with software (and production), “taste” is in scarce quantity (and therefore differentiated and valuable) - Corollary (that grinds my gears): why doesn’t Paul Graham wear better clothes?? how come tech bros don’t like pop culture and nice clothes?? i miss when our elites were into `{thing that people whose high school has a Wikipedia like}` To yell at the basic, low-IQ premise in the corollary, first (I promise there’s a more mature second half you can [[My screed against capital-T Taste#^846bfe|skip]] to). What kind of woo woo bull shit is it to call in question the “taste” of a guy like Paul Graham — guy who bet on the people who built OpenAI, Twitch, Reddit, Coinbase, idc literally go down the list, before they had any credentials to warrant the bet, before people made those sorts of bets, etc. You buy some shit from SSENSE and suddenly you have better taste? What is “taste” even good for in that world? What you’d presently call “pop culture” is some shit tech bros built the entire modern substrate for, on top of which other tech bros built apps, that then delivered to you hyperpop and the other consumerist shit you’ve built thin identities on. Sorry to curse, to glaze PG (eh maybe not that sorry), reduce it all to that. I’m sure it’s just everyone’s anxiety about tech automating everyone’s lunch and a yearning for anything other than tech stuff to matter in the future. I’m just saying: there was obviously a meaningful point to rejecting the ornament and ceremony that made for the entire identity of the rigid, stale establishment, and “building things people want” (without the extra ceremony and ritual) actually *was* both contrarian and correct — as evidenced by the hit rate of the tech bros you hate who managed to take over the world and reshape it in their image that way. You forget this now, but being a nerd wasn’t always the winning game. The world is different now, they won (and so sure, I’ll concede that they don’t really *need* the same kind of defending anymore either). The people saying it weren’t the cool kids in school either; they were also nerds who somewhere along the way found out how to dress good and what music is the coolest, and are trying to retcon their identities around coolness because they never got over the downsides of being a nerd loser (the tech bros managed to console themselves re: the same sorrows with world domination and money — sure also hollow, im just trying to make a throwing stones from a glass house point). ## My more deeply considered problem with the meme ^846bfe I’m sorry for that previous section and how I must have come off; it is the reflection of what my “id” thinks about the topic, though I do have less abrasive criticisms to make of Taste. %%