5 ms·

> Taste is knowing what is good — being able to recognize it. > Skill is the ability to build — to do what’s needed to do the work. > Taste and skill are tota

> Taste is knowing what is good — being able to recognize it. > Skill is the ability to build — to do what’s needed to do the work. > Taste and skill are totally independent. This is the crux of the article, and I'm not sure what to make of it. Some people have argued the opposite as well. When the whole argument rests on a big assumption, I'd expect some data to back it up. If I don't agree with the premise, the argument falls apart.

Jensson 4y ago
Do you think that a person who is great at coding games is also great at coming up with good game ideas to code?
cestith 4y ago
I'm not sure if I would accept the premise, but if we start from it I think the rest of the article makes some self-consistent sense.
Ferret7446 4y ago
I'd argue that taste is a kind of skill (or more generally, knowledge). It can be developed. Doing things requires a multitude of skills. Depending on the task, some skills may be more impactful. There is also some co-development depending on the skill. Basically, to get better at something, usually you have to branch out and develop periphery skills and knowledge. For example, don't just focus on writing bug-free code fast, but also on software design, and design in general. And team management. And people skills. And read research papers and algorithms. And learn from past failures and case studies, etc.
runevault 4y ago
I'll give a simple example. Do you think knowing how to write a lexer and parser means you know how to write the syntax of a language that will be pleasant to use? Because knowing the algorithms to do one does not mean you have the skills to do the other, which is a form of taste.
- bch 4y ago
  It doesn’t necessarily mean you have the skills, but it can inform the process. I can’t think of a case where knowing your materials would be detrimental to working with them.
  - runevault 4y ago
    That's fair, it certainly helps. If you don't understand how all the parsing bits work you might make something that sucks to parse which can lead to confusing syntax. But it doesn't guarantee you can do the design phase.
  - diffxx 4y ago
    Sometimes a little knowledge is more dangerous than ignorance.
zwkrt 4y ago
You bring up a good point. I really don't know anyone in my personal/work life who I think has great taste but poor ability to execute. This includes not only tech but music, interior design, cooking, conversation, anything. I definitely know the reverse; people who can execute quickly but produce something smelly. I'm reminded of the oft-quoted experiment where people judged on the number of ceramics they could create in a given time period ended up making higher quality output than people who were judged on their single best piece. The ability to make good judgements often is acquired by people who continuously have to make many judgements. And the ability to make many judgements is limited by your ability to execute.
- imwillofficial 4y ago
  An example of good taste but poor skill in execution. I always wanted to be a music producer, I have a million ideas I love, but I found the study and act of music production tedious and frustrating. However, after my studies, I was a wedding DJ. My taste in music rocked many a party (you haven't lived until you've seen grandma twerk) despite my inability to translate my cool ideas into cool music. I have awesome taste, but poor ability to create. This reflects in other things I have a well developed taste for, but a poor ability to create, like photography. Another interesting aspect is how skill can inform taste. As I studied music production and learned the nuances, I appreciated music on a far deeper level. Same with photography.
throw7 4y ago
Thanks for the summary as I didn't read the article and I don't like arguing about "taste"... but I was piqued by "do what's needed to do the work" as "skill". I was reminded of the entrance plaque to the Schoellkopf Power Station: to know what to do... wisdom to know how to do it... skill to do the thing as it should be done is... service
club_tropical 4y ago
There is no "data" that would satisfy you if your intuition is so completely erased that you need some sociologist to tell you this. Taste is a manifestation of beauty and beauty in all forms is universal and hypnotic and skill-independent. Babies, animals, 80 year old grandmas, all incapable of executing, all still respond to beauty. Beauty instantiates itself in different "tastes" of the day, maybe, but there is no act of beauty that becomes ugly over time. There are buildings from across the world 500 AD we consider beautiful and even try to emulate today. Execution has very little to do with this; you don't need to be a bricklayer to appreciate the pretty brick building from 16th century London. The people who are most incapable of having good taste are generally not the unskilled people - those actually instinctively orient themselves to beauty when they encounter it - far from it, it is the seething subset of lesser skilled people who resent their inability to produce something of beauty and respond crabs-in-a-bucket style by taking true beauty down a notch. It is pompous art gallery types that will try to persuade you that the signed toilet bowl is "akshually art", worthy of being preserved in museums next to Caravaggio.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  well said. It's the same people that demand data before you can conclude that a quadriplegic is going to finish a 40 yard dash behind a non-quadraplegic.
  - club_tropical 4y ago
    >a quadriplegic is going to finish a 40 yard dash behind a non-quadraplegic SOURCE? :D This is not bashing on the OP who may be innocent of this, but I swear there is a type of person who demands DATA! with the fervor of faith in academics that would make the apostles blush. The eternal hyper-fearful spiritual serf afraid of disobeying the masters of the age and instantly CYA's by running to his priest. For all the SCIENCE they screech, they have no concept of what the kind of research that would produce the DATA! they want might even look like; far from curiosity, it is the absolute form of incuriosity: they want to enter all life's questions into SSRN and have The Anointed tell them the right answer.
avg_dev 4y ago
I just flat out disagree with > Taste and skill are totally independent. As my facility with code has grown, so has my sense of taste. I see beauty in code much more clearly than early in my journey. This is true of other things in my life as well.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  Skill enhances taste, developing skill gives you the experience needed to perceive nuances in design that other people wouldn't notice. But if you don't have taste in the first place I don't think developing skill will fix that.
  - joseda-hg 4y ago
    I can't remember where I read it, but I recall hearing one time, "You need not know how to do something, just know how it should be right, making it will be simple because you will know when it's wrong" It was in the context of I believe, creative work, people with good taste can produce good work by virtue of volume and discarding things that feel "off", regardless of initial skill
    - MichaelCollins 4y ago
      If you have good aesthetic sense but no skill, you can create good work. But not efficiently. You'll have a lot of false starts, trying things only to discover they don't work, retrying again and again until you find something that satisfies your sense of taste. Through this process you will develop skill. Skill comes from experience. It means knowing what will or won't work before you do it, not having to make random stabs in the dark until you find something that works.
      - joseda-hg 4y ago
        It's important to acknowledge, simple here doesn't mean easy, it's simple as in running a marathon, it's mechanicaly simple, but it's not easy to do
swayvil 4y ago
Taste is an eye. Skill is a hand. The eye guides the hand. There's your connection.

Jensson 4y ago

Do you think that a person who is great at coding games is also great at coming up with good game ideas to code?

cestith 4y ago

I'm not sure if I would accept the premise, but if we start from it I think the rest of the article makes some self-consistent sense.

Ferret7446 4y ago

I'd argue that taste is a kind of skill (or more generally, knowledge). It can be developed. Doing things requires a multitude of skills. Depending on the task, some skills may be more impactful. There is also some co-development depending on the skill. Basically, to get better at something, usually you have to branch out and develop periphery skills and knowledge. For example, don't just focus on writing bug-free code fast, but also on software design, and design in general. And team management. And people skills. And read research papers and algorithms. And learn from past failures and case studies, etc.

runevault 4y ago

I'll give a simple example. Do you think knowing how to write a lexer and parser means you know how to write the syntax of a language that will be pleasant to use? Because knowing the algorithms to do one does not mean you have the skills to do the other, which is a form of taste.

bch 4y ago
It doesn’t necessarily mean you have the skills, but it can inform the process. I can’t think of a case where knowing your materials would be detrimental to working with them.
- runevault 4y ago
  That's fair, it certainly helps. If you don't understand how all the parsing bits work you might make something that sucks to parse which can lead to confusing syntax. But it doesn't guarantee you can do the design phase.
- diffxx 4y ago
  Sometimes a little knowledge is more dangerous than ignorance.

zwkrt 4y ago

You bring up a good point. I really don't know anyone in my personal/work life who I think has great taste but poor ability to execute. This includes not only tech but music, interior design, cooking, conversation, anything. I definitely know the reverse; people who can execute quickly but produce something smelly. I'm reminded of the oft-quoted experiment where people judged on the number of ceramics they could create in a given time period ended up making higher quality output than people who were judged on their single best piece. The ability to make good judgements often is acquired by people who continuously have to make many judgements. And the ability to make many judgements is limited by your ability to execute.

imwillofficial 4y ago
An example of good taste but poor skill in execution. I always wanted to be a music producer, I have a million ideas I love, but I found the study and act of music production tedious and frustrating. However, after my studies, I was a wedding DJ. My taste in music rocked many a party (you haven't lived until you've seen grandma twerk) despite my inability to translate my cool ideas into cool music. I have awesome taste, but poor ability to create. This reflects in other things I have a well developed taste for, but a poor ability to create, like photography. Another interesting aspect is how skill can inform taste. As I studied music production and learned the nuances, I appreciated music on a far deeper level. Same with photography.

throw7 4y ago

Thanks for the summary as I didn't read the article and I don't like arguing about "taste"... but I was piqued by "do what's needed to do the work" as "skill". I was reminded of the entrance plaque to the Schoellkopf Power Station: to know what to do... wisdom to know how to do it... skill to do the thing as it should be done is... service

club_tropical 4y ago

There is no "data" that would satisfy you if your intuition is so completely erased that you need some sociologist to tell you this. Taste is a manifestation of beauty and beauty in all forms is universal and hypnotic and skill-independent. Babies, animals, 80 year old grandmas, all incapable of executing, all still respond to beauty. Beauty instantiates itself in different "tastes" of the day, maybe, but there is no act of beauty that becomes ugly over time. There are buildings from across the world 500 AD we consider beautiful and even try to emulate today. Execution has very little to do with this; you don't need to be a bricklayer to appreciate the pretty brick building from 16th century London. The people who are most incapable of having good taste are generally not the unskilled people - those actually instinctively orient themselves to beauty when they encounter it - far from it, it is the seething subset of lesser skilled people who resent their inability to produce something of beauty and respond crabs-in-a-bucket style by taking true beauty down a notch. It is pompous art gallery types that will try to persuade you that the signed toilet bowl is "akshually art", worthy of being preserved in museums next to Caravaggio.

P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
well said. It's the same people that demand data before you can conclude that a quadriplegic is going to finish a 40 yard dash behind a non-quadraplegic.
- club_tropical 4y ago
  >a quadriplegic is going to finish a 40 yard dash behind a non-quadraplegic SOURCE? :D This is not bashing on the OP who may be innocent of this, but I swear there is a type of person who demands DATA! with the fervor of faith in academics that would make the apostles blush. The eternal hyper-fearful spiritual serf afraid of disobeying the masters of the age and instantly CYA's by running to his priest. For all the SCIENCE they screech, they have no concept of what the kind of research that would produce the DATA! they want might even look like; far from curiosity, it is the absolute form of incuriosity: they want to enter all life's questions into SSRN and have The Anointed tell them the right answer.

avg_dev 4y ago

I just flat out disagree with > Taste and skill are totally independent. As my facility with code has grown, so has my sense of taste. I see beauty in code much more clearly than early in my journey. This is true of other things in my life as well.

MichaelCollins 4y ago
Skill enhances taste, developing skill gives you the experience needed to perceive nuances in design that other people wouldn't notice. But if you don't have taste in the first place I don't think developing skill will fix that.
- joseda-hg 4y ago
  I can't remember where I read it, but I recall hearing one time, "You need not know how to do something, just know how it should be right, making it will be simple because you will know when it's wrong" It was in the context of I believe, creative work, people with good taste can produce good work by virtue of volume and discarding things that feel "off", regardless of initial skill
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    If you have good aesthetic sense but no skill, you can create good work. But not efficiently. You'll have a lot of false starts, trying things only to discover they don't work, retrying again and again until you find something that satisfies your sense of taste. Through this process you will develop skill. Skill comes from experience. It means knowing what will or won't work before you do it, not having to make random stabs in the dark until you find something that works.
    - joseda-hg 4y ago
      It's important to acknowledge, simple here doesn't mean easy, it's simple as in running a marathon, it's mechanicaly simple, but it's not easy to do

swayvil 4y ago

Taste is an eye. Skill is a hand. The eye guides the hand. There's your connection.