Not Taste, Expertise

Taste is a word that has started to annoy me. It used to mean what one likes. We remarked about our taste in music, our taste in fashion. Simple times. It has since grown into a nebulous cross between judgement, intuition, and a dubious list of other abstractions. This misty concept has attracted thought leaders and grifters to its coffers; they take cover under its ambiguity.

Sloppy words allow rhetoric without paying for precision. "In the age of AI, taste is what matters."

But it's not all that bro. Taste reduces to expertise. Judgement is expertise. Try having good judgement without expertise; you're not getting far.

The programmers who're supposedly 10xing, whom you're calling programmers with good taste or judgement — aren't they simply expert programmers? The product managers with sharp insights for what to build — don't they simply know a lot about their users?

There's nothing nebulous here; it's altogether simple, fully pedestrian, straight-up boring: it's expertise.