Taste and Elaborating on Judgement

Still thinking of this as related to judgement and decision-making, hence it is bolded and the 2nd article on this specific idea

/ Something people don’t necessarily discuss often but is actually very important is simply taste.

Taste — The capacity of an individual or group to assess and appreciate the aesthetic qualities of objects, experiences, or combinations based on intuition, cultural background, and personal preferences. It involves the discernment of beauty, harmony, and coherence across various sensory domains, influencing judgments of what is aesthetically pleasing or suitable. Taste encompasses visual, auditory, tactile, and emotional elements and is shaped by exposure to cultural influences and life experiences. It guides the recognition of what works harmoniously and aligns with personal or collective values in matters of design and aesthetics (thanks GPT)*

I’m thinking along the lines of knowing/gut feel/intuition informing on what looks and feels “good” qualitatively.

I like thinking about this and thinking of where I stand. I have gleaned from external data points that I have about average taste. There are of course things I have poor taste in and things I have good taste in so I’ll go ahead and say my taste is (usually) average. I’d think it isn’t low nor high (informed by external data points). Is it fair to say if someone’s taste is low in x, they may be incentivized to make biased comments and/or not understand the nuances of average to great taste…and if someone has great taste, they may come off as boastful (inadvertently) or even on purpose! Been thinking about taste in the context of judgement and intuition.

Here is my favorite example.

I can’t count to you the number of times I’ve heard visitors/guests to my parents’ house say that they have a lovely home. It really isn’t anything special or ornate or special. There isn’t anything expensive nor some intentional design nor theme really. It is really just tastefully designed well. My mom has no formal design experience. It literally comes down to just having a “good eye” for what looks good. This extends to clothes/fashion and aesthetics in general but is most pronounced by the combination of whatever rug is in the living room, with the couch, with the one painting on the wall, with the one side table and the one vase with flowers, that it just looks good to a lot of people. Whatever adjective you want to use: homey, comfortable, pretty, aesthetic. It just looks good and I say this because so many external data points, unprompted, over multiple years, from people of different backgrounds, have been noted and a trend observed.

Maybe extend this to genius. It appears wherever and in whomever and just is. Decent movie by the way.

/ Jumping to a side note…am I suggesting that you can get a very balanced view from someone who is around the middle of the pack of taste in x?

This doesn’t make sense…don’t you want someone who is excellent/above average to provide an opinion?

(I’m writing this with some sarcasm since both have pros and cons but the point I’m making is there may be times where an opinion from someone who is “average on taste in x” may outweigh the opinion of an expert in x (this sounds crazy I feel initially))

Where would this occur?

If the expert is biased or so narrow in their view to miss the big picture (funny enough I think this happens all the time).
If the expert is conflicted in telling the truth (happens a bunch as well).
If the expert is so far removed from the average that even if they try to think what is normal, they are way off (happens all the time as well).

Let’s keep thinking about this.

Absolutely random arbitrary example time. There are many different types of soda. You have in front of you 3 people. You want to get the most informed opinion of “what is the best soda?” which you may say “That’s subjective” and I’ll say “ok sure” but let’s give a criteria and/or research process to define what is the best soda.

The best soda by these criteria has the:

Best balance…in taste (not too strong or weak).
Sweetness (not too sweet nor not sweet).
Carbonation (not too bubbly yet not not bubbly).
Aftertaste (avoids a weird aftertaste).
And a few other qualitative measures that are hard to define and less important but not trivial like how does the soda taste when flat? Does it taste different when very chilled? Is the satisfaction when chilled very high? And even more like packaging…color of soda itself…

Ok, now here are the 3 people. You only get to ask the opinion of one person.

(may just be an exercise of who has the most balanced palette and can discern the most balanced soda but I digress, anyways playing along)

A soda producer who works in a soda factory and knows the intricacies of how the soda is made, what ratios of ingredients are used.
A random person who loves thinking soda, doesn’t drink too much soda on a daily basis but has tried every soda, and thought about how the soda tastes. This person has no other qualifications.
Someone who drinks soda very very often. They have tried a number of sodas, about 80-90% of the types of soda #2 has tried, but typically sticks with one or two types of soda that they prefer.

Is it typical that people would go with #1? How many with #2 or #3?

But wait…

#1 knows the most about the science and details about soda and actually works in the soda industry! And #3 consumes the most soda and they have the most experience drinking and tasting soda!

Yeah…but #2 has just been thinking about soda. Day in and day out. They have the greatest range (they’ve tried the most variety of soda). Is that important?

Abstract this out even more.

Imagine you have someone who just has thought about something for 10 years. Every day. Even better, say they think about something on day 1, they spend the next 7 days consuming information about the topic, and then on day 8, they think about that information that informs them.

Are they more favorable, less favorable, the same? Repeat that for 10 years.

My point (may be a stretch) is I think it is possible to train judgement and decision making actively.

You have a weird disconnect. If you had better decision making and judgement by 5%, over the course of your life, you’d live a far superior life with better outcomes and experiences for you and your loved ones but how do you get there passively? Only if exposed to the right environment? Ok…but can it be learned? Possibly. Can it be taught? Sure, but probably not prescriptively and in fact more directionally.

I don’t think classes with heuristics and syllabi are the way to go. It is more like mentoring. I show you how something works, I help you iterate your thinking, you see some patterns because that can’t be gleaned over, but you really just try to mess around in the arena so you develop YOUR way of decision making and judgement.

The point is:

I think judgement and decision making can be trained and I’m currently in the phase of seeing what other sharp individuals think of this.
I think #2 is the person to ask about the soda, partly because even if #1 knows how to MAKE the most balanced soda, #2 knows how to CRITIQUE the most balanced soda (probably but feel free to disagree).
External data points are really helpful.
Taste is really important to think about for more reasons than are listed here.

tl;dr read points above

Cheers,

Vishal

Published on October 31, 2023.