@suchenzang I don't really this is true, as much as people seem to wish it were so.

@chris_j_paxton you shall be stoned to death with chants of "skill issue".

@suchenzang Nah people talk about vibes and taste but it sure seems like the people who are winning actually do have skill on their side

@suchenzang The source essay by pg which presumably started the conversation talks about elegance in work product(and by extension who produces that has taste) as the primary driver. People kind of ignored that and just defaulted to people w taste.

@suchenzang Hm, I don’t think of taste as something “acquired passively through judgement/critique, or via birthright.” Taste is intuition and intuition is distilled experience. Sometimes it’s learned by studying the experience of others, often it can be learned only from active experiments.

@suchenzang Beautiful.. Earned judgement can’t be “distilled” into something abstract.. it comes from doing rather than just knowing

>acquired passively through judgement/critique, or via birthright

I dont think this is true at all, i think developing taste is very active process and there are many actionable things you can do. People think it’s passive / birthright because when done well it’s effortless/looks intuitive.

Source : Im an art curator

@suchenzang Yeah. It’s pretty mad really.

Even for those of us who grew up playing chess, doing other competitions (all of which AI excels at)

I don’t know is Shakespeare is just a matter of “taste”

Then again the frontier LLMs can’t write “like Bloomberg” yet, given inf budget

@suchenzang Tech these days: I’m life-maxxing my life are you?

My Oura ring says I’m happier than you, my eightsleep mattress says I sleep better than you and I hit all my corporate OKRs- so I am better than u!

@suchenzang @chris_j_paxton it's "skill.md issue" now

@suchenzang I like you posts very much ... people will see how wrong they were in most things as they alway are ... and the systematic minds will prevail once more

@suchenzang As an AI researcher yourself, do you believe the existential crisis rhetoric that frontier labs are pushing around the coming of AGI? At least with the current LLM architecture

@suchenzang Then taste is just preference of someone else's best practice.

Abstraction only kicks the concern downstairs - but the staircase is built on tradeoffs and compromises, all the way up.

The emperor wears no clothes. Eventually somebody is going to step in it.

@suchenzang @darrenangle You're getting good

@suchenzang we’re also firmly at t-3months max before AI leapfrogs us in “taste” too

@suchenzang the cope was easier when we called it curation instead of taste

@suchenzang Your posting cadence is concerning. Everything ok, Susan?

@suchenzang No swarms at GDM, what you are talking about, your models can’t even code :)

@suchenzang more thoughts

@suchenzang Taste is expertise that never got written into a benchmark. Which is why everyone claims it and nobody can audit it.