Is there such a thing as good taste?
It amazes me when people seem to lack taste. I&#x27;m not even saying the ability to rank items in a way that agrees to some general standard. I&#x27;m saying the ability to <i>notice</i> that there is even a difference. I&#x27;ll talk about taste in the literal sense but this extends to everything. I remember being at a Chinese restaurant with some friends where we were eating scallion pancakes. I said, boastfully, that my family makes better scallion pancakes and a friend remarked that he didn&#x27;t think there was any difference, that indeed all scallion pancakes were exactly alike to him. Or another friend couldn&#x27;t tell the difference between orange juice from concentrate and not from concentrate.<p>I wonder how much of this is physiological and how much is mental. I can&#x27;t help but think you&#x27;d need some sort of color blindness for taste to genuinely not notice any difference between scallion pancakes. But perhaps my friend was exaggerating.<p>My theory is that taste is one quality that separates the academics from the business people. Academia doesn&#x27;t necessitate a lot of taste. If you have it, great. If you don&#x27;t have it, no big deal. On the other hand, stuff such as product design, user interfaces, even software engineering, requires taste. You need to understand what makes a good piece of software or a good product. One could argue that Steve Jobs was a product supertaster. He was finely attuned to stuff that the average user (or the average HN reader) would not see. As PG notes, taste is being attuned to the collective unconsciousness, to a collective aesthetic. If you can tap into that, you can attract customers.