Taste is the single most important skill to cultivate in a world of AI, if you're in a field where humanity matters.
I'm blessed to have the privilege of working across many fields at once. Without trying to be too self-congratulatory, I would say that I have a lot of experience in each of these areas, achieving them to a very high standard each:
I've been responsible for helping YouTubers make multi-million view videos, focusing particularly on storytelling. (5 years across hundreds of videos.)
I improvise and have composed piano pieces.
I continue to work as a General Practitioner (doctor of family medicine) in a rural town. (5 years of medical school + 10 years practicing as a doctor)
And surprisingly, the concept of taste is something that is common between these:
What do you actually do/create?
Even if you do/make it, how do you make your work good?
How do your come closer to your ideals?
How do you develop these ideals in the first place?
The reason that taste has become a hot topic is because in a world where people increasingly have the ability to create anything. I know firsthand, because in yet another big-number-brag, I recently built 300+ apps/websites in 2 weeks, using 3 laptops and 12 Claude Max 20x accounts.
And I don't even think I'm the best at this process. But I do think that if someone were more motivated than me and tried to make a superior product, it would be my taste and taste alone that could surpass them.
So let me explain, to the best of my knowledge, how I would approach taste in these different fields individually, in the hopes of developing a model of taste that's universally applicable and will greatly help you in your life.
After all, in a world of AI, becoming the best version of a human is the most important thing that we could do.
Pictured: Pieces of Cartier jewellery. These are actually new designs from the 1970s by Italian designer Aldo Cipullo I believe. Cartier has been around for centuries. Left side is a love bracelet, meant to only be taken off by your lover. Right is Juste un Clou, which is indeed a nail envisioned as a minimalistic piece of high end luxury.
Taste in Medical Practice
The art of clinical practice and what good "taste" is, is something unique in that it both has:
an objectively good outcome (the patient's relief from disease at a particular moment), as well as
a subjective outcome (helpfulness for the patient + their experience of healthcare and how their lives are changed)
As an example, if you perform a surgery on a patient but then they are traumatised from the experience, you may have treated their appendicitis - but they will simultaneously hate doctors for the rest of their life.
But conversely, if you flip this around, let's say you mess up a surgery because you chose the wrong approach, but the patient really likes you, then that irregardless be poor taste in medicine as well.
For medicine, I would say we prefer things that have the following properties:
Directly beneficial. The medicine should actually treat the patient's ailments or symptoms.
The least harm possible. Whilst treating it, we should avoid side effects.
Logical.
Simple. Simple is better.
Evidence-based. Treatments that have a lot of data to back them, are significantly more ideal than treatments that have minimal data to back them.
Timely. The right treatment needs to happen at the right time. As an example, an asymptomatic gallstone does not necessarily need to be removed by cholecystectomy unless it's causing symptoms or is particularly big.
Accurate diagnosis.
Yet, when it comes to the patient experience, we should try to emphasise:
Patient benefit. Is this truely done in consideration with the patient's best wishes?
Patient autonomy. Does this respect the patient's individual will?
Functional effect. A small condition can impact someone greatly, and vice versa. We don't just treat the disease but it's functional impact.
Catering the approach to the patient's circumstances. Not everybody can afford an MRI scan, so in this case, you may opt for a CT scan. Even better, not everyone needs a CT scan, if physical examination is reassuring. We do targeted investigations with a view towards learning or finding something specific.
Patient understanding. Does the patient actually understand what's being done to them, or happening to them? This is titrated towards the patient's ability to be able to understand what you're saying. The way that I would talk to a five-year-old is very different from the way I would talk to a 30-year-old, which is different from the way I would talk to an 80-year-old. Even amongst 80-year-olds, some will have dementia, some will have hearing loss, and some don't even want medication!
Humanity. We're not textbooks. ChatGPT/LLMs can't replace doctors because they fundamentally do not have an accurate worldview of what it means to be human.
Cultural understanding.
I've tried to cover a big blanket of things that I think are good in terms of doing clinical practice well. This is not artistic taste, but instead, taste in what makes a good clinician. Other clinicians will emphasise the importance of different things, with different weights.
So perhaps we can abstract a few things that pertain to taste:
Competence
The right action in the right circumstances
Empathy and humanity
Accuracy
Taste in YouTube videos
The realm of YouTube videos is significantly more subjective, and therefore going to be more rich in terms of factors we can look at.
We could once again look at all the different elements that compose the video:
visuals
audio
plot
character
presentation
But just having a big blanket list of things that we can change is actually not all that helpful. It's significantly more helpful to try to figure out the aim of a particular YouTube video. A video with "high taste" achieves the expectations of a viewer, and ideally surpasses them.
For example, I once did storytelling work for a video by Ben Morris. This video was INSANELY hard to figure out the storytelling for, because he attempted to climb this mountain several times, and we struggled to tie it together.
But this video had great taste, because:
It was a genuine struggle
It had lots of true emotional moments
We didn't have to make stuff up for the sake of the video
It contains both fun AND meaning AND struggle
Ben progressed as a human being throughout the course of this video
It was a genuine triumph to make it to the end
We managed to tell the story in a way that didn't lose viewers too badly, despite repeated failures to climb the mountain
What ended up hurting the video, I think, was that we actually went viral in China where it's got several million views on Bilibili reuploads (China's YouTube). And then those viewers came to visit the YouTube video just to tell us how much they loved the video on Bilibilli! This hurt retention. If you were to calculate cumulative views, it'd probably be closer to 4 million, but I haven't checked Bilibili in a while to know.
So in terms of viewer expectations, a video with great taste is defined by its impact on the audience:
Emotional impact of a video
Educational usefulness of a video
And the extremely wide/variable specifics of both of these axes
Authenticity for the YouTuber too
Obviously, you might look at clickability and retention and all of that. But in reality, those are just proxy metrics for the above two things. They are not the aims themselves.
Taste in Making Music
https://youtu.be/p1GPuhMuJr4?si=2LY2ucmQIqhuHTus
Just going to be brief here as this is getting long. But I think taste in the music you make is about how much you can impart a feeling across with the music. On a high level, this involves the use of call-response, of tension-release, and of the specific progressions in music. On a more concrete lower level, you might choose certain chords for certain situations and avoid them in others, and the same is true for rhythms and melodies.
What isn't taste is just doing something generic and meaningless. Tasteful music makes you feel a certain way. Anything outside of that (e.g. basic music you may hear in the gym) is not really tasteful.
This also applies to listening to music. The better you become at making music, the better you become at appreciating really good music. Also, just because something is mainstream, doesn't make it bad in the slightest. You can appreciate Kapustin's etudes, Chopin's Ballades, whilst also appreciating NewJeans' Cool With You. Right now, there a Japanese artist called Mylta who I particularly like, whose tracks merge jazz and EDM and foley (nature sounds) and poetic lyricism, with references to Chinese idioms and colorful expressions.
What Taste Is
In its simplest form, I think taste is knowing what you like, why you like it, and optionally how to make it yourself. For people making things the third is mandatory.
My taste in medicine was learnt from textbooks but also from senior doctors that I looked up to. I would look at how another doctor was practising and then think, "Oh, that's a good way to do things," and then adapt that into my own style. Over time, I developed a set of principles that I strongly apply to patients that I see. Every patient's outcome is the direct manifestation of whether those principles have given them good healthcare or not. This is why objective truth matters.
With YouTube. I similarly would look at every individual component of videos that either 1. performed well, or 2. that I really liked. And I would dissect them, thinking carefully about why it did so well, or - in the case of videos that affected me - why it affected me the way it did.
The very interesting thing about YouTube videos is that regardless of your consent or understanding, a video will affect you in a certain way just by virtue of you continuing to watch it. We are impacted by many things in our lives, in ways that aren't immediately conscious to us.
So taste is conscious competence. It is a curation of all the things that make good things good. It is similarly a curation of avoiding the things that make bad things bad. Taste is to signal, as non-taste is to noise. When you lack taste, you lack the ability to separate signals from noise.
Infinite Monkeys with infinite typewriters don't have taste. Because even though they can theoretically write every single novel that ever came into existence, they have essentially spammed these novels into the air. So you would hardly call them tasteful.
But if you had one author that made a single world-changingly good book, and then that book was written with all of his prior experience rolled into it - from life, from other styles of writing, and from original thought - then that would be a book of extreme taste.
How to Cultivate Taste
With all of the above said, I think you can come pretty close to having a universal method for improving your taste:
Have a mission or project. Learning things aimlessly means that they have no direction or output. However, the only way that you'd actually be able to figure out whether your taste is improving or not is to be able to directly observe the outputs of your own principles.
Your principles should be shaped by your curation. You need to have an opinionated model of the world. It's not opinionated in that it's merely different from others; for example, atonal music is always going to sound really bad to most listeners. But your taste is having a strong idea of what is good and what is bad. And then also going to the next step of taking time to understand why a good thing is good and why a bad thing is bad.
Develop competency. You should aim to get really good at achieving objective outcomes, and then also really good at achieving subjective ones. For example, "good taste in business" would mean that your business is objectively making a lot of money, or even just objectively being done in a way that suits your life the best. Even better if the brand is good and it has a positive impact on the world. However, competency must be developed through deliberate practice, and with intention towards outcomes. You could learn Latin for instance, but it wouldn't help you become a better UX designer much, because obviously it's random and unrelated. That's an extreme example, but there's a lot of examples of learning unnecessary things. (That said, Steve Jobs came up with fonts for Apple computers by going to calligraphy class. So not all things are unnecessary.)
Genuinely consider how you feel about something. This is something that happens a lot with YouTubers, actually, and I'm opinionated on this. But YouTubers that just want to maximise views, rarely create any genuine emotional impact on their viewers. They may actually get a tonne of views. But because they don't have soul or character or any story interesting enough to talk about, and they only care about "will this get me more views?", their content is repetitive and cookie-cutter. They don't go beyond a few proven formats or even produce their own improvements, because they don't understand the fundamentals.
Take in both the good and the bad. Mamoru Oshii (director of Ghost in the Shell) said the following, in a course that is now removed from the internet (but I took notes before it shut down):
Bad Movies Change Lives
He was talking about a science fiction which was the first movie he ever saw: he remembers a scene where the mutant monster was hostile to the lady. “Children usually remember only scenes. They never think of the story as a whole or totally grasp the story and characters.”
“The monster with the lady. And this became strongly embedded in me, it became my inner structure. Pairing something horrifying with something beautiful. I’ve been revolving around that pairing my whole life.”
“Awe and beauty - they’re a set. It’s not limited to beautiful women though…a young girl, or even a dog will do. Similarly, the beast doesn’t have to be evil per se. It could be Frankenstein’s monster, an alien, or a golem. As long as it’s something striking with something beautiful.”
“My experience with that imprinted that in me. When I visited that film as an adult…it was so mediocre! I wouldn’t give it another chance. But that was the film that did it. It was able to change the course of a person’s life. That’s part of what makes film a fascinating medium. It’s also why I don’t just watch the masterpieces. There’s as much value in watching any film as there is in watching a masterpiece. If anything, it’s better to be familiar with what’s mediocre.”
“In the town where I lived, there were five movie theatres. I went to all of every week. The point is, any film will do. I would watch anything with image and sound. I was never bored. Why? You can tell a boring movie is going to be boring within the first 2 minutes, maybe even within the first minute. The first three shots give it away. Once I realise that, I can watch while thinking about why it’s bad. That’s why I never get bored.”
A masterpiece doesn’t give you room to think. Because it’s so well made. No matter how many times you watch it, sometimes it gets hazy. I remember the lame movies. Because my brain was working as I watched, taking in the writing. Why are they taking plot in that direciton? “Start acting like a main character!” I’d scold.
As a director, learning what not to do is the most important thing. By eliminating all that, you can figure out what works. The only way to learn what to do is to watch bad films. There’s no other way but to savor failures.
The only problem is there’s no-one else to talk to. No one else watches them. So I keep a notebook. One page per film. I always write something. I force myself to write no matter what. People are impressed even now. Once I start talking about film, I never stop. Most people couldn’t endure the boredom.
Conclusion
Hope this helps! If it does, please feel free to give the article a like or repost.
With YouTube videos specifically, I made a course on YouTube storytelling - making your videos better so that they both get more views AND feel great for the viewer to watch. It is the distillation of working on many 1 to 10 million+ longform view videos with many YouTubers across niches, and is my best work on the subject.
