Quotes
Acquiring good taste comes through using various things, discarding the ones you don’t like and keeping the ones you do. if you never try various things, you will not acquire good taste. And what I mean by taste here is simply the honed ability to distinguish mediocrity from excellence. This will be highly subjective, and not everyone’s taste will be the same, but that is the point, you should NOT have the same taste as someone else. Question the status quo, experiment, break things, do this several times, do this everyday and keep doing it.
– Tinkering is a lost art
This is in the same vein with what Prime said about people who refuse to try out new tools out of principle, because they think they are “pragmatic” by doing so, but until you explore out new territories and alternatives, you will never know for yourself.
To support the above:
A pure ‘truth-seeker’ has an interest in always getting it right. This attitude constrains the search space, focusing searches on plausible paths to explore and discarding what is implausible or beyond the pale. However, because their assessment of plausibility will always proceed from their standing system of beliefs, even their most rational epistemic attempts can be caught in what Nguyen calls an epistemic trap: belief systems that make us shut down a line of questioning before exploring its validity. These traps constrain our exploratory taste.
– C Thi. Nguyen
You should never ask a man what books he has read. You should ask him what books he chose not to read.
– Proust? (from the YouTube video)
Taste vs. Sensibility?
“Do you think I could be a writer?”
“Well,” the writer said, “I don’t know… Do you like sentences?”
The writer could see the student’s amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am twenty years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, “I liked the smell of paint”
If you’re going to be a gardener, it helps to like the smell of roses. If you’re going to be a writer, it helps to appreciate sentences. That, however, only happens once you’ve spent many afternoons reading.
— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Similar talk about sensibility is here: Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process You need to develop
Taste requires awaraness, paying attention.
In the last YouTube video by val, she mentions “when your preferences are what everyone likes, no one actually feels anything anymore slowly Regarding filling the gaps with content vs sitting in these gaps like “cool interesting people” Can the idea of The Other be interwoven here as well?
The more we chase aesthetics, the less aesthetic sensitivity we have.