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Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

This is a cool thing about learning something as a kid: You have no taste to get in the way of learning. You just learn. This is true of six-year-olds learning to play the violin.

Another taste-bypass is to jump into a field that's new enough to have no established standards for taste. For instance when I learned programming, there were no beautiful websites or even software to compare my work to. Websites were a decade away, and I had no access to any interesting software other than what I wrote myself or could find in a magazine. I was having a blast, and felt like master of the universe, though my programs by today's standards would be laughable.

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I am a pianist that went throught this. The first time I wrote something of my own "taste" was when I was 15. A couple of somewhat important guys told me "We can't wait until you are 18."

This is the only field in which I had this kind of luck. (I am about 30 now and I can write a song within about three days that I would be happy with. A more recent one was when I took an Estonian poem by Johan Liiv and set it to music. I can sing the words, know their meaning, wrote the song accordingly, but I don't speak Estonian.)

My other interests had no such kind of luck. I am still aweful at soccer, but better than other people who started off as rugby players. My MSc was the first time I discovered/invented mathematics and I still am looking for my taste, though I know what it is (self-dual frameworks). I can program the way I think in mathematics, but I am not an accomplished programmer. All of this takes a lot of time, but the recognition along the way is important–especially that one song that I could write at an early age–but then again, I started playing piano when I was, indeed, a six-year-old.

How did you happen to take Juhan Liiv's poem without knowing Estonian?

I asked an Estonian which poet's work to use and then bought the book [1] where his poems are translated to English.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Snow-Drifts-Sing-Essential-Translatio...

I don't see how you can learn anything without such taste. To learn you have to be able to know what can be done better. Or someone tells you.

I think the point here is diminishing returns. When you're younger or rather a beginner you can make bigger leaps because you're learning the rough basics. When you're an expert and you can still tell that it's not good enough it can take months or years to make you reach that next milestone.

Parent seems to refer to taste _being in the way_ of learning (not the lack of it) and I definitely get the sentiment. Sometimes I catch myself thinking about the stuff I could have learned when I was young: I had a C64 and I could have learned assembly programming, if I just had met anyone with an actual disk of an assembler program and my library had a book about it, nothing of which was the case.

But then again, if there had been YouTube already, I'm not sure I wouldn't have been immediately discouraged by some 4-year old whiz kid somewhere in the world doing it better than me.

Back then I was the king of computer science because I was comparing myself to the rest of my rural high school. Now where I'm instantly comparing myself to 4 billion people, that can get pretty discouraging pretty quick.

Or in my case, likely distracted by some random stuff on youtube.

It is best of times, it is the worst of times.

There's so much educational content on YouTube, I envy my brother who has access to courses from CMU, MIT, and Stanford, and countless other presentations he can learn from. Kids, on the other hand...have it worse, ironically, when they should be the ones benefitting the most from all the accelerated learning on offer.

I think the suggestion is that at the earliest levels of mature fields where you've got a lot of basic and technical skills to develop, you're not really able to do much useful with your taste, and it's more likely just to depress you with how far you have to go.

You will need that taste to progress eventually, but in the more mechanical early phases it can be a distraction.

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