> Skill is the ability to build — to do what’s needed to do the work.
> Taste and skill are totally independent.
This is the crux of the article, and I'm not sure what to make of it. Some people have argued the opposite as well.
When the whole argument rests on a big assumption, I'd expect some data to back it up. If I don't agree with the premise, the argument falls apart.
Taste is a manifestation of beauty and beauty in all forms is universal and hypnotic and skill-independent. Babies, animals, 80 year old grandmas, all incapable of executing, all still respond to beauty. Beauty instantiates itself in different "tastes" of the day, maybe, but there is no act of beauty that becomes ugly over time. There are buildings from across the world 500 AD we consider beautiful and even try to emulate today. Execution has very little to do with this; you don't need to be a bricklayer to appreciate the pretty brick building from 16th century London.
The people who are most incapable of having good taste are generally not the unskilled people - those actually instinctively orient themselves to beauty when they encounter it - far from it, it is the seething subset of lesser skilled people who resent their inability to produce something of beauty and respond crabs-in-a-bucket style by taking true beauty down a notch. It is pompous art gallery types that will try to persuade you that the signed toilet bowl is "akshually art", worthy of being preserved in museums next to Caravaggio.
It's the same people that demand data before you can conclude that a quadriplegic is going to finish a 40 yard dash behind a non-quadraplegic.
SOURCE? :D
This is not bashing on the OP who may be innocent of this, but I swear there is a type of person who demands DATA! with the fervor of faith in academics that would make the apostles blush. The eternal hyper-fearful spiritual serf afraid of disobeying the masters of the age and instantly CYA's by running to his priest. For all the SCIENCE they screech, they have no concept of what the kind of research that would produce the DATA! they want might even look like; far from curiosity, it is the absolute form of incuriosity: they want to enter all life's questions into SSRN and have The Anointed tell them the right answer.
This has revealed the importance of being an authority who can spread truth, whereas I used to think seeking power was evil in of itself, now I see it as a powerful tool to spread goodness to those who only respond to power.
(I recently read the 48 laws of power and it was illuminating)
Imagine presenting the original version of King Lear to someone who doesn't know English. It's beautify poetry, I won't argue that, and our hypothetical listener might even be able to detect the rhythm of its iambic pentameter buried under the seemingly-gibberish words, but they won't appreciate it on the same level as someone who actually speaks the language. And while they'd be able to get the story if it was translated, it would lose the rhythm unless the translator recreated it, at which point you've got a new work of art.
Similarly, nobody's going to be able to appreciate the Git data model unless they've already got a solid sense of algorithmic thinking, and preferably the background knowledge of filesystems to know what problem it's actually trying to solve. Or the Quicksort algorithm to someone who doesn't even know what a recursion is.
(Some anal-retentive postmodernist would probably argue that there is, in fact, a language to physical architecture, and that if you don't speak it, you won't get it. The problem is that the only way I know of to test that would be to find someone with zero experience with human-made structures, which seems impossible. I see no real purpose in arguing this point, because when it comes to algorithmic beauty, there is definitely a skill floor below which you just won't get it.)
1) Yes, you definitely need to know Latin to appreciate the Aeneid, I agree with this.
2) It is a comparatively low bar though. Ability to write Hamlet is quite a step up from ability to read it. So a floor level of skill is absolutely necessary to even “unlock” the taste.
3) There are also returns to additional knowledge/skill for a while. The better your English is, or the more cultural references you know, the better your appreciation of Hamlet might be. You “unlock” less dramatic but still new taste buds.
4) I do think, however, that my OG point largely holds: your acquisition of baseline knowledge/skills doesn’t instill taste so much as unlock it. In other words, among people who speak English, all but the aforementioned seething subset will agree that Shakespeare is great and among people with some algo thinking, all will think elegant code is elegant.
5) Because the skill to unlock taste is so much less than the skill to produce, I agree with the article that they are basically orthogonal.
Taste can differentiate between different forms of beauty and form subjective preferences. Beauty is both relative and absolute. Your 16th century London building may cross the beauty threshold on some absolute scale, but consider a block that is filled with equally beautiful, but stylistically distinct buildings. It would be in poor taste to build a new building on that block in the 16th century style, even if the new building is objectively beautiful.
I actually mostly agree with you about intuition, but your claims are too extreme for my taste ;)
True, just like it would be in poor taste to stick a beautiful ornate green column in a building where it doesn’t belong. Beauty requires harmony on the collective level, a cacophony of individually beautiful things can be ugly as a whole. We don’t want eyesores like we don’t want a wrong note in a symphony, though the same note might fit well in a different symphony.
Not a matter of opinion and not in the eye of the beholder, beauty is almost entirely objective. “Good” taste / “bad” taste may be our way of saying how much one has jammed the frequency in his brain that disables himself from perceiving beauty.
A stronger way of saying this, which I believe to be true, is that no two people with good taste will have strongly divergent views when evaluating the same thing, whether that be a piece of elegant software or Shakespeare or Bach.
I disagree with this assertion (look at the heated arguments between different interpretations of quantum mechanics as a simple counter example that comes to mind). If I'm reading you right, you're claiming that taste is just appreciation for beauty, which is itself an undeniable objective truth. But I think this is too extreme in discounting any subjective role in the assessment of beauty. Any object that we deem beautiful just is. Whether or not we ascribe it as beautiful or not says as much about us as it does as the object. What does universal even mean here? Universal to humans? Can dolphins have an appreciation for beauty? If not, can it be said to be truly universal? If so, do we think that the dolphin's standard for beauty is identical to ours?
Again, I do agree with you that there are certain archetypes of beauty that most people will agree on. I also agree with your point that some people will dismiss beauty out of a sense of sour grapes. I just think you are taking things too far in the claim that beauty is a universal, objective truth outside of the realm of subjectivity. The concept of beauty itself cannot even exist outside of subjective experience so how could it completely transcend it?
> Taste and skill are totally independent.
As my facility with code has grown, so has my sense of taste. I see beauty in code much more clearly than early in my journey. This is true of other things in my life as well.
Both come with experience and a willingness to learn.
I'm not keen on the idea of taste as simply some innate quality, rather than something learned / taught. Thinking of it as some X factor makes it easier to write off people who just disagree or lack experience.
That said, I've totally seen code with poor taste and I've written it myself, so I believe in the underlying concept.
Most people are not highly skilled. And most people have poor taste.
It was in the context of I believe, creative work, people with good taste can produce good work by virtue of volume and discarding things that feel "off", regardless of initial skill
Skill comes from experience. It means knowing what will or won't work before you do it, not having to make random stabs in the dark until you find something that works.
That being said, as your skill improves, your taste is likely to improve because you are better able to differentiate between high and low skill work. But in many cases, you don't need any skill to tell the difference. It's not exactly difficult to tell the difference between a mediocre amateur singer and a well trained professional. Where it gets really tricky though is that you may find that you may not prefer the most technically skilled practitioner. There are many people who would rather listen to Bob Dylan sing than Luciano Pavarotti. Is that poor taste? I'm not so sure. It's certainly possible to acknowledge Pavarotti's technical vocal superiority while still preferring Dylan. Whichever singer you prefer, you don't need any vocal skill to immediately tell the vast technical difference between the two. Many things are like this.
Same for singers, a technically good singers are often bad at identifying what people want, while more popular singers have better test so better able to produce what the crowd wants. But same problem here, bands often lose taste as they become famous, they didn't lose skill they are probably more skilled than ever, they just lost their ability to tell whether what they are doing is great or not.
I'm reminded of the oft-quoted experiment where people judged on the number of ceramics they could create in a given time period ended up making higher quality output than people who were judged on their single best piece. The ability to make good judgements often is acquired by people who continuously have to make many judgements. And the ability to make many judgements is limited by your ability to execute.
I always wanted to be a music producer, I have a million ideas I love, but I found the study and act of music production tedious and frustrating.
However, after my studies, I was a wedding DJ. My taste in music rocked many a party (you haven't lived until you've seen grandma twerk) despite my inability to translate my cool ideas into cool music.
I have awesome taste, but poor ability to create. This reflects in other things I have a well developed taste for, but a poor ability to create, like photography.
Another interesting aspect is how skill can inform taste. As I studied music production and learned the nuances, I appreciated music on a far deeper level. Same with photography.
Basically, to get better at something, usually you have to branch out and develop periphery skills and knowledge. For example, don't just focus on writing bug-free code fast, but also on software design, and design in general. And team management. And people skills. And read research papers and algorithms. And learn from past failures and case studies, etc.
to know what to do... wisdom
to know how to do it... skill
to do the thing as it should be done is... service