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Comment by cgearhart | Hacker News Reader

I often find this kind of advice too vague to really be useful. “Have taste” in the problems you work on isn’t very actionable. (Unless perhaps you list examples of good and bad taste.)

I’ll admit that I may just be immature at research as almost all my experience has either been attempting to replicate research or to put it into practice in production systems.

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"Having taste" is mostly about predicting the future. Which problems are worth studying, which problems you are capable of solving, and which solutions turn out to be important, in retrospect. If there was an actionable way of developing taste in something, the activity itself would probably be so predictable that it would not be a particularly good research topic.

Taste is mostly about having a good intuition on the topics where your intuition is worth following. It tends to develop with experience. But if you want to develop the kind of taste that helps picking good research topics, you need the right kind of experience for that field of research. Experience that turns out to be of the right kind, in retrospect. If your experiences and interests align (again in retrospect), you will probably develop a good taste for research problems in your field of interest. But that requires some amount of luck, in addition to everything else.

That seems even less actionable, and somewhat misaligned with the OP article. “Taste” implies an ability to distinguish between a good example and a bad one. If it’s only recognizable in retrospect then it’s just another name for survivorship bias.

If you need actionable guidelines, you may not be the right person to do research. At least not now.

Research is all about studying topics of uncertain value. You have to commit to a project long before you can say if it's actually worth doing.

Taste comes with deliberate effort and experience. It doesn't tell you that a topic is definitely worth studying, but it increases the likelihood that you will guess right.

What is the point of writing the prescription to “have good taste” then?

Either the reader already has it, in which case there’s no point in being told that. Or the reader doesn’t, in which case you have declared that good taste cannot be taught.

Perhaps the author’s next article should be How to win the lottery: be lucky which is just about as actionable.

The author's answer was:

> But if I had to summarize it in one sentence, it would be that taste comes from practicing the skill of research, keeping your focus always on identifying what works and what doesn't.

Instead of following general guidelines, focus on figuring out what works and what doesn't in each specific situation. Keep doing that for many years, and your taste will develop. Remember that you are training your intuition, not developing a set of exact rules.

It's helpful to tell people that they are in uncharted territory and can't rely on running on autopilot even if you don't have a new map to give them. Whether they can make their way or not is unclear, but the first step is just making sure they understand that they're now in a place where they need to make their own way and can't fully rely on existing maps. Otherwise they might not even realize they need to start asking "am I doing the right thing right now" by themselves.

You can cultivate good taste by intentionally taking in a lot of information about what's in the field, and what you like and what you don't like about it. This could be commenting on elements of film, fashion, photography, but it can also be having a sense of what you like to see stylistically in a contract, in a framework, or in corporate culture.

I recall reading an interview about a legendary developer, and the majority of the interview was not focused on his coding decisions or the structures he built, but it was about a notebook that he kept with voluminous notes about what was good and what wasn't. That notebook is a materialized version of 'taste', and it's certainly something almost anyone could put together with enough effort and time.

Eh. I think my point is that the OP is presented as a “how to” (literally: “how to do important research”) and then it immediately dodges the question by saying “have good taste”. That does not help anyone do important research or improve the quality of the research they do; it’s a cop out.

If I wrote about “how to paint great art” or “how to cook great meals” or “how to build great things” then it would be silly to say “have good taste”—even if that’s part of the answer. It won’t help anyone else to improve in any of those endeavors.

Unless you're too early in which case you get mocked for decades.

Unrelated, but I see the use of the phrase "taste" as having a strong Twitter / e/acc smell (in a negative way).

I tend to associate it with folks who are prepared to victim blame researchers for not adapting to the "new economy" as being people who have "bad taste" or "low agency", maybe as a way to rationalize/justify the upcoming inqeuality that AI will create.

Basically a recycling of the way "IQ"/smarts/hard-work has historically been used to justify disproportionate rewards for the upper class.

(Obviously a gigantic stretch on my part, and not saying the author is in this camp, but just wanted to vent somewhere)

Taste has a much longer pg history: "Taste for Makers" in 2002, "How Art Can Be Good" in 2006, and "Is There Such a Thing as Good Taste" in 2021.

(If we're venting about words, I'll bring up "opinionated", which has somehow become a positive .)

Links: https://paulgraham.com/taste.html https://www.paulgraham.com/goodart.html https://paulgraham.com/goodtaste.html

Yes this does not work as well for math or physics. The biggest problem in math is arguably the Riemann Hypothesis . Good luck getting up to the speed on the literature on that . You can invest a lifetime trying to solve the biggest problems in physics or math and get nowhere. You may have to choose more modest goals.

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