Following Yang Chen-Ning's passing, "taste" has once again become central to discussion. He emphasized that in frontier physics, identifying important problems matters more than technical prowess itself. Steve Jobs similarly criticized Microsoft for lacking taste—for being devoid of culture and soul. People treat taste as an almost divine intuition precisely because it operates beyond explicit rules.
But if we examine taste at the experiential level, this intuition doesn't descend from nowhere. It's an emergent structure trained through massive exposure to information. Designers consume countless case studies, scientists read through mountains of papers. This past data continuously adjusts internal weights in the brain until a critical threshold produces what we call intuition. It enables people to feel "this is right" before logic kicks in. As Bohr asks in Oppenheimer: "Can you hear the music?" Reading the music score is post-hoc verification; hearing the music is intuition at test time. Algebra, physics, everything about intuition—it's like a sheet of music. "The important thing isn't can you read music, it's can you hear it."
Yet this narrative about how intuition emerges doesn't tell us how to judge whether a taste is good or bad in the present moment. Neither Steve Jobs' work nor Van Gogh's paintings were immediately recognized as "good" when they first appeared. Their value was established much later, through echoes within the system. In other words, taste verification carries significant temporal lag.
This is why taste resembles a prediction pointing toward the future. A person's intuition proposes a judgment that doesn't immediately become "correct"—it must wait for the system to provide feedback through mechanisms of selection, diffusion, recognition, and replication at some future point. The success of taste depends on tomorrow's evaluation function, not today's applause. This temporal delay and unpredictability make taste fundamentally a prediction of future states rather than a statement about present aesthetics.
We must probe deeper: if taste's success depends on the future, how exactly does "the future" make its judgment? Intuition always belongs to the individual; the feeling of "rightness" is personal experience. But whether a taste is good, beautiful, or even worth remembering is not decided by individuals.
In social contexts, judgment doesn't remain at the individual level—it flows into a larger evaluative network. When peer review, capital flows, media narratives, and public sentiment couple together, they form a systemic force transcending any single will. Once this system operates, like the French Revolution entering its later stages, it rapidly develops its own direction and rhythm, no longer controlled by any individual actor. Taste's ultimate fate is determined within this systemic dynamic independent of personal judgment.
Paul Graham's observation in Hackers and Painters reveals the surface manifestation of this systemic judgment. He notes that ideological struggles often disguise deeper conflicts: the winner's ideas become "correct" while the loser's ideas quickly devolve into discarded fashion. This narrative that struggles are always framed as being about ideas is essentially the system expressing its selection results through the form of ideas. Fashion doesn't emerge from nowhere—it's established along the victor's trajectory, then amplified by mass following driven by ambition and fear, giving taste an obviously post-hoc adjudication structure. In other words, taste becomes "correct" or "sophisticated" not because it's logically superior, but because the system, through its operation, has pushed it into the sampled position.
So when we view "generation" and "evaluation" within the same loop, this system's hierarchy becomes clear. Each individual trains their own intuition using past and present data, thereby generating judgments, then uses this intuition to predict what the future will deem "correct." Subsequently, the system initiates its own testing mechanism. Facts, peer review, capital, markets—these forces collectively constitute an external test. Only the winners sampled in this test have their ideas written into the historical dataset, entering the next generation's training set. In this closed loop, taste is essentially prediction-and-test. What we call supreme taste is ultimately betting that your intuition can survive future examination, be adopted by the system, and leave a trace.
Consider a thought experiment: suppose there existed several "Van Goghs" throughout history whose works were equally brilliant, possessing intuition of equal dimension to the real Van Gogh. But due to random circumstances, they were never sampled by "the future." They were filtered out by the system, never written into humanity's "dataset." In our aesthetic history, their taste is equivalent to non-existence. This is a sobering conclusion: if we view taste as prediction, it's not predicting some Platonic "absolute truth," but rather predicting what will be selected by the evaluation system and granted "survival rights." During Van Gogh's lifetime, his prediction failed because the system refused to sample him. Only after his death, when the system's evaluation function drifted, was his prediction retroactively recognized as truth.
So when we revisit Yang Chen-Ning's "sense of direction" or Steve Jobs' "soul," we see not merely individual talent, but the capacity for future prediction. What we call top-tier taste is your ability, in this chaotic world, to hear through acute intuition the "music" not yet heard by the masses, and successfully have the system accept and record it. This requires not only talent but a prolonged gamble with the system—you must not only hear accurately but make your voice penetrate the evaluation system's layers of filtering, ultimately becoming the data that defines the future, forever inscribed among the luminous stars in humanity's historical river.
Thanks to Solêr, my good friend, for the conversations behind this piece.