
Taste for Makers (2002) - misframer
http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html
======
quizotic
Back when I was a 16 year old mediocre chess player, the captain of our high
school team took me aside, set up a position and asked "Do you like white or
black?" I looked at the board and said "I don't know." And channeling a Yoda
then decades in the future, he said "That is why you lose."

His name was Matthew Looks, and his point was that it doesn't matter whether
you're right or wrong. It only matters that you have a visceral opinion.

If you believe something or care about something strongly, it gets you to
engage. If it turns out that you're objectively wrong, the clash will focus
your attention and you'll learn. Just having an opinion, just caring, will
bring out a better game.

This is how I interpret PG's post on taste. Having good taste is wonderful.
But having taste, even bad taste, is better than not caring at all.

~~~
solve
Sounds like some of the worst advice I've ever heard.

~~~
adwn
I agree. There are already too many people in this world with strong opinions
on topics they don't fully understand. We certainly do not need even more of
them.

~~~
deciplex
Uh, you're both really missing the important part:

> If it turns out that you're objectively wrong, the clash will focus your
> attention _and you 'll learn_.

Yeah, if you have a bunch of ill-informed wrong opinions and, out of some
stubborn ignorance, you refuse to update them when the conflicting evidence
comes crashing in all around you, then you will be a stupid person. However,
if you have a bunch of wrong opinions which you then turn into _right_
opinions after reality keeps kicking you in the ass, then you are on the road
to being a smart person.

But if you're apathetic, you won't even notice reality kicking you in the ass.
Reality won't even bother with you. You're right that having wrong opinions
_as a steady state_ is worse than having no opinion, but the whole point of GP
was not to be in a steady state in the first place.

~~~
adwn
> _Yeah, if you have a bunch of ill-informed wrong opinions and, out of some
> stubborn ignorance, you refuse to update them when the conflicting evidence
> comes crashing in all around you [...]_

There's a ton of research demonstrating that once you've formed an opinion,
you'll actively defend this opinion in the face of contrary evidence. Everyone
does this to some extend, and the best prevention is to not form a premature
opinion.

> _But if you 're apathetic [...]_

That's a false dichotomy. It is very well possible to not form an opinion and
still be interested in a topic.

~~~
deciplex
> _There 's a ton of research demonstrating that once you've formed an
> opinion, you'll actively defend this opinion in the face of contrary
> evidence. Everyone does this to some extend, and the best prevention is to
> not form a premature opinion._

Yes, everyone does this at least a little bit because that's how human brains
work. But you can be aware of it and compensate for it, if you make the truth
(and, by extension, _actually being right_ ) your highest goal. Just throwing
your hands in the air and giving up, seems to me equivalent to saying
"everyone has biases, the best way to avoid them is to not think".

That said, obviously I am not suggesting that you just form opinions before
you know _anything_. The example given was a chess position. The OP knew
enough about chess that he could have picked a side had he taken time to
examine the position well. If he had initially chosen black, but white was the
stronger, he could have perhaps reached this conclusion after evaluating
black's position a little more carefully. Then he could update his opinion to
prefer white. But he did none of that, because he didn't care enough to form
any opinion at all, _even though he had enough information to do so_.

> _That 's a false dichotomy._

Ugh, yes okay if taken absolutely literally, yes it is a false dichotomy. I
mean, I guess I took it as a given that readers would understand that there
are _degrees_ of apathy, and that you might be in a mental state where
_sometimes_ you notice reality kicking you in the ass, and then sometimes you
_don 't_, and so I didn't have to explain that part, and that they would give
me just enough benefit of the doubt to suppose that I also understand this,
but yes it's true that apathy is not a binary thing, nor is self-awareness.
Conceded. Congratulations and I award you one Internet argument point.

So just to be clear, my position is that _the more apathetic you are about a
thing, the less likely you are to notice your wrong opinions about that
thing_. Is that better?

> _It is very well possible to not form an opinion and still be interested in
> a topic._

About as possible as it is to change your opinion on new evidence? Of course
it's possible, although if I had to guess between two people which of them is
interested in a topic, I'd go with the person who has the opinion, and I'd be
right more often than I'd be wrong.

------
melling
I wish I'd known 20 years ago how important design was going to be. Getting my
10,000 hours of design isn't going to be easy. I started this course a few
days ago on Udacity:

[https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-the-design-of-
everyd...](https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-the-design-of-everyday-
things--design101)

And I'm using this subredit to learn how to draw:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/ArtFundamentals](http://www.reddit.com/r/ArtFundamentals)

------
Jun8
It's amazing how close pg's ideas in this essay are to those of David
Deutsch's in his _Beginning of Infinity_ , e.g. on the topic of why flowers
are beautiful to humans as well as insects
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMiP2SM8Tpk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMiP2SM8Tpk)).

~~~
nicklovescode
I was happy to see someone else bring up that book as well. I did not imagine
someone else or make a connection

------
mlpinit
"In math and engineering, recursion, especially, is a big win. Inductive
proofs are wonderfully short. In software, a problem that can be solved by
recursion is nearly always best solved that way."

I don't make use of recursion very often but this statement doesn't sound
right to me. Actually the opposite seems right. If you read the chapter on
recursion from Concrete Mathematics (I'm thinking about the The Tower of
Hanoi, Lines in the Plane and The Josephus Problem here, it seems obvious that
a closed form is much faster, simpler and according to the blog post more
beautiful. Does anybody with more extensive knowledge on the topic care to
comment on this?

~~~
sirsar
I find inductive proofs tend to leave me hanging - I become convinced that the
conclusion is true, but I still have no intuition as to _why_. For example,
Wikipedia's proof [0] that sum of 0..n == n(n+1)/2 is convincing, but
unenlightening. There are proofs which seem much more "elegant" to me, for
example, pairing (1+n) == (2+n-1) == (3+n-2) ... (n/2 + (n/2 + 1)) [1], or
constructing triangles [also 1].

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_induction#Example](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_induction#Example)

[1] [http://betterexplained.com/articles/techniques-for-adding-
th...](http://betterexplained.com/articles/techniques-for-adding-the-
numbers-1-to-100/)

~~~
mlpinit
The book I mentioned above, Concrete Mathematics, talks about how to develop
an intuition when it comes to induction. One of the advice mentioned is to
always start with smallest cases possible because that makes the problem
easier to understand. I suppose the more you practice the better your
intuition becomes.

