How to build taste in anything

Taste looks like something people are born with. It isn't. It is two activities, and one of them is the part almost everyone skips.

Hume worked this out in 1757

David Hume wrote an essay called Of the Standard of Taste, trying to settle an argument about whether taste was just opinion. He decided it wasn't, and that some people's judgement is genuinely better than others'.

Then he listed what those people have. Strong sense. Delicacy of sentiment. Freedom from prejudice.

And two more: practice, and comparison.

Those two are not qualities. They are things you do. Which means three fifths of taste is who you are, and two fifths is available to anyone willing to be a bit boring about it.

His example was wine. Someone who has drunk a lot of it, attentively, next to other wine, tastes things you cannot. Not a better tongue. More of it, and paying attention.

Narrow it much further than feels sensible

Taste does not build across a subject. It builds in one corner of one.

Not photography, portraits. Not design, the spacing between a headline and the paragraph under it. Not film, opening scenes.

The narrower you go, the faster the differences become visible, and visible differences are the entire mechanism. A wide subject gives you fifty examples that have nothing in common, and you learn nothing from comparing them.

Always two, never one

This is Hume's word and it is the part people skip.

One example on its own gives you almost nothing. You either like it or you don't, and you cannot say why, because there is nothing to say why against.

Two side by side and the difference does the work for you. You are not judging any more, you are just noticing, which is much easier and far more reliable.

It also means weak examples are as useful as strong ones. A brilliant example next to another brilliant example teaches you less than a brilliant one next to a mediocre one.

Learn the words experts use

The reason a sommelier can taste more than you is partly practice, but it is also that they have names for what they are tasting.

Once you know that the inside of a croissant is called the crumb, and that a honeycombed crumb means good lamination, you start seeing crumb every time. The word creates the perception.

So before you start on your fifty, find out what the three or four properties are that people who do this professionally actually judge it on. Not adjectives, properties. Things that vary and can be pointed at.

You are looking for your version of crumb, shatter, colour.

Compress it

Comparison needs memory. Eat ten croissants a week for five weeks, rather than fifty spread across a year, because if six months separate the fourth from the fortieth there is no comparison happening. You are just eating croissants.

The prompt

The hard part is finding fifty good examples and knowing what to look at when you get there.

> I want to build taste in [the narrow subject you picked].

>

> First, tell me the three or four properties that people who do this professionally actually judge it on, and the words they use for each. Not adjectives, properties that vary and can be pointed at.

>

> Then give me fifty specific examples I can go and find, arranged in pairs, where each pair differs mainly in one of those properties. Include weak examples as well as strong ones, because I need the contrast.

>

> For each pair, tell me which property separates them, but do not tell me which one is better. I want to decide that myself and check afterwards.

What you get

Not opinions. A vocabulary.

You will be able to point at what's in front of you and say what makes it great. Or not.