Taste Is Not a Skill. It Is a Form of Judgment.

Silicon Valley has begun talking about taste as if it were a newly discovered advantage. In the age of artificial intelligence, founders and investors now describe it as the last remaining human edge. Paul Graham has argued that taste will only become more important.

An obvious question follows. Why are we so bad at developing it?

Part of the answer is that we are misnaming what taste actually is.

The tech conversation treats taste as though it were a novel concept, a fresh insight unlocked by the pressures of automation. It isn’t. Western philosophy has been working on this problem seriously since the eighteenth century, and what those thinkers concluded is considerably more demanding than anything currently circulating on X.

David Hume, in his 1757 essay “Of the Standard of Taste,” argued that taste is not simply a matter of personal preference. Preferences are arbitrary and unchallengeable. Taste, by contrast, is a capacity that can be cultivated, compared, and evaluated. Hume recognized that people disagree about beauty, but he also recognized that some judgments are better than others, and that the difference comes down to the quality of perception brought to bear. That is a demanding claim. It means that disagreement about quality is not always a matter of opinion. It is often a difference in the development of the person making the judgment. The person of taste, for Hume, is someone who has developed a delicacy of perception through wide exposure, careful comparison, and the freedom from prejudice that comes only with genuine effort.

Kant pushed the analysis further. In the Critique of Judgment, he distinguished taste from mere sensory pleasure on one hand and from purely intellectual judgment on the other. Taste occupies a middle ground: it is subjective in that it originates in feeling, but it carries a claim to universal agreement that mere preference does not. When you say something is beautiful, you are not just reporting a private sensation. You are making a claim about how others ought to respond. That normative dimension is what makes taste a serious category and not just a lifestyle preference. It also means that taste carries responsibility. If your judgment is underdeveloped, your decisions will be too.

Voltaire, characteristically more direct, wrote that it is not enough to recognize what is beautiful. You have to feel it. That sentence does a lot of work. It rules out the possibility that taste is purely cognitive, a matter of knowing the right criteria and applying them. It insists on something like genuine perceptual engagement, a responsiveness that has to be developed rather than simply switched on.

None of these thinkers were describing a business skill. They were describing a form of human development.

The figure that best captures what taste actually requires is the connoisseur. Not as a term of social snobbery, but as a description of a particular kind of developed capacity.

A wine connoisseur does not become one by reading about wine or by having strong initial reactions to it. They become one through years of sustained, disciplined attention: exposure to a wide range of cases, the repeated experience of being wrong, gradual refinement of perception until distinctions that were once invisible become obvious. At a certain point, what required conscious effort becomes instinct. They perceive things others simply do not, and they do so reliably, not because they are guessing but because they have trained themselves to see.

This is what taste looks like as a developed capacity rather than a natural gift. It can be taught, but it cannot be fast-tracked. It requires time, exposure, feedback, and the willingness to revise. No shortcut produces the real thing.

The same structure applies in any domain where judgment matters. An experienced editor doesn’t just know the rules of good writing. They feel when something is off before they can fully articulate why. A seasoned architect doesn’t just apply design principles. They perceive the relationship between a space and the people who will inhabit it in ways that take years to develop. These capacities look like intuition from the outside. From the inside, they are the product of sustained practice.

This brings me to the question organizations are not asking clearly enough.

We are very good at detecting skills. A skill is legible: it appears on a resume, it can be tested, it transfers from one context to another with minimal friction. Organizations have built entire talent infrastructures around what can be verified quickly. The dominant hiring ideal is someone who can hit the ground running.

I understand the appeal. Onboarding is expensive. Gaps are costly. The pressure to find people who are immediately productive is real.

But there is a risk embedded in that phrase that rarely gets examined. If someone is running in the wrong direction, their speed is a liability rather than an asset. And the capacity to know which direction is right, to perceive what quality looks like in a given context and insist on it, is exactly the kind of thing a skills-based hiring process is poorly designed to detect.

We reduce people to their credentials and competencies because those things are easier to see. But what matters most in complex environments is often what is hardest to measure. Titles, years of experience, technical certifications. These are useful proxies. But they systematically underweight the capacities that are hardest to fake and hardest to develop quickly: judgment, perception, the ability to recognize when something is genuinely good rather than merely adequate.

Taste, in the philosophical sense, is one of those capacities. And most organizations are leaving its development entirely to chance.

The rediscovery of taste in the tech world is a real opportunity, but only if it moves beyond the level of a slogan. Taste as a buzzword produces better-looking products. Taste as a developed organizational capacity produces something harder to name and more durable: teams that can see what others miss, leaders who can make good decisions under ambiguity, cultures where quality is recognized and demanded rather than assumed and gradually eroded.

That development doesn’t happen accidentally. It requires sustained engagement, exposure to high standards, and the kind of reflective practice that organizations rarely make space for. It also requires someone willing to ask uncomfortable questions about where judgment has drifted, where standards have gone unnamed, and where important decisions are being made without the perceptual grounding to make them well.

This is work I do with organizations and individuals. It often begins in unexpected places: a breakdown in decision-making, a sense that standards have slipped, a recognition that something important is being missed but cannot yet be clearly named. A useful question for any organization is this: who, if anyone, is responsible for developing judgment at this level?

The question the tech world is circling, whether taste can be a genuine differentiator in an era of artificial intelligence, has a real answer. But the answer requires taking seriously what taste actually is, and what it takes to develop it. The philosophers got there first. The rest of us are now rediscovering how demanding the concept actually is.

I work with organizations and individuals who want to think more carefully about judgment, meaning, and the conditions that shape everyday decisions.
If that sounds like your situation, you can reach me at michaelrspicher@gmail.com
or learn more at michaelrspicher.com.

I’m leading an online workshop for The Philosopher called “Beyond Comment Culture: The Socratic Method for Better Judgment.”

Date: March 28, 2026, Saturday
Time: 10am-1pm EDT / 2-5pm GMT
Cost: £60 (about $80.50 in USD)
Link to Register: Beyond Comment Culture

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