←back to thread

Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage

(maalvika.substack.com)
759 points alihm | 2 comments | 04 Jul 25 21:11 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
meander_water ◴[05 Jul 25 00:31 UTC] No.44469163[source]▶
> the "taste-skill discrepancy." Your taste (your ability to recognize quality) develops faster than your skill (your ability to produce it). This creates what Ira Glass famously called "the gap," but I think of it as the thing that separates creators from consumers.

This resonated quite strongly with me. It puts into words something that I've been feeling when working with AI. If you're new to something and using AI for it, it automatically boosts the floor of your taste, but not your skill. And you end up never slowing down to make mistakes and learn, because you can just do it without friction.

replies(8): >>44469175 #>>44469439 #>>44469556 #>>44469609 #>>44470520 #>>44470531 #>>44470633 #>>44474386 #
theshrike79 ◴[05 Jul 25 06:30 UTC] No.44470520[source]▶
This is Rick Rubin pretty much. He has 100/100 in taste, but almost 0/100 in skill.

He can't really play an instrument, but he knows exactly what works and what doesn't and can articulate it.

replies(4): >>44471377 #>>44472049 #>>44473802 #>>44474353 #
missinglugnut ◴[05 Jul 25 09:32 UTC] No.44471377[source]▶
Being able to articulate taste is a skill in and of itself.
replies(1): >>44473254 #
1. worldsayshi ◴[05 Jul 25 15:05 UTC] No.44473254[source]▶
Another important skill in this area, or maybe it's a personality trait: Being able to tell yourself that taste is actually really important. You have to kind of double down on following ideas to their extreme, or something like that. Or maybe taking very subtle emotions very seriously.

Most of the time when you chase taste you are working on splitting hairs. Or it will look like that to an outside observer.

replies(1): >>44473489 #
2. dpritchett ◴[05 Jul 25 15:38 UTC] No.44473489[source]▶
An uncomfortable thing about skill, taste, and experience is that it’s often easier to demonstrate the superiority of one path over another than it is to explain the differences in a way the audience is prepared to absorb.

I imagine this is a large part of why tooling and language wars are still compelling throughout decades of computing. No amount of lecturing on the joy of e.g. Rails vs. Node will really convince anyone to use an “outdated”, slow, dynamically typed language like Ruby in 2025 — even in places where it’d be a major win.