2026-05-25

A reflection on “taste”:

The criteria for selection today should perhaps shift toward something more intuitive: a judgment of quality, a sense of what is good or bad, and an aesthetic understanding of things.

This is because comprehensive and detailed data analysis reports are already something LLMs can produce. I practice and rely on this heavily every day. But for a product, which part of a report truly matters—and whether that importance is enough to make the product “worth trying”—depends heavily on intuition. It depends on how many good and bad projects one has seen, on understanding why past projects succeeded or failed, and on being able to generalize whether those successes and failures are replicable or avoidable.

Aesthetic judgment gives us a way to ask: Was this success “elegant”? Was it an individual’s sudden rise through a low-probability event, or a team’s step-by-step execution? Is it a good business, or merely speculation? Is it based on long-term thinking, or just a temporary trend? Perhaps even that is not precise enough—the better question may be whether a temporary trend can be transformed into a long-term consideration.