Thread by @astralwave

Why is “taste” in something commonly framed as a linear scale?

i.e. “good taste”, “poor taste”

It’s a framing that I personally struggle with, for lack of a more fitting frame.

For example, you liked a show or a restaurant that has poor reviews. Do you have poor taste?

There is definitely a “better” ↔ “worse” dimension to taste, but perhaps a differrent dimension involves the person’s affinity to different tastes.

The people who didn’t like it are clearly more discerning than you about various aspects that you didn’t care about.

So back to the original example.

If you liked a show that had poor reviews, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have poor taste. It could mean that you don’t value aspects of it that others value, and you can accept those aspects even if they are of poor taste.

Someone who is less discerning can enjoy more things, because they don’t care to judge the qualities of aspects that a more discerning person pays attention to.

I am not discerning about olive oil, so I can stand any brand or type of it.

Lack of discernment is a type of freedom

Framing it this way, it’s quickly apparent that having discernment is actually a bad thing, so calling it “good taste” is… weird?

This reminds me of the concept of “economic surplus” in supply & demand. On the demand side, if you are discerning, you derive little surplus value.

If you are discerning on the supply side, you are providing more value than the demand side cares for: you are over-supplying.

Thinking about this economically makes “good films” & “good food” seem economically inefficient. Which makes sense, they become Veblen goods.

If that’s the case, then there’s another conclusion: on the supply side, having good taste makes it possible for you to set high prices, because you’re going after an inelastic market.

This is why disruptive technologies that help make consumptive goods like food, art, music, film etc more accessible don’t tend to disrupt the high-end. Disruptive tech brings down the cost, but high-end discerning consumers will pay anything for quality.

This is “good” only insofar as purveyors of culture benefit from selling Veblen goods. It doesn’t benefit the consumer at all.

Knowing this, it might be worth it to actively become less discerning, so you are more price sensitive, benefiting from the consumption of culture.

Having good taste in something makes you a sucker for paying high prices. If you can put up with lower quality, do it. You will enjoy it more and pay less, leaving you better off!

Suppliers will always be incentivized to paint “good taste” as beneficial to you, but resist it.

There is another thing to conclude from this: disruptive tech on the supply-side can raise consumer expectations by making it cheaper to make something of higher quality, which alters cultural perceptions & the ability for Veblen suppliers to sell quality goods at higher prices.

Which means that it’s a very risky proposition to work yourself into a niche as a high-status connoisseur, or the supplier of high-quality cultural goods.

If tech makes it possible to commoditize good taste, your high status or high profits will be destroyed.

For example, Apple is in quite a tricky spot with the iPhone now, because it’s now relatively easy & cheap for suppliers who make Android phones to make high-quality cameras and screens, and for Google to make Android UX similarly “delightful” as iOS.

Apple is now locked into a situation where they need to continue to generate high margins for shareholders, with the eroding cultural status of their products.

Their only strategy is to lock-in users and developers into a closed ecosystem, but how long can this last?

This is also why progress in tech never happens on the demand side (making sustaining innovations for power users), but on the supply side (making disruptive innovations for tech companies).

It’s a bit indirect, but think about this for a second: any entrepreneur who tried to work on helping living artists monetize their work more broadly beyond UHNW investors, would not have succeeded. It took the invention of Ethereum and ERC-721 to foment the NFT movement.

I think about this all the time when I look at Notion’s valuation versus Stripe’s.

Stripe is valueed at $95B, while Notion is valued at a mere $2B.

cbinsights.com/research-unico…

A worthy player in the productivity space, I reckon, would look less like Notion (demand-side sustaining innovation), and look more like Stripe (supply-side disruptive innovation).

What is something that all existing productivity apps are constrained by?

It’s very likely that Notion is oversupplying, and is used only by those with “good taste”, and is thus helped by Veblen economics. Same goes for apps like Roam, Obsidian, Superhuman, etc, “luxury software” which I tweeted about briefly.

Although I think I was wrong about Notion

https://twitter.com/astralwave/status/1256926828071129089

“Tools for Thought” Twitter (many of you who are following me on here!) reminds me of the kinds of connoisseur communities I’ve been a part of in the past.

This is a sign that purveyors of tools for thought (i.e. productivity apps) are oversupplying.

It’s also a sign of an undersupply of critical infrastructure that makes these apps run more cheaply.

I see a lot of talk on here about interoperability, local-first apps, multiplayer knowledge graphs.

But who is building the equivalent of Stripe for the above?