Taste Is a Record of Attention

Taste gets discussed as though it were a faculty, something a person either has or does not, distributed at birth like perfect pitch. It is more accurate and much more useful to treat it as a ledger. Taste is the accumulated record of what somebody has paid attention to, in what order, and for how long. Nothing mystical is involved, which is good news for anybody who assumed they were excluded.

This explains why taste is so specific and so uneven. Everybody has one or two areas where their judgement is unusually sharp, and those areas are always the ones where they happened to spend a stupid amount of time. The sharpness is not transferable. A person who can hear the difference between two arrangements at a hundred paces may have no ability whatsoever to tell a good film from a competent one, and there is no contradiction there.

It also explains why the strongest recommendations tend to come from the middle of somebody's ledger rather than the top. The top is where the expertise is, and expertise recommends badly. It has forgotten what the first encounter was like and cannot help selecting for the refinements that only matter after the tenth. The middle still remembers the entrance.

The ledger has a shape, and the shape matters more than the contents. Somebody who has attended closely to four things across twenty years has a different kind of judgement from somebody who has sampled four hundred, and neither is superior. The first produces depth and terrible breadth. The second produces excellent triage and shallow verdicts. Knowing which one is talking is most of what a listener needs.

The practical use of this is that taste can be reported rather than asserted. Instead of this is good, the accurate sentence is I have spent a great deal of time in this area and this stood out. That sentence contains the credential and the claim together and lets the listener discount appropriately. It is also true, which the shorter version frequently is not.

It follows that taste can be extended deliberately, and that extending it is mostly a matter of choosing where to be bored. Attention paid to something unfamiliar is unrewarding for a long stretch and then abruptly becomes the thing that makes the area legible. Most people quit within the unrewarding stretch and conclude that the area is not for them, which is a conclusion about duration rather than about the area.

None of this makes taste arbitrary. A ledger is a real thing, built at real cost, and someone who has kept one carefully knows things a person who has not cannot know. The point is only that the knowing came from somewhere, and that the somewhere is available to anybody willing to spend the hours.

For a weekly list, the consequence is straightforward: state where the attention was spent, keep the claim proportionate to it, and stay out of the areas where the ledger is thin. Nobody minds a narrow authority. What they mind is a broad one that turns out to be empty.