Max Schoening: belief

Transcript context

…This idea of knowing when things are obviously good, there's an element of having taste, and this is word taste that comes up a lot now, and this is like what we will need more and more because AI is building a thing now. Our job is taste. Is this great? Is this good? I feel like you're someone that has really great taste. A question people always ask, "How do I build taste? Do I have taste?" Do you have any advice for someone that's like, "I want to develop my taste"? First of all, I don't know if I have great taste. I look at others and I look at how they exercise tastes. And I think that the common thing I think is iterations with feedback. So it takes a really long time to build up taste in a specific domain. Then you maybe often can extrapolate into other domains with that taste. But if I had to describe what taste actually means, it's you're able to run, this is such a nerdy way of describing it, you're able to run a virtual machine in your head where given an idea, you can predict for a certain in group whether they're going to like it or not. The extremes are is, if you are the only person on the planet that thinks something is good, is it good? No. But maybe you also don't need to build a product for eight billion people. I've never built consumer software. I would probably be terrible at it, but you decide what your in group is and then how good do you get at emulating how they will react to it. And to do that, you just have to do reps. It's almost like training a model, which is also why I'm not super ... You know the whole, "Ooh, the one thing that we have left is taste." I'm not so sure. If you think about the loop, it's input idea, how do people react? That seems very back propagation. I don't know. It seems very much how we train models too. So what I love, basically you build taste by just doing the thing, getting feedback, iterating.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.