Season 3 | Transmission 11 | Taste Debt : The Taste Illusion
So how do you actually find out whether you have taste, as opposed to a preference, a posture, or a subject matter expert vocabulary?
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THE OPEN
This is Tenor. Signals Before Surface. I'm Geoffrey Colon.
Fifteen minutes. One signal. Before it surfaces. New transmissions every Sunday. Because the rest of the week is already spoken for. Join us live every Sunday at 12 midnight ET / 9pm PT for a live transmission on this week's topic over on Tenor.FM.
This is Season Three. Transmission Eleven. The first transmission on Taste Debt.
Season Two ended with a sentence I want to repeat, because it's the doorway into everything we're about to spend this third season on: judgment is not a skill, not a process, not a competency you can map onto a rubric. It's what happens to a person after they've been wrong enough times, in real situations, that they've accumulated a gut understanding of where the map stops matching the territory.
That sentence has a hidden assumption in it, and I want to name the assumption before we go any further, because the whole season depends on it. Judgment assumes something underneath itself. A prior capacity. The thing that lets you look at two options and sense, before you can even fully explain why, that one of them is better.
That capacity is taste. And almost everyone listening to this right now believes they have it. Today I want to make the case that most of you, let me be honest here, most of us including me, are wrong about that, and that the mistake is not embarrassing, it's structural. It's not a character flaw. It's a debt.
This is Taste Debt.
THE SIGNAL
Here's the sentence that's going to be inconvenient for a lot of people listening. Having a preference is not the same as having taste. You can prefer something your entire life and never once have taste about it. Preference requires nothing except exposure and a nervous system. Taste requires comparison, consequence, and time. Unfortunately most people have skipped straight from preference to certainty without ever passing through the part where taste actually gets built.
The confusion is understandable, because preference and taste feel identical from the inside. Both show up as a confident, immediate reaction to things. I like this, I don't like that. Neither announces its own credentials. Nothing about the feeling of certainty tells you whether it's backed by anything real.
Which means the most dangerous population, when it comes to taste, isn't the person who admits they don't know what they like. It's the person supremely confident in a taste that was never actually tested against anything. And that population, it turns out, is quite enormous, because we built entire systems over the last two decades that are extremely good at generating the feeling of discernment while removing every actual condition that discernment requires.
THE SURFACE
Let me walk through three specific ways this shows up in our world, because the abstraction won't land until you see yourself in one of these situations.
PART ONE — THE ALGORITHM MISTAKE
You open a streaming platform, a music app, a shopping feed, heck, even LinkedIn, and within seconds it shows you something you love. You feel that flash of recognition. Wow, this gets me, this is exactly my taste. And you take that flash as proof of a refined, specific sensibility. What actually happened is much less flattering if we diagnose the backend technical implications of this all. What's really happening is a recommendation engine, trained on millions of people who behaved like you, served you the statistically likely next thing. We call this AI. But that's a misnomer. It's really advance applied statistics. That's not taste recognizing itself. That's pattern-matching recognizing a pattern. The feeling is identical. The mechanism is quite the opposite.
The tell is what happens when the algorithm is absent. A blank shelf, an unsorted pile, a genre you've never been fed anything from. People with actual taste can still navigate that space, slowly, by evaluating on their merits of lived experience and curiosity. People whose taste was manufactured by a feed go quiet and dark, because there's nothing underneath the recognition. They have no soul and go quiet for fear of being discovered and called out as a grifter. It was never their discernment. It was the system's memory of their past clicks, reflected back to them at a flattering angle.
PART TWO — THE CONTRARIAN MISTAKE
Here's the opposite failure, and it's more common in exactly the audience listening to a show like this one. Somewhere along the way, a certain kind of person learned that liking the obscure thing, the unpopular thing, the thing everyone else missed, reads as sophistication. And so contrarianism gets adopted as a taste strategy. Not because the underrated thing is actually better, but because disagreeing with the consensus is socially load-bearing. It signals independence. It signals depth. And the hot take of disagreeing with the herd gets lots of comments, likes and engagement. So there is a benefit to the behavior.
The problem is that reflexive contrarianism is exactly as manufactured as reflexive conformity. Both are outsourcing the actual judgment to an external reference point. One says "Agree with the crowd," while the other says "Disagree with the crowd!" Neither one requires you to have looked at the thing itself closely enough to have an opinion that didn't already know, in advance, which direction it needed to point. Real taste is occasionally contrarian and occasionally consensus. It has no allegiance to either position. It's usually weighted with heavy nuance. But the online world has made everything "black or white" to our detriment. The moment your taste has a predictable relationship to popularity, (I'm always against it, I'm always ahead of it), you're not evaluating anymore. You're simply posturing.
PART THREE — THE EXPERTISE MISTAKE
This is the one that catches the most capable people in any room, because it looks the most like the real thing. A marketer who can recite every metric on a campaign. A musician who can name the chord and the mode and the influence. A film editor who can explain exactly what a cut is doing technically. All of that is real knowledge, and none of it is taste. Technical fluency and taste are different axes entirely, and you can be extremely high on one and unremarkable on the other.
The confusion happens because expertise is genuinely necessary for certain kinds of taste to develop. You usually can't have refined taste in wine without learning something about wine. How it's made, what process goes into bottling it. But necessary isn't the same as sufficient. Plenty of people accumulate the vocabulary of a field, the credentials, the pattern recognition for how something was made, without ever developing the separate, harder capacity to sense whether it's actually good. They can tell you exactly how the sausage was made. They cannot always tell you whether the sausage is worth eating. And because their technical fluency is real and demonstrable, nobody, including them, questions whether the taste underneath it is equally real. A lot of people in tech and creative fields take up this space. Are they experts? Yes. Do they have taste? That's highly debatable.
THE SO WHAT
So how do you actually find out whether you have taste, as opposed to a preference, a posture, or a subject matter expert vocabulary?
First trial. Run a blind test on yourself, in any domain you think you have taste in. Remove the branding, the price, the byline, the algorithm's endorsement, the crowd's opinion, and see if your reaction holds. If your enthusiasm depends on knowing who made it or what it cost, that's not taste. That's status, wearing taste's clothes. Mark a big red zero on your scorecard.
Second trial. Track your hit rate before public opinion forms, not after. Anyone can have great taste retroactively, once consensus has already told them what was good. The only honest test is whether you were right early, on the record, before the answer was available to copy. This is why people who copy trend forecasters and put their stamp on it in video feeds really have no taste. They are copy androids. Real taste is predicting macro trends, not micro ones. Anyone can spot a fad after it happens. Swing for the fences and see if things you predict in ten months or even ten years will actually stick.
Third trial. Notice whether your taste ever costs you anything socially. If every preference you hold happens to be one your peer group already approves of, you haven't tested your taste against anything. You've just synced it to your environment. Taste that never produces friction was probably never independently arrived at. You're a closeted conformist. Someone who is afraid to be cast off as weird rather than holding court for holding a POV. People with true taste aren't popular because we actually take chances. Taste requires risk.
THE CLOSE
That's Transmission Eleven. The first for Season Three.
Here's the tool I want to leave you with. The next time you feel that flash of certainty and rush to post a hot take, you know, something we're all guilty of (including myself) that usually starts with "this is good, this is bad," ask yourself where it came from before you trust it. Was it earned through comparison, or was it handed to you by a feed, a crowd, or a credential? Do you have three objective sources to back up your claim? Most people have never asked that question about a single one of their own preferences. That's the debt. It's not that your taste is bad. It's that you've never actually audited whether it's truly yours.
Next transmission goes further into where taste is actually built. We'll dive into the specific conditions, the reps, the exposure to real quality that most people never get, and why that scarcity is not evenly distributed. That's next week.
Tenor is supported by Giide, learning built for how people actually retain it. Check out more at Giide.com that's G-I-I-D-E (dot) com.
Thanks again for listening. If this resonated with you I hope you'll share it with others to start or finish a conversation. That's how we build taste after all. This is Tenor. I'm Geoffrey Colon. We'll catch you next week.
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Okay, that's it. See you later.
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