Developing Taste Through Accumulated Experience通过累积经验培养品味

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Context

This idea sits at the intersection of research methodology, expertise development, and metacognition. It addresses a question rarely made explicit in scientific and creative training: how does one develop taste — the intuitive sense for which problems are worth pursuing and which combinations of ideas might yield something “magical or highly useful.” The claim is that taste is not innate but accumulated from experience working on a diversity of problems. That accumulated base teaches you (a) what future problems might be interesting, and (b) what might be just barely possible by cobbling together previous approaches plus a handful of open problems you’d still have to solve. The core practical insight is a technique for accelerating this accumulation: write down a list of things you think will be important in the next 12 months, work on one, and then return after 12 months to evaluate which predictions held — including which ideas other people in the world went out and created, and which no one has tackled yet. This retrospective scoring gives you “more samples” for your own taste-creation capability.

Key Insights

• Taste as pattern recognition over accumulated cases. The framing that breadth of past problems teaches you what is “just barely possible” mirrors expertise research: expert intuition is compiled from a large library of encountered patterns, reliable only in domains with valid feedback structures. See Kahneman and Klein’s joint work on the conditions under which expert intuition can be trusted (Kahneman & Klein, “Conditions for Intuitive Expertise,” American Psychologist, 2009).

• “Cobbling together previous approaches plus open problems." This describes research taste as a form of combinatorial search over an adjacent-possible frontier — recombining existing tools until something new becomes reachable. Kauffman’s notion of the “adjacent possible” captures why breadth expands what is barely-attainable (Stuart Kauffman, Investigations, 2000).

• The 12-month prediction list as a calibration mechanism. Writing down predictions and revisiting them is a documented method for improving forecasting judgment; keeping records and scoring outcomes is central to Tetlock’s “superforecasting” findings, where deliberate feedback loops sharpen calibration far more than raw intelligence (Tetlock & Gardner, Superforecasting, 2015). The original idea generalizes this from probability calibration to taste calibration — evaluating not just “was I right” but “was this actually important / did the world need it.”

• The three-way outcome scoring is the crucial refinement. The original proposes evaluating each written-down idea along distinct axes: (1) which ones actually seemed important in retrospect, (2) which ones others went out and created, and (3) which ones no one has done yet. This last category is the most valuable signal — an idea you flagged, still believe in, and that remains unbuilt is a candidate for a genuinely uncrowded opportunity. This resembles how investors and researchers hunt for correct-but-non-consensus bets.

• Prediction as a substitute for slow lived experience. The explicit motivation is generating “more samples” faster than one problem-at-a-time work allows. This is a form of accelerated experiential learning: instead of waiting years to accumulate cases, you manufacture a batch of forecasts and let time adjudicate them cheaply. It parallels the practice of maintaining a decision journal to counter hindsight bias, since without a written record memory rewrites what you actually believed.

• A structural caution. Betting on the near future favors ideas whose importance is visible within 12 months, potentially biasing taste toward incrementally legible problems and away from long-horizon bets whose payoff or even relevance won’t clarify for a decade. The technique may need multiple time-horizon lists to avoid short-termism.

Open Questions

• If you keep 12-month prediction lists over many years, does your hit rate on “what was important” actually improve — or does the world’s fashion-driven attention (which ideas got hyped vs. genuinely mattered) contaminate the feedback signal and calibrate you toward trendiness rather than truth?

• Can taste developed through recombination of your own past problems ever produce a paradigm shift, or does the “cobbling together” model structurally confine you to the adjacent possible — and what deliberate practice would push taste beyond it?