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Syllabus | Malaika Aiyar

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I notice a real gap in my understanding of my opinions about ideas and problems, which keeps me from making decisions about the kind of work I want to do. I revisit this problem quite often, and I'd be very happy if I spent the year making significant progress on this. I believe developing taste for ideas and problems would be a good start, after all, taste is a guide for what is worthwhile. In Jacky Zhao's post, his explore/exploit dichotomy broadly matches my theory of taste: ...taste operates in two distinct and almost opposite modes: You can only express and know your taste through Type 2: going deep, making, committing, and seeing what resonates. In technology and art, where I have experience, that's mostly how I've operated: dive in first, learn the landscape as it is needed. It works well when you already have some intuition for the territory. But I've had years of education in maths, cs, and art. I severely lack both kinds of taste when it comes to the humanities, and when appl

Syllabus | Malaika Aiyar Syllabus 11.03.2026 I notice a real gap in my understanding of my opinions about ideas and problems, which keeps me from making decisions about the kind of work I want to do. I revisit this problem quite often, and I'd be very happy if I spent the year making significant progress on this. I believe developing taste for ideas and problems would be a good start, after all, taste is a guide for what is worthwhile . In Jacky Zhao's post, his explore/exploit dichotomy broadly matches my theory of taste: ...taste operates in two distinct and almost opposite modes: Type I tas

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