There’s a scene in Asimov’s inspired Foundation series Season 3 Episode 6 on Apple TV where emperor Dawn encounters a street vendor on Mycogen on Trantor. The vendor offers a sample sweet from micro farms. The encounter goes in the following way
Dawn: What's this?
Street Vendor: Sweets from the micro farms. Every one of them taste different. Trouble is sometimes you get one that taste better than anything, and you can't have it again.
This simple exchange captures something I have been thinking for a while about cooking. When you think about it, all food can never be the same entity, that there are tiny differences between every fruit, vegetable or meat. Every tomato carries slight variations in soil, sunlight, and rainfall. Every piece of meat has its own texture and fat distribution. When it comes to cooking, Even when we follow the exact same recipe, use identical ingredients, and replicate every step, the result will be subtly different. Our memories are fuzzy too, so that “perfect” dish we made last month exists more in our idealized recollection than in any precise reality. This is because of the impreciseness of sensory inputs of any human, you can think of it like a band on a spectrum. Here is the example from Wikipedia to illustrate the point:
This does not meant ultra sensory people don’t exist, they probably do and lot of it has to do with the training. With Music it is very well documented. For other senses, the role of Perfumer, Audio Engineer, Tea Master, Textile Specialist, Coffee Specialist, Cheese Monger, Sommelier exist because they were trained. On the other hand, I remembered reading about trained professionals and critics in food that could not survive double blinded tests. So like any study, the truth is much more complex.
This concept extends beyond cooking into art, writing, music any creative endeavor. Each painting stroke carries the artist’s mood of that moment. Even this blog post, if I rewrote it tomorrow, would be different in countless small ways.
About good enough and taste#
The great news is what is considered as good is on a broad band of taste.
About perfection#
perfection is always a race towards that a smaller “band”. So perfection is something that creatives think exists on that broad spectrum. So doing good enough work is working towards getting into the band. Perfection is about landing somewhere in that spectrum of quality we find satisfying. For some perfection is one impossible point.
The art of good cooking, good writing, good anything, is getting close enough to that spectrum that you’re happy with what you’ve made. The variations aren’t flaws to eliminate, they’re what make each attempt uniquely yours.
Thoughts about creative work#
But in general, I think this applies well to any of my own creative work, nothing is exactly the same twice.
I feel this theory applied to the concept of MVPs. No need polishing something to perfection when you can get feedback and iterate on it.
Also for personal projects, no need overengineering or polishing something when you are the only user. Be happy if it is good enough
That is why I feel a lot of SEO and now LLM writing misses its mark because it ends up just outside the good enough for subjective human taste even though clinically it hits all the checkmarks for being good enough. It is a crazy and uncanny valley