Although style can be superficial, in the best case it reflects something more fundamental—knowledge, judgment, intention, discernment. Taste, in short. “Taste governs every free—as opposed to rote—human response,” Susan Sontag wrote in “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” from 1964. “There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion—and there is taste in acts, taste in morality,” even “taste in ideas.” In her essay, Sontag explored the notion of camp, the appreciation of which requires having “good taste in bad taste.” Today, meanwhile, artificial-intelligence researchers talk about “research taste”: they hope to create algorithms that have intuitions, as the best humans do, about which problems are interesting and which will hit dead ends. We use our taste to perceive, to decide, to think.journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter