>Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I know the guidelines. But that downvote was incredibly low quality and I chose to make an exception. It's unfortunate that someone needs to censor discussion of someone that actually does creative work for a living and of a comment that was not inflammitory or off topic without anything of value to add on their part.

There is even another comment in this thread that continues to discuss "taste". Which is the absolute 100% worst way to think about creative work. Taste is like the bootcamp for creative work. It will get you shallow quick results that will not extend anywhere past the introductory levels. At which point your work will stagnate.

What does "your hand is behind your eye" mean, and how does that relate to taste? I don't understand what advice you're giving.

(FYI, your comment could have come across as implying that Ira Glass is a fraud who's just a "curator" pretending to be a "creator," so that could be why someone took offense.)

In the most literal sense, in anything that involves hand-eye coordination - say, hand-drawing some parallel lines - you can never hand better than you can eye, because if you can't see that you're a little off to the left, you can't correct for that no matter how precisely you can move your hand.

In a more metaphorical sense, you can't correct for a fault you can't recognise. So a writer can only avoid cliches if they can recognise them, a photographer has to be able to recognise what will make a good photo in order to take a good photo, and so on.

Of course you can avoid faults you can't recognise by random chance, imitating things that avoid those faults, or tools that take care of it without you noticing.