I completely agree with your assertion. As an avid drinker, I find that I don’t like drinks that taste nice nearly as much as ones that don’t. The taste seems to me to be a signal of alcoholic effect; alcopops (sweet and alcoholic) get it wrong one way, and <1% alcohol beer gets it wrong the other way.
That said, I do like some beers better than others. Hoppy rather than fruity is good, for instance.
I recall reading somewhere on LessWrong that a highly effective way to stop eating chocolate is to get a pound of M&Ms and put them in your mouth and chew them up and taste them, then spit them out, and after a while chocolate will taste awful. This would suggest there’s a lot more to liking foods than just what your taste buds (and sense of smell) say.
Edit: And how could I forget coffee. Tastes terrible in itself—decaf is utterly missing the point—but taste+buzz is something one can have strong and even discussable personal preferences on, and I just had my morning cup of something awful and went “mmmm, coffee.”
I wouldn’t ever wanna stop eating chocolate, at least delicious 80+ percent cocoa chocolate. It has little sugar but plenty of quality fats and cardioprotective and anti-inflammatory polyphenols. It’s still a bit addictive for some reason (flavor? phenylethylamine? theobromine? ) but if you eat quality chocolate daily, well, if you don’t go really overboard I imagine it’d do you no harm.
It’s a YMMV, sure. But I can see people who need to give the stuff up—though my internal model of other humans tells me they’d be horrified at the idea of doing something that would actually work to cut them off from chocolate.
Well, I’ve been systematically (if desultorily) reading all of LW from the beginning. So I got to your comment and, given the local norm that it’s just fine to respond to a comment or post from years ago, responded to it. I presume bcoburn saw my comment in “Recent Comments”, went to your original and felt like responding too.
Yep! Things to read while waiting for Tomcat to finish restarting … if I’m going to use the Internet as a television, I want at least to be watching something good.
I got through the Sequences, and it occurred to me that I didn’t really understand the history of the culture of LessWrong, let alone the history of the history. So I thought reading the lot would be a nice way to approximate that. And I’m finding some fantastic posts I would never have seen without doing this.
I completely agree with your assertion. As an avid drinker, I find that I don’t like drinks that taste nice nearly as much as ones that don’t. The taste seems to me to be a signal of alcoholic effect; alcopops (sweet and alcoholic) get it wrong one way, and <1% alcohol beer gets it wrong the other way.
That said, I do like some beers better than others. Hoppy rather than fruity is good, for instance.
I recall reading somewhere on LessWrong that a highly effective way to stop eating chocolate is to get a pound of M&Ms and put them in your mouth and chew them up and taste them, then spit them out, and after a while chocolate will taste awful. This would suggest there’s a lot more to liking foods than just what your taste buds (and sense of smell) say.
Edit: And how could I forget coffee. Tastes terrible in itself—decaf is utterly missing the point—but taste+buzz is something one can have strong and even discussable personal preferences on, and I just had my morning cup of something awful and went “mmmm, coffee.”
I wouldn’t ever wanna stop eating chocolate, at least delicious 80+ percent cocoa chocolate. It has little sugar but plenty of quality fats and cardioprotective and anti-inflammatory polyphenols. It’s still a bit addictive for some reason (flavor? phenylethylamine? theobromine? ) but if you eat quality chocolate daily, well, if you don’t go really overboard I imagine it’d do you no harm.
It’s a YMMV, sure. But I can see people who need to give the stuff up—though my internal model of other humans tells me they’d be horrified at the idea of doing something that would actually work to cut them off from chocolate.
Interesting. Btw, why did my old comment suddenly get two replies?
Well, I’ve been systematically (if desultorily) reading all of LW from the beginning. So I got to your comment and, given the local norm that it’s just fine to respond to a comment or post from years ago, responded to it. I presume bcoburn saw my comment in “Recent Comments”, went to your original and felt like responding too.
Is that part of what you have referred to as “internet as television”, David?
Yep! Things to read while waiting for Tomcat to finish restarting … if I’m going to use the Internet as a television, I want at least to be watching something good.
I got through the Sequences, and it occurred to me that I didn’t really understand the history of the culture of LessWrong, let alone the history of the history. So I thought reading the lot would be a nice way to approximate that. And I’m finding some fantastic posts I would never have seen without doing this.
This is, indeed, exactly what happened.
I’m eagerly awaiting years-later responses to my own early comments :-D
waves
:-)
I am doing the same right now, BTW.