Sorry, all I got out of that was a name-drop and (what seemed like) a dodge.
Could you answer again, and this time maybe explain it a little differently? Specifically:
-Are you claiming that Pollock discovered a way of satisfying the aesthetic senses that allowed generalization of the method in other forms?
-Let’s say I knew a wacko who believed that “By historical accident, Pollock became a focal point for people of high-status to identify each other, despite there being nothing special about his work.” What evidence would you point me to that has a low Bayes factor against that hypothesis?
I’m claiming that Pollock’s work demonstrated easily-neglected and valuable parts of the aesthetic experience.
As for evidence against that hypothesis, I think that depends largely upon how seriously you take some of the relevant premises in your wacko’s model. According to some, there is virtually nothing to all of culture other than status games (though in this case the clause “despite there being nothing special about his work” would make little sense). According to others, there really is quite a bit to aesthetics, and perhaps it’s worth listening to the folks who’ve spent their lives studying it.
There are a lot of different kinds of things in the world, and many of them are valuable in unexpected ways.
So you really can’t think of anything that is less likely to be observed if “it’s all bullshit” than if it’s not? There isn’t any kind of aesthetic feeling you could feed to the wacko that he couldn’t help but burst out in appreciation for?
As for evidence against that hypothesis, I think that depends largely upon how seriously you take some of the relevant premises in your wacko’s model.
Not when I’m asking for evidence with a low Bayes factor, rather than a guaranteed low posterior.
Maybe an example would be in order. Let’s say Bob is the wacko, but about quantum physics. Bob believe that the claims of quantum physics are just a big status game, and so are the results of the particle accelerators and everything. I could point to evidence like the atom bomb. If they were just arguing over meaningless crap the whole time, and assigning truth purely based on who has the most status, how did they ever get the understanding necessary to build an atom bomb, Bob?
There are a lot of different kinds of things in the world, and many of them are valuable in unexpected ways.
Right, like Halo. Except that millions of people like Halo even in the absence of a well-funded indoctrination campaign, and the fact that expressing appreciation for Halo won’t endear them to the kewl kids of art.
It’s not very impressive if people start to enjoy something after they’ve
If you spend ten years associating wine with a good time, and are expected to have a refined palette for wine to be part of the kewl kids club, then guess what—you can make yourself like wine! The fact that you like wine in such a scenario does not, to me, count as a genuine liking, in the sense in which I judge beverages. Any substance, even bat urine, will find connosieurs under those conditions!
What I want to do is, find out what’s good about something, that isn’t simply an artifact of practices that can make anything look good.
That’s why I’m not impressed by “enjoy this because people are telling you to enjoy it”, which the support for much high art and alcohol amounts to.
Instead of refusing to engage the issue, maybe you should start to think about the recursivity of your criteria for quality?
What I want to do is, find out what’s good about something, that isn’t simply an artifact of practices that can make anything look good.
This seems exceedingly arbitrary. The exact evolutionary processes that made ice cream taste good gave rise to the connoisseur phenomenon. Our ability to “predict” evolution and make something “taste like victory” doesn’t make enjoyment of those things less real, let alone less “good.”
Besides, we could keep following this rabbit hole to the end of time. What makes it enjoyable for you to not succumb to the trends of status? Why is the good-feeling reward that gives you better than the good-feeling reward that some other activity gives someone else?
So wait—are you conceding that art is just about signaling that you like whatever-high-status-people-like? Or that “you will get higher status for saying you like this” is a valid reason to judge a work as being art?
This seems exceedingly arbitrary. The exact evolutionary processes that made ice cream taste good gave rise to the connoisseur phenomenon. Our ability to “predict” evolution and make something “taste like victory” doesn’t make enjoyment of those things less real, let alone less “good.”
It matters for the same reason the placebo effect matters. Pills can make you better, merely by virtue of believing they’ll make you better. But, for a rigorous science of curing people, we want to know what makes people get better even more reliably than just believing they will.
Likewise, there are practices that can make people like something. But there’s no point to saying, “Hey, after this practice, people like it!” That conveys no information—it’s true for everything. Like with placebo cures, I want to know what is good above and beyond that that results from standard “make something seem good” tricks.
And there is a difference: I liked chocolate before I knew what anyone thought about it. In contrast, very few people liked alcohol before they found social or non-taste reasons to drink it.
If all you care about is the final level of liking, why not spend all this effort making yourself like healthy foods? And why the broad reluctance for people to admit, “okay, wine is really just about showing off status”? Why do I have to pry teeth to get anyone to talk about this?
The reason people are reluctant to admit it is because you are simply wrong. I like beer better than wine, even though wine has higher social status and greater psychological effects. I would drink beer in private if it had the same taste but no alcohol, and I would definitely prefer it to a milkshake, on taste alone.
What makes you so reluctant to admit that some people might have different tastes from you?
My question was somewhat rhetorical, in response to your “Why the broad reluctance...”
In fact I read through the thread that you link to and found it quite unpersuasive.
It’s true it’s somewhat surprising that so many people said they preferred the taste of milkshake. But in reality that’s partly a question of context. If you’re comparing the taste of sweet things with the taste of non-sweet things, it can depend on what you feel like at the moment. Sometimes you have a desire for sugar, sometimes you don’t.
Did you read it all? It wasn’t just the milkshake comparison. It was the fact that, if you ignore the question “do you like alcohol?” and simply ask about the supposed implications of liking alcohol, my answers match up with everyone who claimed to like alcohol. Yet I characterize my state as “not liking alcohol”, while others characterize it as the reverse.
Again, the point is to subtract away the influence of factors that can make you like anything. If applejuice made me happy and killed my usual inhibitions, I’d “like it”. I might even get over the taste. I might even show off my pickiness about which apples must be used before I will consider to drink it.
But this is a HUGELY different sense of liking than exists for a milkshake. Or milk. Or smoothies. Or mocha peppermint frappucinos. Or any of the other things that I didn’t have to consume many, many times to finally decide I like the taste of.
The checklist doesn’t seem very strong evidence to me:
“-Think milkshakes are better tasting than the best alcoholic drink.” I don’t think this. And even for people who do, many people like the taste of some things more than others, without disliking the taste of the latter.
“-Enjoy the taste of alcoholic drinks when it is drowned out with some other flavor.” Sure, if it’s a good flavor. But I also enjoy the taste of the alcoholic drinks when it isn’t drowned out at all.
“-Believe it changes our mental states in a good way.” Possibly, but this doesn’t show that it wouldn’t taste good without this effect.
“-Could not comfortably chug down a alcoholic drink the way we might a milkshake.” I think this happens with strong drinks because the alcohol causes a coughing reflex, not because of the taste. But I can definitely drink a beer comfortably just as fast as a milkshake, and I can do the same with wine if a little water is added (and it still tastes like wine, indicating that it isn’t a question of taste.)
“-Could not comfortably chug down a alcoholic drink the way we might a milkshake.” I think this happens with strong drinks because the alcohol causes a coughing reflex, not because of the taste.
Okay, I hope statements like this show what I’m dealing with on this topic. We have substances that provoke the choking reflex in people, as your body protests against this substance entering you, just as it would for toxic smoke, cleaning fluid, and engine oil, and yet people casually ignore that and say with a straight face, “oh, what a pleasure it is for me to drink this delicious beverage! Why would not others so enjoy it?”
Do you drink the hot sauce directly? Do you put so much on that it provokes a choking or wincing reaction? Then I don’t think it’s comparable.
ETA: Oh, one more rhetorical quesiton: Do you act surprised that there are people who aren’t willing to pay insane prices to injest burritos with so much hotsauce that they have to suffer through eating it?
Because that’s what it would take for me to have the same perplexion as I do about alcohol.
I don’t—I’d choke or wince, and I don’t want that. But I still like hot sauce on my burrito.
What I am arguing—and I believe this was Unknowns’ argument—is that the effect of increasing rate of intake is not indicative of whether a substance is enjoyable at the lower rate of intake. I wouldn’t eat a tray of lemon squares, but I’d eat one piece.
What I am arguing—and I believe this was Unknowns’ argument—is that the effect of increasing rate of intake is not indicative of whether a substance is enjoyable at the lower rate of intake. I wouldn’t eat a tray of lemon squares, but I’d eat one piece.
Okay, give me a little credit here. I “get” that much—I mean, even a milkshake will give you a brainfreeze.
The point is (and I admit I’ve had a hard time expressing it with examples because of the confounding factors), people strangely start to use a definition of “enjoy drinking X” that expands to cover aspects that they admit are very displeasurable. Hard liquors will induce the coughing reflex (the beginning of it), for example, even at very low rates of consumption.
This would seem to dominate the experience, but then, even in the midst of what is quite clearly painful, they enjoy it—and are somehow able to discern “good” hard liquor from “bad” hard liquor.
Taking the whole experience into account, I can accept that there’s a lot to like—just not the act of drinking.
Might dill pickles be a useful example? I had to be coerced into trying them several times before I came to find them edible, but I enjoy them now, and there’s not much if any status involved there.
I’m not sure that those factors can be fully, or even partly, separated from status signaling. For example, I expect that I could tell the difference between different kinds of pickles, and develop a favorite among the brands that exist. I have no particular reason to do so, and if I did, I wouldn’t talk about it, but if pickles became trendy, and the pickle companies started making subtly-different types to satisfy the demand for signaling tools, I probably would at least try the varieties and pick a favorite. (I have a favorite brand of mayonnaise, after all, and am that picky about which brand of Macadamia nuts I’ll eat.)
You assume that the bad effects will dominate, but I’m not sure that would be the case. If you like the taste itself enough, that might balance the bad effect. And “good” hard liquor might (and does, in my limited experience) reduce the bad effects.
Further, comparatively few people like (neat) hard liquor, and the direct unpleasant effects are significantly reduced in beer, wine, and mixed drinks.
I agree with you that status considerations will often make people inclined to get an Irish Cream when they’d prefer a milkshake or fool themselves into thinking that expensive wine tastes better. But you’re apparently making a strong claim (nobody really likes the taste of alcoholic beverages), on weak evidence.
The point is (and I admit I’ve had a hard time expressing it with examples because of the confounding factors), people strangely start to use a definition of “enjoy drinking X” that expands to cover aspects that they admit are very displeasurable. Hard liquors will induce the coughing reflex (the beginning of it), for example, even at very low rates of consumption.
And hot sauce will induce a burning sensation at even very low concentrations of capsaicin. Like BDSM, sometimes people actually do like that.
Right—sometimes. Not “the overwhelming majority of the adult population, which also happens to get high while doing so.” It’s the ubiquity, not just the strangeness, that confuses me.
You’re sure of that ubiquity part? I just think you should put off endorsing complicated beliefs until you are sure they are based on good data. In this case, I believe that means a proper sociological study.
Edit: Such a study may also make it easier to confirm the extent of various proposed motivations.
I don’t think we’re going to need a sociological study to verify that the vast majority of adults drink, and claim to like it when they do. That’s all I meant by ubiquity. I should have said “commonness” or something equally awkwardish.
No, you seem to be claiming that they’re doing it for the taste. They do it in spite of the taste, or indifferently to the taste, and add sweet flavors to mask it. However, people can grow to like the taste over time, and some of the flavors in the taste are good by themselves, though not as good as, say, a chocolate milkshake.
You also seem to be assuming that a taste has to be repulsive or delicious, instead of just neutral, or all right in certain contexts, or occasionally desirable.
No, you seem to be claiming that they’re doing it for the taste.
Er, no, that’s pretty much the opposite of what I’m claiming. I’m claiming that they say they do it for the taste, but mainly (or solely) want the psychoactive effects.
I’m claiming that they say they do it for the taste
Sorry for getting it wrong. Anyway, I don’t think they say that they primarily do it for the taste, which is an empirical question.
I think they say they “like” it, and they mean they like the overall experience, and you’re interpreting that to mean that they like the taste. Or they say they like the taste because they grew to like it over time, or because they mix it with other flavors, and you’re interpreting that to mean they primarily drink it for the taste.
Do you act surprised that there are people who aren’t willing to pay insane prices to injest burritos with so much hotsauce that they have to suffer through eating it?
I am not surprised when someone does pay to do such a thing to their burrito.
I think it is quite common for people to eat food that is hot enough to cause discomfort or even pain, at least in some cultures. The uncomfortably-hot curry is a British tradition that often goes hand in hand with the consumption of beer. In my non-scientific personal experience willingness to eat (and enjoy) food with levels of heat that cause discomfort correlates somewhat with wealth/status—it can be seen as a marker of openness to experience and embracing cultural diversity.
People get desensitized to hot sauce after a while; it takes more to cause discomfort in someone who routinely eats hot sauce than in someone who doesn’t.
I’m fond of spicy food. (My father, who I suspect is a supertaster, isn’t.)
People do get desensitized to hot/spicy food over time but I think people who enjoy the sensation tend to increase the dosage to compensate. Speaking from personal experience, I still like hot food to burn slightly, it just takes more chilli than it used to to achieve that. The burning/discomfort isn’t an unfortunate side effect of the pleasant taste of chillis for me, it’s an essential component of the enjoyment of eating hot food. I’ve heard that the reason people enjoy spicy food is that chilli stiumlates pain receptors and causes the release of endorphins and it is the endorphin release that people crave but I don’t know if that is true.
People do get desensitized to hot/spicy food over time but I think people who enjoy the sensation tend to increase the dosage to compensate.
Yes, that’s what I meant.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that some hot peppers have good flavors in addition to the burning sensation (jalapenos, for example), but others seem to be practically tasteless apart from it.
I grant the reflex is a way of your body protesting. I just don’t think it has to do with TASTE. And I gave evidence for that from the the fact that if it is diluted, it has the same taste, but not the same protest.
Also, this reflex is different from nausea, which I would admit would be a protest to the taste, and if I dislike the taste of something sufficiently, it causes nausea in me. Nothing like this happens with alcoholic drinks.
1)dilution weakens the taste (and the other effects like the choking protest), but it doesn’t change it to another taste; 2) I’m not talking about getting drunk, I’m talking about the effect at the moment of drinking it.
Would someone like to make a falsifiable claim about how a person is likely to react to alcohol over their first few instances of drinking it? If so, I’d be willing to be a guinea pig.
The only times I’ve had alcohol were over a decade ago, and involved either having communion at church or my father insisting that I take a sip of his beer. I’ve never experienced an alcohol buzz. I dislike being in the kinds of situations in which one would drink socially, but am curious about how alcohol might affect me separately from that. I do find the smell of wine and beer aversive (but not nauseating), which I understand might affect the outcome, but I’d be willing to try them anyway. (I’d been considering trying wine coolers, but, hey, it’s for science.)
Given that you don’t like the smell of beer and wine, you likely won’t like the taste at first either. But some people do like the taste even the first time, so this isn’t strong evidence for SilasBarta’s position.
You might like wine coolers which tend to be a little sweeter. Actually, one thing correct in Silas’s position is that many people like sweet drinks because they are sweet, not because of the alcohol, and they are sometimes unwilling to admit this for social reasons.
Sure, I’d love to make such a prediction, but those who disagree with me know all too well what the result will be and will try to rationalize away the predictable results of you trying alcohol … oops, too late.
I don’t think anyone disputes that people usually don’t like alcohol the first time they try it. I’m disputing that, after liking it, there’s a difference between this liking of alcohol and the liking of your apt example, milkshakes. The two likes are the same.
No, they’re not the same, because you have to go through a process to like alcohol, which would just the same cause you to like bat urine. You don’t have to do that for milkshakes.
So make predictions about what will happen after I’ve had N drinks. Or what would happen after I had N drinks of near-beer, if it’s the psychological effect you’re concerned with and not just the social one.
my answers match up with everyone who claimed to like alcohol.
I completely agree with you about wine tasting specifically. But there are those of us who actually like the taste of some alcoholic drinks, even without the psychological effects, signaling, or need to acquire the taste. It doesn’t look like your answers match up with that.
I made my main point in the other comment, and I don’t want to include these two comments together because I don’t want the other to be ignored, but health is an objective measure, whereas pleasure is not.
First of all, I think you’re ignoring that there are some practices that, despite making some people like an activity, will not make other people like the activity—i.e., that placebo will work on some people, but not other people, so to that extent, there is something marginally “real” (under your definition) there.
I understand what you mean very much; I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time thinking about it over the past decade. Cognitive dissonance seems like a weak trait when you notice it in someone else, either to change your values to dislike the inaccessible or the reverse, to change your values to like the accessible.
But why? I tend to like things I’m better at than most of the people I know, like math and arguing and pointing out other people’s cognitive dissonance. Why should I expect other people to be any different?
In the end, the “liking” part is really, like you pointed out, liking the taste of status more than the taste of alcohol. But I enjoy spicy food, despite not liking it originally, either. I didn’t like hip-hop, but I figured there must be something there that attracts so many people; now I like some. I didn’t like a bunch of popular TV shows, but I didn’t want to assume that all the ways I’m different from people who did like those TV shows were ways I was better; what if they were ways I was worse? So I watched a bunch of them. Most of them still suck, but I found I like House and Big Love, despite thinking beforehand only idiots could like those shows.
I agree with you to some extent—if I have to have someone telling me I’m cool for me to enjoy it, I don’t want to partake. But that’s not because it’s less “pure,” it’s because I’ve done activities like that before and it’s not fun not being in control of when I can enjoy myself.
I have been telling people for years that the difference between people who like alcohol and people who don’t is that the people who don’t didn’t have a peer group to pressure them to drink their first 5 beers. That’s true with me and with almost everyone I know (although there are some who claim they liked beer right away, and I even believe a few of them).
But now even when I’m alone, do I enjoy having a beer and relaxing? Yes, very much. Would I like beer if it weren’t for the alcohol’s effects of relaxing me? Probably not, no. But that doesn’t change that the alcohol has changed how much I enjoy the taste of beer, because now it actually tastes good. That doesn’t seem disingenuous to me. I don’t experience the enjoyment any less, so it’s hard for me to discredit it due to the fact that the way I got to that point was through trying to not look stupid to my friends when they gave me a beer for the first time.
I have been telling people for years that the difference between people who like alcohol and people who don’t is that the people who don’t didn’t have a peer group to pressure them to drink their first 5 beers. That’s true with me and with almost everyone I know (although there are some who claim they liked beer right away, and I even believe a few of them).
Yes, I think that’s what my point comes down to: so you like beer after being pressured by friends to drink it for five years. Then, by simple force of habit, you come to like it—your tastes change.
But I say: so what? What does that tell me about beer? Like I keep saying, if you go through this (five years of drinking it with friends who pressure you to drink it) with any drink, you will end up “liking” it. So there’s nothing about the hops or the special microbrewery or the yeast or this or that. It’s completely arbitrary.
I would much prefer to drink something that actually tastes good. If I want to further enhance this with a group of friends, great. But stop telling me beer tastes good. Keeping up with habits you’ve developed in pleasant situations is what “tastes” good. The psychoactive effects of a socially-acceptable product “taste” good. Beer, however, does not taste good.
ETA: Similarly, Homer’s The Odyssey isn’t good. Rather, a bunch of people have a tradition of reading it that they pass on and get the next generation to perpetuate. But what the heck am I supposed to learn about good writing from that, other than:
1) Here are some references you can make that you can expect people to “get”
2) If you want to start a cult, here are some things you can do that will trick people into liking your holy texts.
I would much prefer to drink something that actually tastes good. If I want to further enhance this with a group of friends, great. But stop telling me beer tastes good. Keeping up with habits you’ve developed in pleasant situations is what “tastes” good. The psychoactive effects of a socially-acceptable product “taste” good. Beer, however, does not taste good.
It looks to me like you’re trying to curry the 2-place predicate “tastes good to X” into a 1-place predicate “tastes good”, without really specifying the X that you’re supplying as an argument. Surely X isn’t “everyone”. And it can’t just be “many/most people”, since you’ve attached other conditions (like “psychoactive taste changes don’t count”).
In my experience, most things taste different the second or third time around. The stomach and intestines are connected to the nervous system, ya know—you get direct neural feedback on the things you put in your body. If that feedback is negative, you might find that substance A isn’t quite so tasty the second time around. Does any modification of a taste count as a “refinement” in your eyes, rather than an arbitrary change?
Anecdote: I concluded long ago that coffee tasted like dirt, and I wanted no part of it. Once every few years, someone would say “oh, try this, it’s good coffee!”, and I’d try it, and it tasted like dirt. Then a couple years ago I was eating breakfast at a diner and decided to just choke down some free caffeine. It tasted like dirt, but it did the job. A few days later, I forced down another cup of dirtwater. The next day I felt a sudden, sharp craving for coffee. That third cup of coffee tasted vastly better than the first two. I think the mechanism is obvious enough.
But the drug-induced shift in my perception of coffee wasn’t as simple as “it used to taste bad, now it tastes good”. Previously, all coffee tasted the same to me. As soon as coffee stopped tasting like dirt, the differences between types of coffee became much more noticeable. I’m no connoisseur, but you’ll have a hard time convincing me that I prefer a French-pressed Sumatran blend to the drip coffee available at my job because of peer pressure.
There was a TED talk (I don’t recall which one) where a neuroscientist spoke about some fMRI research done on monkeys performing a task requiring dexterity in the hands and fingers. They found that the region of the monkey’s brain mapped to its relevant digits basically grew with practice. This “adaptive resolution” aspect of perception means if you restrict X to “tastes good the first time” in an attempt to filter out noise from status games, you’ll also throw away everything that can’t be easily perceived with the initial chunk of allocated brainspace.
To summarize, your version of “tastes good” appears to be an oversimplification. Our taste sense seems to be quite inherently adaptive. So I disagree that “there’s nothing about the hops or the special microbrewery or the yeast or this or that”. I think your perception of the subtler qualities of beer is probably just too low-res, because your initial reaction to the taste of alcohol is preventing your brain from allocating additional resources to flavor decoding.
Incidentally, chocolate is one of the foulest-tasting things I’ve had the misfortune of placing against my tongue. Dark, milk, cheap, fancy—it all tastes the same.
Incidentally, chocolate is one of the foulest-tasting things I’ve had the misfortune of placing against my tongue. Dark, milk, cheap, fancy—it all tastes the same.
Incidentally, chocolate is one of the foulest-tasting things I’ve had the misfortune of placing against my tongue. Dark, milk, cheap, fancy—it all tastes the same.
I hate a lot of chocolate, too! I can’t stand Hershey’s Kisses, chocolate cake, chocolate milk, M&Ms, or chocolate ice cream. I do like hot chocolate, chocolate chip cookies, Three Musketeers bars, and Nestle Crunch bars.
Okay, thanks for explaining all of that. It really sheds light on the dynamics at play here. My thoughts:
1) Even if what you’re saying is true, about the brain allocating more mass to a given activity the more you do it, giving a plausible mechanism for greater ability to distinguish coffees, that still doesn’t differentiate it from bat urine. We can expect the same thing would go on there. Once you’re accustomed to bat urine, you’ll be able to tell all the different kinds apart, you’ll have a newfound appreciation for its “taste”, etc., all because of your neural plasticity.
So it still comes back to my original question: given this strange path to a person’s judgment that they like wine/coffee/bat urine, what is the appropriate way to describe this kind of liking? Are we usefully carving conceptspace by putting this kind of liking with milkshakes, which most people like the first time, and all subsequent times? Is the liking-bat-urine a different phenomenal experience than liking-milkshakes?
2) Even though your account of the changing taste for coffee may be right, are you sure about the sensitivity to nuances? Have you given yourself blind taste tests for random beans? Keep in mind, that when scientific controls are in place, wine “experts” inevitably fail miserably to make the distinctions they claim are important.
It’s actually not that unexpected to dislike the office’s coffee in favor of your own. I’m still at the stage of not liking coffee unless it’s ultra-sweetened (frappucinos ftw), and even I can tell what’s bad coffee. Not necessarily the taste, as the fact that bad coffee, um, doubles as a laxative.
3) My taste in beer hasn’t changed despite drinking it for ten years. The best I can say about any beer is that it “doesn’t hurt that much going down”. (Guiness wins in this regard.) The best explanation seems to be that my “supertasting” ability makes me very sensitive to the alcohol, blurring out any other taste, and keeping me from adapting to the nuances. The problem, though, is that supertasters are estimated at 25% of the population. So why aren’t 25% of people voicing my opinion on alcohol? Why would they stay silent about hating it, while drinking it for social and psychoactive benefits?
1) Even if what you’re saying is true, about the brain allocating more mass to a given activity the more you do it, giving a plausible mechanism for greater ability to distinguish coffees, that still doesn’t differentiate it from bat urine. We can expect the same thing would go on there. Once you’re accustomed to bat urine, you’ll be able to tell all the different kinds apart, you’ll have a newfound appreciation for its “taste”, etc., all because of your neural plasticity.
I don’t think liking is inherently tied to differentiation. It seems more like shifting your focus—you’re perceiving fundamentally new taste data, some of which you may find pleasant. I doubt that becoming an expert bat urine taster would impart much love for the urine relative to doing the same for coffee or beer. If Seth Roberts is right, we enjoy the complex flavors of fermented stuff like beer because they’re markers for valuable biotic diversity. The same is probably not true of bat urine.
2) Even though your account of the changing taste for coffee may be right, are you sure about the sensitivity to nuances? Have you given yourself blind taste tests for random beans? Keep in mind, that when scientific controls are in place, wine “experts” inevitably fail miserably to make the distinctions they claim are important.
I wouldn’t call the things I’m sensitive to “nuances”—the difference in flavor between “Sumatran” and “other” beans I’ve tried seems pretty major. There are probably other similar beans that would be indistinguishable, my preferences on the subject are quasitransitive at best. I haven’t tested it, nor have I tested my ability to distinguish ale from lager.
The problem, though, is that supertasters are estimated at 25% of the population. So why aren’t 25% of people voicing my opinion on alcohol? Why would they stay silent about hating it, while drinking it for social and psychoactive benefits?
Interesting, I’d never heard of supertasters before. I don’t see what the problem is here, though. You appear to be seeking a concept of “genuine” flavor, and you’ve ruled out psychologically adapted tastes. But that’s a bit tangent to the situation where someone starts out disliking beer and acquires a taste for it from psychoactive reinforcement. They still probably end up with higher-res perception of it than someone who hates the taste of it and drinks it anyway. Note the difference between “drinking for psychoactive effect” and “drinking because previous psychoactive effects led to a modified perception of flavor”. People in the latter category have no cause for complaint (except for alcoholics, of course).
If they’re really drinking it for social benefits, the motivation to stay silent is probably also social benefits.
I don’t think liking is inherently tied to differentiation.
I didn’t say it was. I accept that you also started liking the taste itself; I just claim that this would happen for anything, including bat urine, so I don’t put it in the same class of stuff that tastes good before significantly molding your mind to make it so.
If Seth Roberts is right, we enjoy the complex flavors of fermented stuff like beer because they’re markers for valuable biotic diversity. The same is probably not true of bat urine.
Sounds like a despised “just-so” story to me. You can just as well find markers of biotic diversity in bat urine (at the very least, diabetic bat urine) that derives from the variety in their diet, and the different kinds of bats, etc.
I wouldn’t call the things I’m sensitive to “nuances”
I know. I was referring to your newfound “ability to distinguish differences to a higher degree of precision” and didn’t know a shorter term. Please don’t criticize someone’s terminology unless you offer an alternate, superior term that you would not object to. Like what I did in a different discussion over here in point 2.
I haven’t tested it,
Okay. Scientists have, though, and usually you can get away with swapping out “high quality” stuff for low quality stuff and people won’t notice. They will throw a status-driven hissy fit if they find out what you did, though.
If they’re really drinking it for social benefits, the motivation to stay silent is probably also social benefits.
So would you agree that my thesis is at least accurate for a portion of the population? (The thesis was, “People don’t really like the taste but use the supposed taste and other reasons as an excuse for getting high in a socially acceptable way and keeping it legal to do so.”)
I don’t think liking is inherently tied to differentiation.
I didn’t say it was.
True, what you said was
Once you’re accustomed to bat urine, you’ll be able to tell all the different kinds apart, you’ll have a newfound appreciation for its “taste”, etc., all because of your neural plasticity.
which I read as implying that differentiation causes “liking” (“inherently tied” was imprecise terminology on my part). What did you actually mean?
Sounds like a despised “just-so” story to me.
Uh, taste as an evolutionarily-shaped nutrition-detector isn’t exactly a novel just-so hypothesis. If your real objection is with the assertion of complex flavor preferences or the link between such flavors and biotic diversity, I don’t know what calling it a “just-so story” even means. You were probably looking for a slightly less general retaliate button.
You can just as well find markers of biotic diversity in bat urine (at the very least, diabetic bat urine) that derives from the variety in their diet, and the different kinds of bats, etc.
Valuable biotic diversity. The kind of stuff that garners positive feedback from the tract.
I know. I was referring to your newfound “ability to distinguish differences to a higher degree of precision” and didn’t know a shorter term. Please don’t criticize someone’s terminology unless you offer an alternate, superior term that you would not object to.
I wasn’t “criticizing your terminology”, I was attempting to correct a perceived misunderstanding in progress. You used the word “nuance” and then went on to talk about double-blind taste tests, which taken together led me to believe that I hadn’t effectively communicated the scale of distinction I had in mind. Hence the comparison to ale and lager. I’m well-aware of wine snobs and their embarrassing track records.
Assuming that my terminological correction is some ineffectual, off-topic criticism of your choice of words is assuming I’m basically acting in bad faith. Not very productive.
So would you agree that my thesis is at least accurate for a portion of the population?
True, what you said was … which I read as implying that differentiation causes “liking” (“inherently tied” was imprecise terminology on my part). What did you actually mean?
I was listing the differentiation, and the liking of taste, as two separate phenomena, with any possible causal relationship, not necessarily the differentiation causing the enjoyment.
Uh, taste as an evolutionarily-shaped nutrition-detector isn’t exactly a novel just-so hypothesis.
Yes, we do have (what can be called) nutrition detectors, but none of them work anything like what would have to be present for the one you posited: 1) in the EEA, we didn’t normally taste the ingredients of beer, 2) 25% of the population is distracted by the taste of alcohol and unable to use the information, 3) the nutrition detectors we do have evoke pleasant responses in almost everyone, from a very young age (i.e. aren’t acquired tastes).
I call it a “just so story” because it doesn’t pass many obvious sanity checks.
Valuable biotic diversity. The kind of stuff that garners positive feedback from the tract.
None of the things in beer “garner positive feedback from the tract”. And knowledge of what fruits and meats the bats in the area are able to eat would definitely signal the diversity in the area. If you meant GI tract micoorganisms, beer came around way too late, and is way too dissimilar to other things we consume to have been adapted for as a gauge of useful diversity.
I wasn’t “criticizing your terminology”, I was attempting to correct a perceived misunderstanding in progress.
What is the brief appellation you believe I should have used to describe what I was referring to? If you don’t have one, you should have accepted the specificity/brevity tradeoff I made in trying to summarize what you just said, and responded to the substance of the point, saying what I got wrong there.
If you do have one, you just passed up your second opportunity to be helpful by telling it to me. What’s your goal here?
Assuming that my terminological correction is some ineffectual, off-topic criticism of your choice of words is assuming I’m basically acting in bad faith.
No, telling me what I did wrong without telling me what would have been right, is bad faith, because it leaves me in the position of having to get permission from you every time I want to briefly refer back to something you said.
So would you agree that my thesis is at least accurate for a portion of the population?
Yes.
Okay, thank you. I just wish I didn’t have to pull teeth to talk about these things.
“None of the things in beer “garner positive feedback from the tract”″.
Not true. One of the things I like about beer is that when I’m hungry, it tastes REALLY good. It tastes like I’m eating a meal. This doesn’t happen with wine, which is just a drink.
LOL! What’s funny is, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard this line of “reasoning”.
“Okay okay, high-carb substance X might not taste good, but it tastes REALLY good when you’re energy starved (in contrast to all those high-carb food/drinks that don’t taste really good in such a circumstance).”
I mention it because it tastes better than other high carb food and drinks in those circumstances. That’s a fact, at least regarding my taste.
And there’s really something wrong with your manner of argument, since you could say something similar about any reason why anyone would say anything ever tastes good. You might as well say you dislike the taste of milkshake, but just like the effects of fat and sugar on your body, or something like that.
[replying separately to this tortured meta sub-thread]
What is the brief appellation you believe I should have used to describe what I was referring to? If you don’t have one, you should have accepted the specificity/brevity tradeoff I made in trying to summarize what you just said, and responded to the substance of the point, saying what I got wrong there.
Look, it wasn’t clear to me at all that you were making such a trade-off. I wouldn’t have mentioned the word “nuance” at all if I thought you were you just abbreviating my intent. Misinterpretations are a dime a dozen in these sorts of conversations, no need to take a retransmit so personally.
What’s your goal here?
To have a clear exchange of ideas. Do you suspect another?
No, telling me what I did wrong without telling me what would have been right, is bad faith, because it leaves me in the position of having to get permission from you every time I want to briefly refer back to something you said.
Emphasis mine. You’re taking it personally. It could just as easily have been poor phrasing on my part. I’m more interested in ensuring that the thing you read is the thing I’m trying to write than I am in figuring who’s to “blame” for some terminological “error”.
1) in the EEA, we didn’t normally taste the ingredients of beer
Not sure what you mean here. In the EEA we could still probably taste the rough signature of a fermentation process.
2) 25% of the population is distracted by the taste of alcohol and unable to use the information
Again you imply that supertasters are unable to get past their initial reaction to the taste of alcohol, despite the utter plausibility of psychoactive reinforcement leading to a modified sense of taste.
3) the nutrition detectors we do have evoke pleasant responses in almost everyone, from a very young age (i.e. aren’t acquired tastes).
Source? My tastes changed slowly but continually as I aged. Is your assertion that none of the common shifts from childhood to adult food preferences are linked to nutritional content?
I call it a “just so story” because it doesn’t pass many obvious sanity checks.
If the above ordered list constitutes your “obvious sanity checks”, then I question their adequacy. If you’re referring to some other sanity checks, I’d be interested in hearing them.
To clarify, I’m not actually advocating Roberts’ theory. I brought it up because I think it’s plausible, which is all that’s required to doubt the counterintuitive assertion that developing a taste for bat urine is akin to developing a taste for beer.
If you meant GI tract micoorganisms, beer came around way too late, and is way too dissimilar to other things we consume to have been adapted for as a gauge of useful diversity.
Came around way too late? Dietary adaptations can be pretty rapid (e.g., adult lactose tolerance). But I doubt your assertion that beer is too dissimilar to other things we consume—getting a message like “this is fermented, caloric, and not obviously toxic” from your tongue is probably good enough.
Not sure what you mean here. In the EEA we could still probably taste the rough signature of a fermentation process.
Then you’d have to show how it has selective power. What information is gained from the fermentation stage, and why would it shift our makeup so quickly?
Again you imply that supertasters are unable to get past their initial reaction to the taste of alcohol, despite the utter plausibility of psychoactive reinforcement leading to a modified sense of taste.
Not one that just happens to line up with a convoluted mechanism that just happens to justify liking beer.
Source? My tastes changed slowly but continually as I aged. Is your assertion that none of the common shifts from childhood to adult food preferences are linked to nutritional content?
We change what we like, but we keep the category of sweet (detection of sugars). There is no scientific substantiation for a “fermentedness” category detector: just sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and the recent meaty one. That gives a serious presumption against this kind of mechanism.
To clarify, I’m not actually advocating Roberts’ theory. I brought it up because I think it’s plausible, which is all that’s required to doubt the counterintuitive assertion that developing a taste for bat urine is akin to developing a taste for beer.
Then I just have to show equal plausibility of the usefulness of bat urine, which I’ve done. Diabetic bat urine contains sugar, which in turn contains sweetness, which in turn contains information information about the plants in the area. This result can be extended to normal bat urine, in which the fruit content of the area will determine bat urine bitterness, which we would then “enjoy” drinking, just as people learn to “enjoy” beer’s bitterness.
And, as a bonus, urine was consumed for a sliver of our evolutionary history.
Sure, it’s convoluted and implausible, but good enough to keep consumption of bat urine nice and legal, which is really all it has to do.
Then you’d have to show how it has selective power. What information is gained from the fermentation stage, and why would it shift our makeup so quickly?
Why would it need to be a quick shift?
Not one that just happens to line up with a convoluted mechanism that just happens to justify liking beer.
Huh? In earlier comments you seemed to have no problem with the idea that people developed a taste for things that got them high, but now the idea is suspect because it supports an explanation for liking beer?
We change what we like, but we keep the category of sweet (detection of sugars). There is no scientific substantiation for a “fermentedness” category detector: just sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and the recent meaty one. That gives a serious presumption against this kind of mechanism.
And there’s no need for a “fermentedness” category detector, any more than there’s a need for cones that selectively perceive yellow.
Sure, it’s convoluted and implausible, but good enough to keep consumption of bat urine nice and legal, which is really all it has to do.
Ah yes, the “grand social conspiracy to ward off prohibition” hypothesis emerges again. I’d be interested in hearing more about how you think this is supposed to work.
Ah yes, the “grand social conspiracy to ward off prohibition” hypothesis emerges again. I’d be interested in hearing more about how you think this is supposed to work.
A large fraction of the population is hugely enthusiastic about something, and acts to preserve it? It worked for chocolate—what makes you think alcohol inspires less enthusiasm?
Then I just have to show equal plausibility of the usefulness of bat urine, which I’ve done.
You haven’t shown equal plausibility for your “bat urine” hypothesis as Roberts has for his “fermented food” hypothesis. Go ahead and scan his blog under the categories fermented food and umami hypothesis. (I don’t agree with everything Roberts has written on the subject.)
That said, I think it was an error for loqi to bring up Roberts’s ideas at all—when he talks about fermented food, he means things like yogourt, soy sauce, natto, miso, fish paste, and kombucha, not the products of alcoholic fermentation. (ETA: No, apparently he includes alcoholic fermentation.)
So would you agree that my thesis is at least accurate for a portion of the population? (The thesis was, “People don’t really like the taste but use the supposed taste and other reasons as an excuse for getting high in a socially acceptable way and keeping it legal to do so.”)
I think people usually either find a taste they like when they drink (sometimes mixing in sweet drinks), or drink just for the alcohol and grow to like the taste over time. I doubt many people claim to drink solely for the taste: I’ve never heard anyone say this, though people who enjoy the buzz of alcohol also say they like the taste.
I think people usually either find a taste they like when they drink (sometimes mixing in sweet drinks), or drink just for the alcohol and grow to like the taste over time.
Again, this is something that could make anything taste good—it’s no evidence of liking the alcoholic drink. It’s one of the very reasons I rolled my eyes at when people tried to convince me that I must actually like alcohol, because I like a certain drink that heavily dilutes the alcohol taste through sweetness.
I doubt many people claim to drink solely for the taste: I’ve never heard anyone say this, though people who enjoy the buzz of alcohol also say they like the taste.
I’ve certainly seen people put on that pretense, and, in any case, they certainly claim it’s a driving factor, if for no other reason than the vastly varying prices for the same amount of alcohol.
I do not particularly like the high of alcohol. However, I really like Belgian beer, and it has alcohol in it, sometimes large amounts, and it’s a side effect I am willing to handle for the taste! Unfortunately, that side effect does mean I am forced to limit myself to about 3 beers in one sitting.
I wonder if you have never drank sufficiently good beer. It doesn’t have to be that expensive even, super-high end beers are much cheaper than super-high end wine. $5-7 for a normal bottle, $30 for a bottle of the best beer in the world. http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/westvleteren-abt-12/4934/
If you’re ever in Pittsburgh, I’ll buy you a real beer at the Sharp Edge.
I also admit that your point is probably correct and I am something of an outlier—and it’s really just Belgian beer that I would drink despite the alcohol; most other beer and wine and liquor is nothing special.
Pay attention, everyone. This is what it looks like when you really like drinking something, rather than its effect on your mind:
I do not particularly like the high of alcohol. However, I really like Belgian beer, and it has alcohol in it, sometimes large amounts, and it’s a side effect I am wiling to handle for the taste! Unfortunately, that side effect does mean I am forced to limit myself to about 3 beers in one sitting.
When you start running into hard limits about how much of the stuff you can consume before deleterious effects on your body, and this is a downside to you, that definitely sounds like a serious enjoyment. (That’s where I am regarding ice cream and many other sweets.)
In contrast, when there are very narrow situations in which you enjoy its “taste”, and drink “just enough” to accomplish mild relaxation when you want to, um, mildly relax, well, then I start to get skeptical.
I’ve certainly seen people put on that pretense, and, in any case, they certainly claim it’s a driving factor, if for no other reason than the vastly varying prices for the same amount of alcohol.
I think I understand. We’re talking about two different things.
You’re saying, if I understand correctly, that there’s a great deal of snobbery in alcohol drinking: people claim that expensive wines or liquors taste so much better, and this claim doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Outside of this snobbery, though, just in terms of friendly social drinking, almost everyone agrees that they drink because they enjoy the feeling, and the taste is just something they grew to like over time, or they mix it with something sweet to make it taste better.
Outside of this snobbery, though, just in terms of friendly social drinking, almost everyone agrees that they drink because they enjoy the feeling, and the taste is just something they grew to like over time, or they mix it with something sweet to make it taste better.
Um, no, and that’s the problem. I have never been able to get people to admit that it’s just about the mental effects, and that they have to find ways to make themselves tolerate the awful taste. Not without a lot of teeth-pulling, and people telling me about all the wonderful arguments against this position.
Again, it’s the insistence that they like “this particular drink” because it’s “so good” that bothers me. No, it’s about getting high, and no one will talk about this.
I’m surprised by this experimental result. In my experience most people say that it’s about the mental effects as well as the taste. Just to be clear: over half the people you ask say that they don’t drink alcohol for the mental effects at all, and it’s solely about the taste?
I wonder if part of this is due to the way you’re asking. You use language like “tolerate the awful taste”, “suffer through”, and compare it to hot sauce and engine oil. Obviously you strongly dislike the taste of alcohol. Not everyone does though; while I drink primarily for the mental effects, I also enjoy and have acquired a taste for some different types of alcohol, and I like some combinations of flavors when having a beer with food.
So maybe you’re getting strong reactions in contrast to your extreme statements that alcohol tastes awful and no one could ever like the taste.
me: So you like the taste of those margaritas? What is it about the taste?
And they answered your question? Specifically, would one good response cause you to rethink your theory on the subject? How many responses would you need to be convinced?
I am not saying I have those responses. I am just curious.
It sounds like the person here is saying he drinks for the mental effects (“it helps me to relax”), and that he doesn’t mind the taste because it’s mixed with things he likes (“fruit flavors”). This seems like the answer I’d expect.
Whereas it seems like you absolutely despise the taste, most people who drink don’t mind it, and sometimes like it, especially when mixed with fruit or sweet tastes.
But they don’t like it, “especially when mixed with fruit or sweet tastes (and taste-bud numbing ice, but whatever)”. Rather, they like sweet, fruity, cold drinks, and still find them good, even if it is worsened with a little alcohol.
That, I think is the appropriate way to characterize it.. Again, remember my incessant point about baseline comparisons: if someone likes fruity sweetness, it’s going to make pretty much anything (that doesn’t clash) taste good. But so what? That doesn’t mean they like the stuff its mixed with. It just means they like that fruity sweetness, and their enjoyment may persist even if the drink is degraded with other, worse flavors.
What’s more, conversations like these (alarmingly typical) reveal that people aren’t even thinking about the distinction between liking a drink for its taste, and liking it because they like getting high—and nor are they interested in learning.
I’ve been watching this thread for a while, and as a frequent alcohol-drinker, I thought I would try to report my experience as honestly as I can manage:
Beer: In an absolute sense, I don’t like the taste. Since some beers taste less bad—or more interesting—than others, I will sometimes comment that a particular beer tastes “really good”. What I mean though, is that it tastes “really good” for a beer. I drink quite a lot of beer, because I usually prefer the slower, gentler, more controllable buzz to that of harder alcohol. I’ve heard plenty of women say they don’t like beer. In some circles, it’s considered unmanly for a man to say he doesn’t like beer, and I expect that’s why I hear it much less from men. In some situations, I take the praise of beer as shorthand for “I know we all don’t have much in common, nor any real reason beyond company for hanging out, so lets go through the motions of affirming our mutual love for something that is safe to affirm mutual love for.”
Wine: This is definitely all about the taste, but it’s not at all the same category of taste as sugar or a milkshake. This is all about the complexity of dozens of interacting flavors. It is a kaleidescope that you “see” with your tongue. It’s a taste experience by definition, but that doesn’t mean that it is anything like the tastiness of a milkshake. The thrill is in the richness of the patterns that exist in the taste. Importantly, I find that only certain wines at certain ages produce this effect to a worthwhile degree. Lousy wine tastes lousy. A really good cabernet franc, say, can be the kind of amazing that makes me bolt upright in my chair and go wide-eyed. Really. As far as the alcohol component, it is such an intrinsic part of the taste-orchestra that I, unfortunately, find it impossible to speculate on whether I’d still drink wine without it. I think I would still drink it if it did not produce a buzz, although there would be one less reason. I think I would still like swishing it around, even if I was only going to spit it out. Needless to say, I find it to be an extremely pleasant way to get buzzed.
Mixed drinks/Hard alcohol: As far as I’m concerned, these have always existed solely as a fast-track to getting buzzed or drunk. For me, they might as well be an IV drip. I, however, administer them in the normal way, because it is normal and practical. Also, sipping lets me roughly calibrate my dosage to match others, and the situation.
Bat urine: I don’t think this is a fair argument at all, because you cannot separate your disgust reaction from pure taste, in the experience of drinking something. Several bodily fluids have little/fairly neutral taste, but the experience of drinking it would still be disgusting.
I agree that most alcohol consumption is mainly about the buzz. I like different states of consciousness. The one induced by alcohol is not my favorite, but it’s one I can enjoy without having to sneak around or worry about prison, so I make do with the (somewhat personally disappointing) political freedoms I have. I do drink wine for the taste—it just isn’t the same kind of taste as anything else. It’s a sensory-overload experience that happens to be delivered by the tongue.
Isn’t it possible that a little bit of complex, astringent bitterness can actually make a sweet fruity drink more palatable? I wouldn’t drink a virgin margherita; I honestly believe the tequilla and triple sec make it taste better.
It seems like this whole argument is motivated out of a wish to make it socially acceptable to say “I don’t like the taste of beer” by trying to paint everyone who disagrees as liars.
You need to read my history again, for the first time. I initially did believe that I was just weird in not liking alcohol, or that it would come with time. It’s the obvious, favored, simple hypothesis.
But I can only hold belief in it for so long until the shower of disconfirmatory evidence hits. When I look behind the veil and find out what it means for other people to like alcohol, and find that it matches up with what I consider not liking alcohol, well … if anything, I held on to the belief too long.
Did you notice that I said that I don’t match up with your criterion? Besides the fact that even that total list didn’t seem to show that a person necessarily didn’t like the taste of something.
You could at least modify your belief to “some people don’t like the taste of alcohol but claim that they do for such and such reasons...” and then it would become more accurate, since surely this is likely true of at least some people, while it is surely not true of all who claim to like it.
For example, an area where your position has some truth is that there are guys who basically dislike any type of alcohol except sweet drinks, and these they like only because of the sweetness, but they are unwilling to admit it because this is thought to be “girlish”. But at the same time, this is definitely untrue of many others.
I ask that you take serious note of the sympathy with which I’ve characterized these liars. I completely understand why they have to put on a show: anything that does to your mind what alcoholic drinks do, but doesn’t have wide-scale social support from respectable people, is going to get banned or otherwise given severe restrictions. Such a pretense doesn’t strike me as so wrong here.
What bothers me is the widespread refusal to acknowledge this, even in private.
Many people don’t drink alcohol primarily for the mental effects. Rather, there is a strong status penalty to drinking non-alcoholic beverages. Most non-alcoholic beverages are strongly associated with children, at least in the afternoon (juice and milk are OK at breakfast, not at dinner). Adults can’t order them without sending an undesirable signal about their maturity.
Among the acceptable drinks, you’re left with other “acquired tastes” (coffee and tea) or drinks that often give other low status signals (water alone is cheap, soft drinks are lower-class).
Once you’ve established that it’s a status issue, the refusal to admit it is understandable, since open concern for status is generally a low-status trait. I don’t agree with all of Robin Hanson’s status explanations, but it makes sense here.
The mind-altering effects play into it as well. Even then, there are important signaling effects in play (Robin put up a post on that a bit ago). And ignoring taste totally is a mistake. Even if I might prefer a milkshake to an Irish creme, I definitely prefer an Irish creme to Everclear.
Btw, I think your milkshake comparison needs to be between equal caloric portions.
I’d prefer 600 calories of milkshake to 600 calories of beer. But I would rather have one beer than one milkshake. For certain values of beer, beer is more delicious than milkshake per calorie.
anything that does to your mind what alcoholic drinks do, but doesn’t have wide-scale social support from respectable people
I’m confused. Are you saying that alcohol doesn’t have wide-scale social support from respectable people? What society are we talking about?
I would guess that of the adult population in the US who drinks, at least 75% drink primarily for the mental effects and would have no problem saying so.
anything that does to your mind what alcoholic drinks do, but doesn’t have wide-scale social support from respectable people, is going to get banned or otherwise given severe restrictions.
Understand now? If alcohol didn’t have the social support it does, it would be Just Another Mind Altering Substance that would be banned, or that you’d need a prescription for.
Please, finish sentences before responding to them
a) you’re not really curious,
b) expect any answer to come back negative, and
c) aren’t interested in arguing whether he can read a full clause anyway.
If alcohol didn’t have the social support it does, it would be Just Another Mind Altering Substance that would be banned, or that you’d need a prescription for.
I find this difficult to swallow. Alcohol prohibition was a widely acknowledged disaster (or does this collective memory also count as “social support”?). The “Joe Sixpacks” of the nation aren’t crooning over Miller’s exquisite blend of hops, but they’d be up in arms if you tried to take it away.
And drug policy (at least in the US) isn’t particularly consistent—if you don’t believe me, feel free to conduct your own experiment with some high-potency salvia extract.
I doubt most people are worried even subconsciously about the reintroduction of prohibition. Why postulate a coordinated social response to such a non-threat?
I find this difficult to swallow. Alcohol prohibition was a widely acknowledged disaster (or does this collective memory also count as “social support”?).
Yes it was a disaster—because of alcohol’s widespread social support, that led to the black market, inability to enforce, etc.
Hence my statement
If alcohol didn’t have the social support it does, it would … be banned, or … need a prescription.
You also said:
I doubt most people are worried even subconsciously about the reintroduction of prohibition. Why postulate a coordinated social response to such a non-threat?
There are many measures short of prohibition that restrict alcohol. In trying to impose them, as society imposes restrictions on mind-altering substances, legislatures butt up against the social support for alcohol. Retaining this support is necessary for preventing these (otherwise reasonable) restrictions on alcohol.
This is getting perilously close to politics, but the difference with alcohol is the great history of human use. Alcohol was one of the first drugs regularly consumed by humans. A lot of culture has developed around that. Prohibition failed because it tried to outlaw the culture. Cannabis and psychedelics were also used by pre-modern humans, but the government could outlaw the other drugs without a people’s revolt because the average person didn’t use cannabis and psychedelics. The average person did and does use alcohol.
The problem, though, is that supertasters are estimated at 25% of the population. So why aren’t 25% of people voicing my opinion on alcohol? Why would they stay silent about hating it, while drinking it for social and psychoactive benefits?
More anecdotal evidence: Over 1⁄4 of the people I know do not drink alcohol in any form. The society I am from is probably atypical in this regard.
Manipulating coffee into a good tasting form isn’t too hard; just add a lot of sugar and dilute it with enough milk, and it’ll probably taste pretty good even if you think black coffee tastes like dirt. (And then, if you want, you can reduce the amount of milk and sugar over time.)
Yes, I think that’s what my point comes down to: so you like beer after being pressured by friends to drink it for five years. Then, by simple force of habit, you come to like it—your tastes change.
[...] But stop telling me beer tastes good.
I like the taste of a particular beer and came to that conclusion after having about 4 beers before it in my lifetime. Not 4 servings of that particular beer, but 4 servings total. I understand acquired taste and claim that this does not qualify for that label. I liked it. I though it tasted good.
I assume you are not saying, “beer always tastes bad for everyone until they get conditioned by society.” That is what it sounds like to me, however. Is beer just an example for the sake of convenience?
ETA: Similarly, Homer’s The Odyssey isn’t good. Rather, a bunch of people have a tradition of reading it that they pass on and get the next generation to perpetuate. But what the heck am I supposed to learn about good writing from that, other than:
Is it plausible that it is good? Or has that scenario been completely rejected from your worldview? I haven’t read it, personally, so I really have no idea if it is or isn’t.
There are adaptations of The Odyssey that are pretty fun to read. I agree that direct translations tend to have issues, though; thousands of years of cultural change, the loss of lyrical elements through translation, the change in medium from oral recitation to print, and many other factors I can’t think of at the moment all make the story much less impressive than it must have been back in ancient times.
Likewise, there are practices that can make people like something. But there’s no point to saying, “Hey, after this practice, people like it!” That conveys no information—it’s true for everything. Like with placebo cures, I want to know what is good above and beyond that that results from standard “make something seem good” tricks.
Is it fair to say that you are looking for a way to predict “good” art before it enters the cultural status stream?
Not in the sense that I want to predict the next big thing.
What I’m looking for is, what portion is due to actual merit of the artwork, that people would appreciate even in the absence of others pressuring them to like it, or the signaling effects of displaying it to others?
I have often focused on scenarios where you can get a judgment before cultural effects interfere, but these aren’t strictly necessary. Like with the placebo example I keep giving, there are ways to see what is due to some effect that will make anything look good, and what effect is due to the actual merit. The hoaxes that others have referenced are good examples of this.
Very useful: in the future, we want to have machines that can make the same (peer-pressure-free) art classifications that humans would, so they can pop out art themselves. Bad art is nearly as useful as good art in helping to train such a machine and identify the algorithms humans use to make these judgments.
But when the field of art has been corrupted to the point where it’s just a pure status game, there is no such classifier that can be learned. The only machine you’re going to be making is one that looks human, and hobnobs its way up the social ladder so that it can learn what the elites think, and render judgments in that way.
(I made the same critique about some Japanese researchers’ quixotic attempt to build a machine that determines how much humans will like a given wine, based on chemical analysis. Hey guys—it ain’t the chemical composition of a wine that makes people like it!)
My point is that it doesn’t matter if it’s about signaling or not. Quests for status pervade every aspect of human life and are inescapable. These people believe what they believe and get upset when you bring it up for the same reason that you will object if I said you’re only interested in pointing out their status-questing for your own status-questing. “I don’t care about status” is everyone’s conceit.
EDIT: Just to expand on this a little bit—I’m saying that the desire to point out their cognitive dissonance is motivated by status, as well, and that further, neither of these is worse than the other when rating by sincerity or honesty.
My point is that it doesn’t matter if it’s about signaling or not. Quests for status pervade every aspect of human life and are inescapable.
Yes, and the placebo effect in cures is inescapable. But there’s still a part of the cure that is due to genuine biochemical effects from the medicine rather than the belief that it will work.
Likewise, I want to know the portion of art—and alcohol—that is due to more than just those things that could rook anyone into liking them. If, as it seems, in many cases, there is no such portion—if it’s all about being conditioned to like it in a way that could work for bat urine—then I don’t consider those things good, and I wish people would stop putting on the pretense that they are.
Science passes this test with flying colors: no amount of phony, meaningless papers by status jockeying scientists and engineers is going to get an airplane off the ground (without ripping apart) or an extremely powerful bomb to go off. The buck stops somewhere. Where does the art buck stop? Where does the drink quality buck stop?
These people believe what they believe and get upset when you bring it up for the same reason that you will object if I said you’re only interested in pointing out their status-questing for your own status-questing. “I don’t care about status” is everyone’s conceit.
Yes, that would explain why someone’s won’t say to my face the real reasons they drink. But in an online discussion with 90% anonymous handles: what’s holding them back?
Just to expand on this a little bit—I’m saying that the desire to point out their cognitive dissonance is motivated by status,
That may be a part of it. But read the link thomblake gave to my earlier thread: I was experiencing really weird data. People seemed to be experiencing the same internal state as me, but using different labels for it.
The buck stops with you, because art isn’t a competition. Maybe it is for the artists, but not from your end—it’s just what you enjoy.
I have a copy of a painting hanging in my living room that I won’t name here, but it’s very popular and famous (and therefore kind of stupid to have hanging in my living room, because it doesn’t really show off my taste as refined). But I get a lot out of it. I love looking at it.
If an art student came in and wanted to try to condescend to me about my taste in art, what could I do? I’d look at him and say, “This painting does for me what art is supposed to do for people. I don’t have the time or energy to devote to refining my taste. I admit your taste in art is more refined and you might get more out of a Picasso than I do, because I don’t get much.”
If he still wants to look down his nose at me, who gives a shit? Get out of my house, right? But I think the true art-lover will say, “I’m glad you experience something that’s so meaningful to me, even if your taste is blunter and cruder than mine.”
I think this is analogous to if the art student came to me and said, “I never realized how cool the Pythagorean theorem is before. It’s amazing.” Do I look at him and say, “Wow, you’re an idiot”? I would hope not; I would hope to think to myself, “Well, it’s a start,” and say, “Right?!”
ETA: I’d be calling him an idiot because he’s only getting it now, and not back when he learned it for the first time in high school and I realized how cool it was.
The buck stops with you, because art isn’t a competition. Maybe it is for the artists, but not from your end—it’s just what you enjoy. … If he still wants to look down his nose at me, who gives a shit? Get out of my house, right? But I think the true art-lover will say, “I’m glad you experience something that’s so meaningful to me, even if your taste is blunter and cruder than mine.”
I’m sorry, but that’s a very naive view of “how it works”. The elite art cadre certainly promotes the belief that there’s a lot more to art than what you or I personally like. They’re the ones that influence, by their status, what students will be indoctrinated in, and what artworks they will be expected to deem good, even as construction workers mistake the “good” stuff for trash. (This has happened before.) Even as the “art” in front of public buildings, under the full endorsement of the art elite, is a blight on the landscape.
If it were just a matter of “enjoy what you like”, I’d have the same view as you do. But there is significant money spent indoctrinating students in one view of art—which unlike science, lacks a stopping-buck. There is the pretense that you have to enjoy Shakespeare, or the latest splotches on a canvas, to “truly” appreciate art. And as long as they promote their priesthood that decides which art is blessed, and gets the huge grants for museums to “study” and promote it, even as they cant substantiate their opinions … well, then I have a problem.
Do I really need to explain why it’s bad for people to be wealthy and high status depsite never having produced anything of value, and spend all their time perpetuating what is essentially an information cascade?
It’s not just the fact that people have to be trained. After all, people must be trained in order to read or use a computer.
The problem is that there’s no clear standard for what counts as successful training. You can check for whether someone can read (at a given level) using tests that everyone will agree about for the results. How do you know when someone’s gotten the right “art appreciation training”? “Oh, well, you see, you have to join our club, and hand around only our people for years and years, and then we still get fooled by monkeys …”
Well, there’s always the blind taste tests where people of various degrees of drink quality naivety rank drinks. Which reliably produce a negative correlation with the elite feedback loop!
Sorry, all I got out of that was a name-drop and (what seemed like) a dodge.
Could you answer again, and this time maybe explain it a little differently? Specifically:
-Are you claiming that Pollock discovered a way of satisfying the aesthetic senses that allowed generalization of the method in other forms?
-Let’s say I knew a wacko who believed that “By historical accident, Pollock became a focal point for people of high-status to identify each other, despite there being nothing special about his work.” What evidence would you point me to that has a low Bayes factor against that hypothesis?
I’m claiming that Pollock’s work demonstrated easily-neglected and valuable parts of the aesthetic experience.
As for evidence against that hypothesis, I think that depends largely upon how seriously you take some of the relevant premises in your wacko’s model. According to some, there is virtually nothing to all of culture other than status games (though in this case the clause “despite there being nothing special about his work” would make little sense). According to others, there really is quite a bit to aesthetics, and perhaps it’s worth listening to the folks who’ve spent their lives studying it.
There are a lot of different kinds of things in the world, and many of them are valuable in unexpected ways.
So you really can’t think of anything that is less likely to be observed if “it’s all bullshit” than if it’s not? There isn’t any kind of aesthetic feeling you could feed to the wacko that he couldn’t help but burst out in appreciation for?
Not when I’m asking for evidence with a low Bayes factor, rather than a guaranteed low posterior.
Maybe an example would be in order. Let’s say Bob is the wacko, but about quantum physics. Bob believe that the claims of quantum physics are just a big status game, and so are the results of the particle accelerators and everything. I could point to evidence like the atom bomb. If they were just arguing over meaningless crap the whole time, and assigning truth purely based on who has the most status, how did they ever get the understanding necessary to build an atom bomb, Bob?
Right, like Halo. Except that millions of people like Halo even in the absence of a well-funded indoctrination campaign, and the fact that expressing appreciation for Halo won’t endear them to the kewl kids of art.
It’s not very impressive if people start to enjoy something after they’ve
You have to adjust for stuff like that.
Well said!
I just realized we seem to be arguing over wine again. I fold.
Yes, we are.
If you spend ten years associating wine with a good time, and are expected to have a refined palette for wine to be part of the kewl kids club, then guess what—you can make yourself like wine! The fact that you like wine in such a scenario does not, to me, count as a genuine liking, in the sense in which I judge beverages. Any substance, even bat urine, will find connosieurs under those conditions!
What I want to do is, find out what’s good about something, that isn’t simply an artifact of practices that can make anything look good.
That’s why I’m not impressed by “enjoy this because people are telling you to enjoy it”, which the support for much high art and alcohol amounts to.
Instead of refusing to engage the issue, maybe you should start to think about the recursivity of your criteria for quality?
This seems exceedingly arbitrary. The exact evolutionary processes that made ice cream taste good gave rise to the connoisseur phenomenon. Our ability to “predict” evolution and make something “taste like victory” doesn’t make enjoyment of those things less real, let alone less “good.”
Besides, we could keep following this rabbit hole to the end of time. What makes it enjoyable for you to not succumb to the trends of status? Why is the good-feeling reward that gives you better than the good-feeling reward that some other activity gives someone else?
So wait—are you conceding that art is just about signaling that you like whatever-high-status-people-like? Or that “you will get higher status for saying you like this” is a valid reason to judge a work as being art?
It matters for the same reason the placebo effect matters. Pills can make you better, merely by virtue of believing they’ll make you better. But, for a rigorous science of curing people, we want to know what makes people get better even more reliably than just believing they will.
Likewise, there are practices that can make people like something. But there’s no point to saying, “Hey, after this practice, people like it!” That conveys no information—it’s true for everything. Like with placebo cures, I want to know what is good above and beyond that that results from standard “make something seem good” tricks.
And there is a difference: I liked chocolate before I knew what anyone thought about it. In contrast, very few people liked alcohol before they found social or non-taste reasons to drink it.
If all you care about is the final level of liking, why not spend all this effort making yourself like healthy foods? And why the broad reluctance for people to admit, “okay, wine is really just about showing off status”? Why do I have to pry teeth to get anyone to talk about this?
The reason people are reluctant to admit it is because you are simply wrong. I like beer better than wine, even though wine has higher social status and greater psychological effects. I would drink beer in private if it had the same taste but no alcohol, and I would definitely prefer it to a milkshake, on taste alone.
What makes you so reluctant to admit that some people might have different tastes from you?
The investigation documented here led me to reject that initial, more obvious and probable theory.
My question was somewhat rhetorical, in response to your “Why the broad reluctance...”
In fact I read through the thread that you link to and found it quite unpersuasive.
It’s true it’s somewhat surprising that so many people said they preferred the taste of milkshake. But in reality that’s partly a question of context. If you’re comparing the taste of sweet things with the taste of non-sweet things, it can depend on what you feel like at the moment. Sometimes you have a desire for sugar, sometimes you don’t.
Did you read it all? It wasn’t just the milkshake comparison. It was the fact that, if you ignore the question “do you like alcohol?” and simply ask about the supposed implications of liking alcohol, my answers match up with everyone who claimed to like alcohol. Yet I characterize my state as “not liking alcohol”, while others characterize it as the reverse.
See the checklist.
Again, the point is to subtract away the influence of factors that can make you like anything. If applejuice made me happy and killed my usual inhibitions, I’d “like it”. I might even get over the taste. I might even show off my pickiness about which apples must be used before I will consider to drink it.
But this is a HUGELY different sense of liking than exists for a milkshake. Or milk. Or smoothies. Or mocha peppermint frappucinos. Or any of the other things that I didn’t have to consume many, many times to finally decide I like the taste of.
The checklist doesn’t seem very strong evidence to me:
“-Think milkshakes are better tasting than the best alcoholic drink.” I don’t think this. And even for people who do, many people like the taste of some things more than others, without disliking the taste of the latter.
“-Enjoy the taste of alcoholic drinks when it is drowned out with some other flavor.” Sure, if it’s a good flavor. But I also enjoy the taste of the alcoholic drinks when it isn’t drowned out at all.
“-Believe it changes our mental states in a good way.” Possibly, but this doesn’t show that it wouldn’t taste good without this effect.
“-Could not comfortably chug down a alcoholic drink the way we might a milkshake.” I think this happens with strong drinks because the alcohol causes a coughing reflex, not because of the taste. But I can definitely drink a beer comfortably just as fast as a milkshake, and I can do the same with wine if a little water is added (and it still tastes like wine, indicating that it isn’t a question of taste.)
Okay, I hope statements like this show what I’m dealing with on this topic. We have substances that provoke the choking reflex in people, as your body protests against this substance entering you, just as it would for toxic smoke, cleaning fluid, and engine oil, and yet people casually ignore that and say with a straight face, “oh, what a pleasure it is for me to drink this delicious beverage! Why would not others so enjoy it?”
...then why do I put hot sauce on my burrito?
Do you drink the hot sauce directly? Do you put so much on that it provokes a choking or wincing reaction? Then I don’t think it’s comparable.
ETA: Oh, one more rhetorical quesiton: Do you act surprised that there are people who aren’t willing to pay insane prices to injest burritos with so much hotsauce that they have to suffer through eating it?
Because that’s what it would take for me to have the same perplexion as I do about alcohol.
I don’t—I’d choke or wince, and I don’t want that. But I still like hot sauce on my burrito.
What I am arguing—and I believe this was Unknowns’ argument—is that the effect of increasing rate of intake is not indicative of whether a substance is enjoyable at the lower rate of intake. I wouldn’t eat a tray of lemon squares, but I’d eat one piece.
Okay, give me a little credit here. I “get” that much—I mean, even a milkshake will give you a brainfreeze.
The point is (and I admit I’ve had a hard time expressing it with examples because of the confounding factors), people strangely start to use a definition of “enjoy drinking X” that expands to cover aspects that they admit are very displeasurable. Hard liquors will induce the coughing reflex (the beginning of it), for example, even at very low rates of consumption.
This would seem to dominate the experience, but then, even in the midst of what is quite clearly painful, they enjoy it—and are somehow able to discern “good” hard liquor from “bad” hard liquor.
Taking the whole experience into account, I can accept that there’s a lot to like—just not the act of drinking.
Might dill pickles be a useful example? I had to be coerced into trying them several times before I came to find them edible, but I enjoy them now, and there’s not much if any status involved there.
Dill pickles don’t have nearly the same perplexity factors that alcohol does, so I don’t think they’re a useful example.
People aren’t ultra-particular about which dill pickles they like, beyond them not looking gross.
People don’t claim to be able to discern all the differences.
The taste of dill pickles doesn’t serve as a convenient excuse for getting high.
Dill picklers aren’t regularly used to get high, and aren’t in danger of being banned or overregulated.
You get the point.
I’m not sure that those factors can be fully, or even partly, separated from status signaling. For example, I expect that I could tell the difference between different kinds of pickles, and develop a favorite among the brands that exist. I have no particular reason to do so, and if I did, I wouldn’t talk about it, but if pickles became trendy, and the pickle companies started making subtly-different types to satisfy the demand for signaling tools, I probably would at least try the varieties and pick a favorite. (I have a favorite brand of mayonnaise, after all, and am that picky about which brand of Macadamia nuts I’ll eat.)
You assume that the bad effects will dominate, but I’m not sure that would be the case. If you like the taste itself enough, that might balance the bad effect. And “good” hard liquor might (and does, in my limited experience) reduce the bad effects.
Further, comparatively few people like (neat) hard liquor, and the direct unpleasant effects are significantly reduced in beer, wine, and mixed drinks.
I agree with you that status considerations will often make people inclined to get an Irish Cream when they’d prefer a milkshake or fool themselves into thinking that expensive wine tastes better. But you’re apparently making a strong claim (nobody really likes the taste of alcoholic beverages), on weak evidence.
And hot sauce will induce a burning sensation at even very low concentrations of capsaicin. Like BDSM, sometimes people actually do like that.
Right—sometimes. Not “the overwhelming majority of the adult population, which also happens to get high while doing so.” It’s the ubiquity, not just the strangeness, that confuses me.
You’re sure of that ubiquity part? I just think you should put off endorsing complicated beliefs until you are sure they are based on good data. In this case, I believe that means a proper sociological study.
Edit: Such a study may also make it easier to confirm the extent of various proposed motivations.
I don’t think we’re going to need a sociological study to verify that the vast majority of adults drink, and claim to like it when they do. That’s all I meant by ubiquity. I should have said “commonness” or something equally awkwardish.
No, you seem to be claiming that they’re doing it for the taste. They do it in spite of the taste, or indifferently to the taste, and add sweet flavors to mask it. However, people can grow to like the taste over time, and some of the flavors in the taste are good by themselves, though not as good as, say, a chocolate milkshake.
You also seem to be assuming that a taste has to be repulsive or delicious, instead of just neutral, or all right in certain contexts, or occasionally desirable.
Er, no, that’s pretty much the opposite of what I’m claiming. I’m claiming that they say they do it for the taste, but mainly (or solely) want the psychoactive effects.
Sorry for getting it wrong. Anyway, I don’t think they say that they primarily do it for the taste, which is an empirical question.
I think they say they “like” it, and they mean they like the overall experience, and you’re interpreting that to mean that they like the taste. Or they say they like the taste because they grew to like it over time, or because they mix it with other flavors, and you’re interpreting that to mean they primarily drink it for the taste.
I am not surprised when someone does pay to do such a thing to their burrito.
Even if it were very common, and a practice concentrated in the top 10% wealthiest people?
I think it is quite common for people to eat food that is hot enough to cause discomfort or even pain, at least in some cultures. The uncomfortably-hot curry is a British tradition that often goes hand in hand with the consumption of beer. In my non-scientific personal experience willingness to eat (and enjoy) food with levels of heat that cause discomfort correlates somewhat with wealth/status—it can be seen as a marker of openness to experience and embracing cultural diversity.
People get desensitized to hot sauce after a while; it takes more to cause discomfort in someone who routinely eats hot sauce than in someone who doesn’t.
I’m fond of spicy food. (My father, who I suspect is a supertaster, isn’t.)
People do get desensitized to hot/spicy food over time but I think people who enjoy the sensation tend to increase the dosage to compensate. Speaking from personal experience, I still like hot food to burn slightly, it just takes more chilli than it used to to achieve that. The burning/discomfort isn’t an unfortunate side effect of the pleasant taste of chillis for me, it’s an essential component of the enjoyment of eating hot food. I’ve heard that the reason people enjoy spicy food is that chilli stiumlates pain receptors and causes the release of endorphins and it is the endorphin release that people crave but I don’t know if that is true.
Yes, that’s what I meant.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that some hot peppers have good flavors in addition to the burning sensation (jalapenos, for example), but others seem to be practically tasteless apart from it.
Mmm… I think I missed something. How I would I stop being not surprised if it were a common practice?
Uh, I mean, why would I start being surprised if it were a common practice [to pay insane prices to inject burritos...]?
I grant the reflex is a way of your body protesting. I just don’t think it has to do with TASTE. And I gave evidence for that from the the fact that if it is diluted, it has the same taste, but not the same protest.
Also, this reflex is different from nausea, which I would admit would be a protest to the taste, and if I dislike the taste of something sufficiently, it causes nausea in me. Nothing like this happens with alcoholic drinks.
Dilution doesn’t change the taste of a drink, and alcohol doesn’t cause nausea …
And I’m the one that’s rationalizing a refuted position?
1)dilution weakens the taste (and the other effects like the choking protest), but it doesn’t change it to another taste; 2) I’m not talking about getting drunk, I’m talking about the effect at the moment of drinking it.
Would someone like to make a falsifiable claim about how a person is likely to react to alcohol over their first few instances of drinking it? If so, I’d be willing to be a guinea pig.
The only times I’ve had alcohol were over a decade ago, and involved either having communion at church or my father insisting that I take a sip of his beer. I’ve never experienced an alcohol buzz. I dislike being in the kinds of situations in which one would drink socially, but am curious about how alcohol might affect me separately from that. I do find the smell of wine and beer aversive (but not nauseating), which I understand might affect the outcome, but I’d be willing to try them anyway. (I’d been considering trying wine coolers, but, hey, it’s for science.)
Given that you don’t like the smell of beer and wine, you likely won’t like the taste at first either. But some people do like the taste even the first time, so this isn’t strong evidence for SilasBarta’s position.
You might like wine coolers which tend to be a little sweeter. Actually, one thing correct in Silas’s position is that many people like sweet drinks because they are sweet, not because of the alcohol, and they are sometimes unwilling to admit this for social reasons.
Sure, I’d love to make such a prediction, but those who disagree with me know all too well what the result will be and will try to rationalize away the predictable results of you trying alcohol … oops, too late.
I don’t think anyone disputes that people usually don’t like alcohol the first time they try it. I’m disputing that, after liking it, there’s a difference between this liking of alcohol and the liking of your apt example, milkshakes. The two likes are the same.
No, they’re not the same, because you have to go through a process to like alcohol, which would just the same cause you to like bat urine. You don’t have to do that for milkshakes.
After that process has happened, they’re the same.
Yes, once you use a process that will cause people to like ANYTHING, including bat urine, it will cause them to like alcohol.
If you look closely, that statement has no information content, and it’s equivalent to yours.
“Anything” is too broad. If you made drinking bat urine sufficiently high-status, or gave it some reward other than taste, then yes; otherwise, no.
EDIT: Taste in this case = “pleasure from first taste”
Good thing alcohol doesn’t have other rewards (like pleasant mental states) or impacts or your status.
Otherwise, the situations might be parallel!
You are bringing your own assumptions into it, as well, like that “anything” isn’t cyanide.
So make predictions about what will happen after I’ve had N drinks. Or what would happen after I had N drinks of near-beer, if it’s the psychological effect you’re concerned with and not just the social one.
I completely agree with you about wine tasting specifically. But there are those of us who actually like the taste of some alcoholic drinks, even without the psychological effects, signaling, or need to acquire the taste. It doesn’t look like your answers match up with that.
I made my main point in the other comment, and I don’t want to include these two comments together because I don’t want the other to be ignored, but health is an objective measure, whereas pleasure is not.
First of all, I think you’re ignoring that there are some practices that, despite making some people like an activity, will not make other people like the activity—i.e., that placebo will work on some people, but not other people, so to that extent, there is something marginally “real” (under your definition) there.
I understand what you mean very much; I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time thinking about it over the past decade. Cognitive dissonance seems like a weak trait when you notice it in someone else, either to change your values to dislike the inaccessible or the reverse, to change your values to like the accessible.
But why? I tend to like things I’m better at than most of the people I know, like math and arguing and pointing out other people’s cognitive dissonance. Why should I expect other people to be any different?
In the end, the “liking” part is really, like you pointed out, liking the taste of status more than the taste of alcohol. But I enjoy spicy food, despite not liking it originally, either. I didn’t like hip-hop, but I figured there must be something there that attracts so many people; now I like some. I didn’t like a bunch of popular TV shows, but I didn’t want to assume that all the ways I’m different from people who did like those TV shows were ways I was better; what if they were ways I was worse? So I watched a bunch of them. Most of them still suck, but I found I like House and Big Love, despite thinking beforehand only idiots could like those shows.
I agree with you to some extent—if I have to have someone telling me I’m cool for me to enjoy it, I don’t want to partake. But that’s not because it’s less “pure,” it’s because I’ve done activities like that before and it’s not fun not being in control of when I can enjoy myself.
I have been telling people for years that the difference between people who like alcohol and people who don’t is that the people who don’t didn’t have a peer group to pressure them to drink their first 5 beers. That’s true with me and with almost everyone I know (although there are some who claim they liked beer right away, and I even believe a few of them).
But now even when I’m alone, do I enjoy having a beer and relaxing? Yes, very much. Would I like beer if it weren’t for the alcohol’s effects of relaxing me? Probably not, no. But that doesn’t change that the alcohol has changed how much I enjoy the taste of beer, because now it actually tastes good. That doesn’t seem disingenuous to me. I don’t experience the enjoyment any less, so it’s hard for me to discredit it due to the fact that the way I got to that point was through trying to not look stupid to my friends when they gave me a beer for the first time.
Yes, I think that’s what my point comes down to: so you like beer after being pressured by friends to drink it for five years. Then, by simple force of habit, you come to like it—your tastes change.
But I say: so what? What does that tell me about beer? Like I keep saying, if you go through this (five years of drinking it with friends who pressure you to drink it) with any drink, you will end up “liking” it. So there’s nothing about the hops or the special microbrewery or the yeast or this or that. It’s completely arbitrary.
I would much prefer to drink something that actually tastes good. If I want to further enhance this with a group of friends, great. But stop telling me beer tastes good. Keeping up with habits you’ve developed in pleasant situations is what “tastes” good. The psychoactive effects of a socially-acceptable product “taste” good. Beer, however, does not taste good.
ETA: Similarly, Homer’s The Odyssey isn’t good. Rather, a bunch of people have a tradition of reading it that they pass on and get the next generation to perpetuate. But what the heck am I supposed to learn about good writing from that, other than:
1) Here are some references you can make that you can expect people to “get”
2) If you want to start a cult, here are some things you can do that will trick people into liking your holy texts.
It looks to me like you’re trying to curry the 2-place predicate “tastes good to X” into a 1-place predicate “tastes good”, without really specifying the X that you’re supplying as an argument. Surely X isn’t “everyone”. And it can’t just be “many/most people”, since you’ve attached other conditions (like “psychoactive taste changes don’t count”).
In my experience, most things taste different the second or third time around. The stomach and intestines are connected to the nervous system, ya know—you get direct neural feedback on the things you put in your body. If that feedback is negative, you might find that substance A isn’t quite so tasty the second time around. Does any modification of a taste count as a “refinement” in your eyes, rather than an arbitrary change?
Anecdote: I concluded long ago that coffee tasted like dirt, and I wanted no part of it. Once every few years, someone would say “oh, try this, it’s good coffee!”, and I’d try it, and it tasted like dirt. Then a couple years ago I was eating breakfast at a diner and decided to just choke down some free caffeine. It tasted like dirt, but it did the job. A few days later, I forced down another cup of dirtwater. The next day I felt a sudden, sharp craving for coffee. That third cup of coffee tasted vastly better than the first two. I think the mechanism is obvious enough.
But the drug-induced shift in my perception of coffee wasn’t as simple as “it used to taste bad, now it tastes good”. Previously, all coffee tasted the same to me. As soon as coffee stopped tasting like dirt, the differences between types of coffee became much more noticeable. I’m no connoisseur, but you’ll have a hard time convincing me that I prefer a French-pressed Sumatran blend to the drip coffee available at my job because of peer pressure.
There was a TED talk (I don’t recall which one) where a neuroscientist spoke about some fMRI research done on monkeys performing a task requiring dexterity in the hands and fingers. They found that the region of the monkey’s brain mapped to its relevant digits basically grew with practice. This “adaptive resolution” aspect of perception means if you restrict X to “tastes good the first time” in an attempt to filter out noise from status games, you’ll also throw away everything that can’t be easily perceived with the initial chunk of allocated brainspace.
To summarize, your version of “tastes good” appears to be an oversimplification. Our taste sense seems to be quite inherently adaptive. So I disagree that “there’s nothing about the hops or the special microbrewery or the yeast or this or that”. I think your perception of the subtler qualities of beer is probably just too low-res, because your initial reaction to the taste of alcohol is preventing your brain from allocating additional resources to flavor decoding.
Incidentally, chocolate is one of the foulest-tasting things I’ve had the misfortune of placing against my tongue. Dark, milk, cheap, fancy—it all tastes the same.
Heresy!
I hate a lot of chocolate, too! I can’t stand Hershey’s Kisses, chocolate cake, chocolate milk, M&Ms, or chocolate ice cream. I do like hot chocolate, chocolate chip cookies, Three Musketeers bars, and Nestle Crunch bars.
Okay, thanks for explaining all of that. It really sheds light on the dynamics at play here. My thoughts:
1) Even if what you’re saying is true, about the brain allocating more mass to a given activity the more you do it, giving a plausible mechanism for greater ability to distinguish coffees, that still doesn’t differentiate it from bat urine. We can expect the same thing would go on there. Once you’re accustomed to bat urine, you’ll be able to tell all the different kinds apart, you’ll have a newfound appreciation for its “taste”, etc., all because of your neural plasticity.
So it still comes back to my original question: given this strange path to a person’s judgment that they like wine/coffee/bat urine, what is the appropriate way to describe this kind of liking? Are we usefully carving conceptspace by putting this kind of liking with milkshakes, which most people like the first time, and all subsequent times? Is the liking-bat-urine a different phenomenal experience than liking-milkshakes?
2) Even though your account of the changing taste for coffee may be right, are you sure about the sensitivity to nuances? Have you given yourself blind taste tests for random beans? Keep in mind, that when scientific controls are in place, wine “experts” inevitably fail miserably to make the distinctions they claim are important.
It’s actually not that unexpected to dislike the office’s coffee in favor of your own. I’m still at the stage of not liking coffee unless it’s ultra-sweetened (frappucinos ftw), and even I can tell what’s bad coffee. Not necessarily the taste, as the fact that bad coffee, um, doubles as a laxative.
3) My taste in beer hasn’t changed despite drinking it for ten years. The best I can say about any beer is that it “doesn’t hurt that much going down”. (Guiness wins in this regard.) The best explanation seems to be that my “supertasting” ability makes me very sensitive to the alcohol, blurring out any other taste, and keeping me from adapting to the nuances. The problem, though, is that supertasters are estimated at 25% of the population. So why aren’t 25% of people voicing my opinion on alcohol? Why would they stay silent about hating it, while drinking it for social and psychoactive benefits?
I don’t think liking is inherently tied to differentiation. It seems more like shifting your focus—you’re perceiving fundamentally new taste data, some of which you may find pleasant. I doubt that becoming an expert bat urine taster would impart much love for the urine relative to doing the same for coffee or beer. If Seth Roberts is right, we enjoy the complex flavors of fermented stuff like beer because they’re markers for valuable biotic diversity. The same is probably not true of bat urine.
I wouldn’t call the things I’m sensitive to “nuances”—the difference in flavor between “Sumatran” and “other” beans I’ve tried seems pretty major. There are probably other similar beans that would be indistinguishable, my preferences on the subject are quasitransitive at best. I haven’t tested it, nor have I tested my ability to distinguish ale from lager.
Interesting, I’d never heard of supertasters before. I don’t see what the problem is here, though. You appear to be seeking a concept of “genuine” flavor, and you’ve ruled out psychologically adapted tastes. But that’s a bit tangent to the situation where someone starts out disliking beer and acquires a taste for it from psychoactive reinforcement. They still probably end up with higher-res perception of it than someone who hates the taste of it and drinks it anyway. Note the difference between “drinking for psychoactive effect” and “drinking because previous psychoactive effects led to a modified perception of flavor”. People in the latter category have no cause for complaint (except for alcoholics, of course).
If they’re really drinking it for social benefits, the motivation to stay silent is probably also social benefits.
I didn’t say it was. I accept that you also started liking the taste itself; I just claim that this would happen for anything, including bat urine, so I don’t put it in the same class of stuff that tastes good before significantly molding your mind to make it so.
Sounds like a despised “just-so” story to me. You can just as well find markers of biotic diversity in bat urine (at the very least, diabetic bat urine) that derives from the variety in their diet, and the different kinds of bats, etc.
I know. I was referring to your newfound “ability to distinguish differences to a higher degree of precision” and didn’t know a shorter term. Please don’t criticize someone’s terminology unless you offer an alternate, superior term that you would not object to. Like what I did in a different discussion over here in point 2.
Okay. Scientists have, though, and usually you can get away with swapping out “high quality” stuff for low quality stuff and people won’t notice. They will throw a status-driven hissy fit if they find out what you did, though.
So would you agree that my thesis is at least accurate for a portion of the population? (The thesis was, “People don’t really like the taste but use the supposed taste and other reasons as an excuse for getting high in a socially acceptable way and keeping it legal to do so.”)
True, what you said was
which I read as implying that differentiation causes “liking” (“inherently tied” was imprecise terminology on my part). What did you actually mean?
Uh, taste as an evolutionarily-shaped nutrition-detector isn’t exactly a novel just-so hypothesis. If your real objection is with the assertion of complex flavor preferences or the link between such flavors and biotic diversity, I don’t know what calling it a “just-so story” even means. You were probably looking for a slightly less general retaliate button.
Valuable biotic diversity. The kind of stuff that garners positive feedback from the tract.
I wasn’t “criticizing your terminology”, I was attempting to correct a perceived misunderstanding in progress. You used the word “nuance” and then went on to talk about double-blind taste tests, which taken together led me to believe that I hadn’t effectively communicated the scale of distinction I had in mind. Hence the comparison to ale and lager. I’m well-aware of wine snobs and their embarrassing track records.
Assuming that my terminological correction is some ineffectual, off-topic criticism of your choice of words is assuming I’m basically acting in bad faith. Not very productive.
Yes.
I was listing the differentiation, and the liking of taste, as two separate phenomena, with any possible causal relationship, not necessarily the differentiation causing the enjoyment.
Yes, we do have (what can be called) nutrition detectors, but none of them work anything like what would have to be present for the one you posited: 1) in the EEA, we didn’t normally taste the ingredients of beer, 2) 25% of the population is distracted by the taste of alcohol and unable to use the information, 3) the nutrition detectors we do have evoke pleasant responses in almost everyone, from a very young age (i.e. aren’t acquired tastes).
I call it a “just so story” because it doesn’t pass many obvious sanity checks.
None of the things in beer “garner positive feedback from the tract”. And knowledge of what fruits and meats the bats in the area are able to eat would definitely signal the diversity in the area. If you meant GI tract micoorganisms, beer came around way too late, and is way too dissimilar to other things we consume to have been adapted for as a gauge of useful diversity.
What is the brief appellation you believe I should have used to describe what I was referring to? If you don’t have one, you should have accepted the specificity/brevity tradeoff I made in trying to summarize what you just said, and responded to the substance of the point, saying what I got wrong there.
If you do have one, you just passed up your second opportunity to be helpful by telling it to me. What’s your goal here?
No, telling me what I did wrong without telling me what would have been right, is bad faith, because it leaves me in the position of having to get permission from you every time I want to briefly refer back to something you said.
Okay, thank you. I just wish I didn’t have to pull teeth to talk about these things.
“None of the things in beer “garner positive feedback from the tract”″.
Not true. One of the things I like about beer is that when I’m hungry, it tastes REALLY good. It tastes like I’m eating a meal. This doesn’t happen with wine, which is just a drink.
LOL! What’s funny is, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard this line of “reasoning”.
“Okay okay, high-carb substance X might not taste good, but it tastes REALLY good when you’re energy starved (in contrast to all those high-carb food/drinks that don’t taste really good in such a circumstance).”
I mention it because it tastes better than other high carb food and drinks in those circumstances. That’s a fact, at least regarding my taste.
And there’s really something wrong with your manner of argument, since you could say something similar about any reason why anyone would say anything ever tastes good. You might as well say you dislike the taste of milkshake, but just like the effects of fat and sugar on your body, or something like that.
[replying separately to this tortured meta sub-thread]
Look, it wasn’t clear to me at all that you were making such a trade-off. I wouldn’t have mentioned the word “nuance” at all if I thought you were you just abbreviating my intent. Misinterpretations are a dime a dozen in these sorts of conversations, no need to take a retransmit so personally.
To have a clear exchange of ideas. Do you suspect another?
Emphasis mine. You’re taking it personally. It could just as easily have been poor phrasing on my part. I’m more interested in ensuring that the thing you read is the thing I’m trying to write than I am in figuring who’s to “blame” for some terminological “error”.
Not sure what you mean here. In the EEA we could still probably taste the rough signature of a fermentation process.
Again you imply that supertasters are unable to get past their initial reaction to the taste of alcohol, despite the utter plausibility of psychoactive reinforcement leading to a modified sense of taste.
Source? My tastes changed slowly but continually as I aged. Is your assertion that none of the common shifts from childhood to adult food preferences are linked to nutritional content?
If the above ordered list constitutes your “obvious sanity checks”, then I question their adequacy. If you’re referring to some other sanity checks, I’d be interested in hearing them.
To clarify, I’m not actually advocating Roberts’ theory. I brought it up because I think it’s plausible, which is all that’s required to doubt the counterintuitive assertion that developing a taste for bat urine is akin to developing a taste for beer.
Came around way too late? Dietary adaptations can be pretty rapid (e.g., adult lactose tolerance). But I doubt your assertion that beer is too dissimilar to other things we consume—getting a message like “this is fermented, caloric, and not obviously toxic” from your tongue is probably good enough.
Then you’d have to show how it has selective power. What information is gained from the fermentation stage, and why would it shift our makeup so quickly?
Not one that just happens to line up with a convoluted mechanism that just happens to justify liking beer.
We change what we like, but we keep the category of sweet (detection of sugars). There is no scientific substantiation for a “fermentedness” category detector: just sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and the recent meaty one. That gives a serious presumption against this kind of mechanism.
Then I just have to show equal plausibility of the usefulness of bat urine, which I’ve done. Diabetic bat urine contains sugar, which in turn contains sweetness, which in turn contains information information about the plants in the area. This result can be extended to normal bat urine, in which the fruit content of the area will determine bat urine bitterness, which we would then “enjoy” drinking, just as people learn to “enjoy” beer’s bitterness.
And, as a bonus, urine was consumed for a sliver of our evolutionary history.
Sure, it’s convoluted and implausible, but good enough to keep consumption of bat urine nice and legal, which is really all it has to do.
Why would it need to be a quick shift?
Huh? In earlier comments you seemed to have no problem with the idea that people developed a taste for things that got them high, but now the idea is suspect because it supports an explanation for liking beer?
And there’s no need for a “fermentedness” category detector, any more than there’s a need for cones that selectively perceive yellow.
Ah yes, the “grand social conspiracy to ward off prohibition” hypothesis emerges again. I’d be interested in hearing more about how you think this is supposed to work.
A large fraction of the population is hugely enthusiastic about something, and acts to preserve it? It worked for chocolate—what makes you think alcohol inspires less enthusiasm?
Enthusiasm alone doesn’t solve coordination problems, especially when there’s no problem to be solved in the first place.
On retrospect, I would argue less “keep alcohol legal” than “keep alcohol available”.
It’s called umami.
You haven’t shown equal plausibility for your “bat urine” hypothesis as Roberts has for his “fermented food” hypothesis. Go ahead and scan his blog under the categories fermented food and umami hypothesis. (I don’t agree with everything Roberts has written on the subject.)
That said, I think it was an error for loqi to bring up Roberts’s ideas at all—when he talks about fermented food, he means things like yogourt, soy sauce, natto, miso, fish paste, and kombucha, not the products of alcoholic fermentation. (ETA: No, apparently he includes alcoholic fermentation.)
http://www.blog.sethroberts.net/2010/01/17/lindemans-lambic-framboise/
My mistake.
I think people usually either find a taste they like when they drink (sometimes mixing in sweet drinks), or drink just for the alcohol and grow to like the taste over time. I doubt many people claim to drink solely for the taste: I’ve never heard anyone say this, though people who enjoy the buzz of alcohol also say they like the taste.
Again, this is something that could make anything taste good—it’s no evidence of liking the alcoholic drink. It’s one of the very reasons I rolled my eyes at when people tried to convince me that I must actually like alcohol, because I like a certain drink that heavily dilutes the alcohol taste through sweetness.
I’ve certainly seen people put on that pretense, and, in any case, they certainly claim it’s a driving factor, if for no other reason than the vastly varying prices for the same amount of alcohol.
I do not particularly like the high of alcohol. However, I really like Belgian beer, and it has alcohol in it, sometimes large amounts, and it’s a side effect I am willing to handle for the taste! Unfortunately, that side effect does mean I am forced to limit myself to about 3 beers in one sitting.
I wonder if you have never drank sufficiently good beer. It doesn’t have to be that expensive even, super-high end beers are much cheaper than super-high end wine. $5-7 for a normal bottle, $30 for a bottle of the best beer in the world. http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/westvleteren-abt-12/4934/
If you’re ever in Pittsburgh, I’ll buy you a real beer at the Sharp Edge.
I also admit that your point is probably correct and I am something of an outlier—and it’s really just Belgian beer that I would drink despite the alcohol; most other beer and wine and liquor is nothing special.
Thanks for the offer, and your input.
Pay attention, everyone. This is what it looks like when you really like drinking something, rather than its effect on your mind:
When you start running into hard limits about how much of the stuff you can consume before deleterious effects on your body, and this is a downside to you, that definitely sounds like a serious enjoyment. (That’s where I am regarding ice cream and many other sweets.)
In contrast, when there are very narrow situations in which you enjoy its “taste”, and drink “just enough” to accomplish mild relaxation when you want to, um, mildly relax, well, then I start to get skeptical.
I think I understand. We’re talking about two different things.
You’re saying, if I understand correctly, that there’s a great deal of snobbery in alcohol drinking: people claim that expensive wines or liquors taste so much better, and this claim doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Outside of this snobbery, though, just in terms of friendly social drinking, almost everyone agrees that they drink because they enjoy the feeling, and the taste is just something they grew to like over time, or they mix it with something sweet to make it taste better.
Um, no, and that’s the problem. I have never been able to get people to admit that it’s just about the mental effects, and that they have to find ways to make themselves tolerate the awful taste. Not without a lot of teeth-pulling, and people telling me about all the wonderful arguments against this position.
Again, it’s the insistence that they like “this particular drink” because it’s “so good” that bothers me. No, it’s about getting high, and no one will talk about this.
I’m surprised by this experimental result. In my experience most people say that it’s about the mental effects as well as the taste. Just to be clear: over half the people you ask say that they don’t drink alcohol for the mental effects at all, and it’s solely about the taste?
I wonder if part of this is due to the way you’re asking. You use language like “tolerate the awful taste”, “suffer through”, and compare it to hot sauce and engine oil. Obviously you strongly dislike the taste of alcohol. Not everyone does though; while I drink primarily for the mental effects, I also enjoy and have acquired a taste for some different types of alcohol, and I like some combinations of flavors when having a beer with food.
So maybe you’re getting strong reactions in contrast to your extreme statements that alcohol tastes awful and no one could ever like the taste.
It’s more like this:
me: I think I’m strange. I don’t like alcoholic drinks. I mean, I like the effect on me, but not the taste, not the process of drinking it.
them: Yeah, that is strange. I mean, I like margaritas.
me: Oh really? What do you like about them?
them: Well, I like them when I go out dancing...
me: No, I mean, like, about the taste.
them: Well, I like those really frozen ones with lots of different fruit flavors.
me: So you like the taste of those margaritas? What is it about the taste?
them: Um, well, it helps me to relax. [Alternate: It’s kind of a social thing/social lubricant.]
me: *falls out of chair* Okay, so about the taste. Do you like the taste more than that of a milkshake?
them: Hm, that’s a good question, I’ve never even thought of that. No, I like the milkshake much better.
me: *loses hope in humanity*
What would happen if you asked someone this:
And they answered your question? Specifically, would one good response cause you to rethink your theory on the subject? How many responses would you need to be convinced?
I am not saying I have those responses. I am just curious.
It sounds like the person here is saying he drinks for the mental effects (“it helps me to relax”), and that he doesn’t mind the taste because it’s mixed with things he likes (“fruit flavors”). This seems like the answer I’d expect.
Whereas it seems like you absolutely despise the taste, most people who drink don’t mind it, and sometimes like it, especially when mixed with fruit or sweet tastes.
But they don’t like it, “especially when mixed with fruit or sweet tastes (and taste-bud numbing ice, but whatever)”. Rather, they like sweet, fruity, cold drinks, and still find them good, even if it is worsened with a little alcohol.
That, I think is the appropriate way to characterize it.. Again, remember my incessant point about baseline comparisons: if someone likes fruity sweetness, it’s going to make pretty much anything (that doesn’t clash) taste good. But so what? That doesn’t mean they like the stuff its mixed with. It just means they like that fruity sweetness, and their enjoyment may persist even if the drink is degraded with other, worse flavors.
What’s more, conversations like these (alarmingly typical) reveal that people aren’t even thinking about the distinction between liking a drink for its taste, and liking it because they like getting high—and nor are they interested in learning.
I’ve been watching this thread for a while, and as a frequent alcohol-drinker, I thought I would try to report my experience as honestly as I can manage:
Beer: In an absolute sense, I don’t like the taste. Since some beers taste less bad—or more interesting—than others, I will sometimes comment that a particular beer tastes “really good”. What I mean though, is that it tastes “really good” for a beer. I drink quite a lot of beer, because I usually prefer the slower, gentler, more controllable buzz to that of harder alcohol. I’ve heard plenty of women say they don’t like beer. In some circles, it’s considered unmanly for a man to say he doesn’t like beer, and I expect that’s why I hear it much less from men. In some situations, I take the praise of beer as shorthand for “I know we all don’t have much in common, nor any real reason beyond company for hanging out, so lets go through the motions of affirming our mutual love for something that is safe to affirm mutual love for.”
Wine: This is definitely all about the taste, but it’s not at all the same category of taste as sugar or a milkshake. This is all about the complexity of dozens of interacting flavors. It is a kaleidescope that you “see” with your tongue. It’s a taste experience by definition, but that doesn’t mean that it is anything like the tastiness of a milkshake. The thrill is in the richness of the patterns that exist in the taste. Importantly, I find that only certain wines at certain ages produce this effect to a worthwhile degree. Lousy wine tastes lousy. A really good cabernet franc, say, can be the kind of amazing that makes me bolt upright in my chair and go wide-eyed. Really. As far as the alcohol component, it is such an intrinsic part of the taste-orchestra that I, unfortunately, find it impossible to speculate on whether I’d still drink wine without it. I think I would still drink it if it did not produce a buzz, although there would be one less reason. I think I would still like swishing it around, even if I was only going to spit it out. Needless to say, I find it to be an extremely pleasant way to get buzzed.
Mixed drinks/Hard alcohol: As far as I’m concerned, these have always existed solely as a fast-track to getting buzzed or drunk. For me, they might as well be an IV drip. I, however, administer them in the normal way, because it is normal and practical. Also, sipping lets me roughly calibrate my dosage to match others, and the situation.
Bat urine: I don’t think this is a fair argument at all, because you cannot separate your disgust reaction from pure taste, in the experience of drinking something. Several bodily fluids have little/fairly neutral taste, but the experience of drinking it would still be disgusting.
I agree that most alcohol consumption is mainly about the buzz. I like different states of consciousness. The one induced by alcohol is not my favorite, but it’s one I can enjoy without having to sneak around or worry about prison, so I make do with the (somewhat personally disappointing) political freedoms I have. I do drink wine for the taste—it just isn’t the same kind of taste as anything else. It’s a sensory-overload experience that happens to be delivered by the tongue.
Isn’t it possible that a little bit of complex, astringent bitterness can actually make a sweet fruity drink more palatable? I wouldn’t drink a virgin margherita; I honestly believe the tequilla and triple sec make it taste better.
Hey, if that helps keep it legal and socially acceptable to get high … sure, why not?
It seems like this whole argument is motivated out of a wish to make it socially acceptable to say “I don’t like the taste of beer” by trying to paint everyone who disagrees as liars.
No, I think he simply hates the taste of alcohol so much that he can’t conceive that someone could honestly like it.
You need to read my history again, for the first time. I initially did believe that I was just weird in not liking alcohol, or that it would come with time. It’s the obvious, favored, simple hypothesis.
But I can only hold belief in it for so long until the shower of disconfirmatory evidence hits. When I look behind the veil and find out what it means for other people to like alcohol, and find that it matches up with what I consider not liking alcohol, well … if anything, I held on to the belief too long.
Did you notice that I said that I don’t match up with your criterion? Besides the fact that even that total list didn’t seem to show that a person necessarily didn’t like the taste of something.
You could at least modify your belief to “some people don’t like the taste of alcohol but claim that they do for such and such reasons...” and then it would become more accurate, since surely this is likely true of at least some people, while it is surely not true of all who claim to like it.
For example, an area where your position has some truth is that there are guys who basically dislike any type of alcohol except sweet drinks, and these they like only because of the sweetness, but they are unwilling to admit it because this is thought to be “girlish”. But at the same time, this is definitely untrue of many others.
I ask that you take serious note of the sympathy with which I’ve characterized these liars. I completely understand why they have to put on a show: anything that does to your mind what alcoholic drinks do, but doesn’t have wide-scale social support from respectable people, is going to get banned or otherwise given severe restrictions. Such a pretense doesn’t strike me as so wrong here.
What bothers me is the widespread refusal to acknowledge this, even in private.
I think you’re missing a significant factor.
Many people don’t drink alcohol primarily for the mental effects. Rather, there is a strong status penalty to drinking non-alcoholic beverages. Most non-alcoholic beverages are strongly associated with children, at least in the afternoon (juice and milk are OK at breakfast, not at dinner). Adults can’t order them without sending an undesirable signal about their maturity.
Among the acceptable drinks, you’re left with other “acquired tastes” (coffee and tea) or drinks that often give other low status signals (water alone is cheap, soft drinks are lower-class).
Once you’ve established that it’s a status issue, the refusal to admit it is understandable, since open concern for status is generally a low-status trait. I don’t agree with all of Robin Hanson’s status explanations, but it makes sense here.
The mind-altering effects play into it as well. Even then, there are important signaling effects in play (Robin put up a post on that a bit ago). And ignoring taste totally is a mistake. Even if I might prefer a milkshake to an Irish creme, I definitely prefer an Irish creme to Everclear.
Btw, I think your milkshake comparison needs to be between equal caloric portions.
I’d prefer 600 calories of milkshake to 600 calories of beer. But I would rather have one beer than one milkshake. For certain values of beer, beer is more delicious than milkshake per calorie.
Why could per-calorie be the relevant metric? And why would a metric requiring you to consume the full five beers be helpful?
I’m confused. Are you saying that alcohol doesn’t have wide-scale social support from respectable people? What society are we talking about?
I would guess that of the adult population in the US who drinks, at least 75% drink primarily for the mental effects and would have no problem saying so.
Do you have trouble reading a full clause?
Understand now? If alcohol didn’t have the social support it does, it would be Just Another Mind Altering Substance that would be banned, or that you’d need a prescription for.
Please, finish sentences before responding to them
SilasBarta, I too am puzzled at why Blueberry misunderstood you, but your response was needlessly rude.
Would you say it was more or less rude than clipping a sentence in two and responding to one that misrepresented what I said?
Do any of you intend to criticize/mod down Blueberry for his/her rudeness, or do you just reserve your rebukes for the diligent?
I submit that
a) you’re not really curious, b) expect any answer to come back negative, and c) aren’t interested in arguing whether he can read a full clause anyway.
I find this difficult to swallow. Alcohol prohibition was a widely acknowledged disaster (or does this collective memory also count as “social support”?). The “Joe Sixpacks” of the nation aren’t crooning over Miller’s exquisite blend of hops, but they’d be up in arms if you tried to take it away.
And drug policy (at least in the US) isn’t particularly consistent—if you don’t believe me, feel free to conduct your own experiment with some high-potency salvia extract.
I doubt most people are worried even subconsciously about the reintroduction of prohibition. Why postulate a coordinated social response to such a non-threat?
Yes it was a disaster—because of alcohol’s widespread social support, that led to the black market, inability to enforce, etc.
Hence my statement
You also said:
There are many measures short of prohibition that restrict alcohol. In trying to impose them, as society imposes restrictions on mind-altering substances, legislatures butt up against the social support for alcohol. Retaining this support is necessary for preventing these (otherwise reasonable) restrictions on alcohol.
Salvia is both new and little known in comparison to marijuana, LSD, cocaine, heroin, meth, etc.
This is getting perilously close to politics, but the difference with alcohol is the great history of human use. Alcohol was one of the first drugs regularly consumed by humans. A lot of culture has developed around that. Prohibition failed because it tried to outlaw the culture. Cannabis and psychedelics were also used by pre-modern humans, but the government could outlaw the other drugs without a people’s revolt because the average person didn’t use cannabis and psychedelics. The average person did and does use alcohol.
Of note, Guinness has a lower alcohol content than most beer.
More anecdotal evidence: Over 1⁄4 of the people I know do not drink alcohol in any form. The society I am from is probably atypical in this regard.
I would think training yourself to like chocolate would be a lot easier than training yourself to like coffee.
Manipulating coffee into a good tasting form isn’t too hard; just add a lot of sugar and dilute it with enough milk, and it’ll probably taste pretty good even if you think black coffee tastes like dirt. (And then, if you want, you can reduce the amount of milk and sugar over time.)
I like the taste of a particular beer and came to that conclusion after having about 4 beers before it in my lifetime. Not 4 servings of that particular beer, but 4 servings total. I understand acquired taste and claim that this does not qualify for that label. I liked it. I though it tasted good.
I assume you are not saying, “beer always tastes bad for everyone until they get conditioned by society.” That is what it sounds like to me, however. Is beer just an example for the sake of convenience?
Is it plausible that it is good? Or has that scenario been completely rejected from your worldview? I haven’t read it, personally, so I really have no idea if it is or isn’t.
There are adaptations of The Odyssey that are pretty fun to read. I agree that direct translations tend to have issues, though; thousands of years of cultural change, the loss of lyrical elements through translation, the change in medium from oral recitation to print, and many other factors I can’t think of at the moment all make the story much less impressive than it must have been back in ancient times.
Is it fair to say that you are looking for a way to predict “good” art before it enters the cultural status stream?
Not in the sense that I want to predict the next big thing.
What I’m looking for is, what portion is due to actual merit of the artwork, that people would appreciate even in the absence of others pressuring them to like it, or the signaling effects of displaying it to others?
I have often focused on scenarios where you can get a judgment before cultural effects interfere, but these aren’t strictly necessary. Like with the placebo example I keep giving, there are ways to see what is due to some effect that will make anything look good, and what effect is due to the actual merit. The hoaxes that others have referenced are good examples of this.
Does that answer your question?
Yes, this does answer my question.
The followup question: How useful is being able to identify “bad” art? Is it a step toward the same direction of identifying merit?
(Good and bad as I am using it means value from actual merit and ignores all peer pressure or signaling effects.)
Very useful: in the future, we want to have machines that can make the same (peer-pressure-free) art classifications that humans would, so they can pop out art themselves. Bad art is nearly as useful as good art in helping to train such a machine and identify the algorithms humans use to make these judgments.
But when the field of art has been corrupted to the point where it’s just a pure status game, there is no such classifier that can be learned. The only machine you’re going to be making is one that looks human, and hobnobs its way up the social ladder so that it can learn what the elites think, and render judgments in that way.
(I made the same critique about some Japanese researchers’ quixotic attempt to build a machine that determines how much humans will like a given wine, based on chemical analysis. Hey guys—it ain’t the chemical composition of a wine that makes people like it!)
Cool. Yeah, I pretty much agree with everything here and don’t have anything to add. I think this comment nails the subject on the head.
My point is that it doesn’t matter if it’s about signaling or not. Quests for status pervade every aspect of human life and are inescapable. These people believe what they believe and get upset when you bring it up for the same reason that you will object if I said you’re only interested in pointing out their status-questing for your own status-questing. “I don’t care about status” is everyone’s conceit.
EDIT: Just to expand on this a little bit—I’m saying that the desire to point out their cognitive dissonance is motivated by status, as well, and that further, neither of these is worse than the other when rating by sincerity or honesty.
Yes, and the placebo effect in cures is inescapable. But there’s still a part of the cure that is due to genuine biochemical effects from the medicine rather than the belief that it will work.
Likewise, I want to know the portion of art—and alcohol—that is due to more than just those things that could rook anyone into liking them. If, as it seems, in many cases, there is no such portion—if it’s all about being conditioned to like it in a way that could work for bat urine—then I don’t consider those things good, and I wish people would stop putting on the pretense that they are.
Science passes this test with flying colors: no amount of phony, meaningless papers by status jockeying scientists and engineers is going to get an airplane off the ground (without ripping apart) or an extremely powerful bomb to go off. The buck stops somewhere. Where does the art buck stop? Where does the drink quality buck stop?
Yes, that would explain why someone’s won’t say to my face the real reasons they drink. But in an online discussion with 90% anonymous handles: what’s holding them back?
That may be a part of it. But read the link thomblake gave to my earlier thread: I was experiencing really weird data. People seemed to be experiencing the same internal state as me, but using different labels for it.
The buck stops with you, because art isn’t a competition. Maybe it is for the artists, but not from your end—it’s just what you enjoy.
I have a copy of a painting hanging in my living room that I won’t name here, but it’s very popular and famous (and therefore kind of stupid to have hanging in my living room, because it doesn’t really show off my taste as refined). But I get a lot out of it. I love looking at it.
If an art student came in and wanted to try to condescend to me about my taste in art, what could I do? I’d look at him and say, “This painting does for me what art is supposed to do for people. I don’t have the time or energy to devote to refining my taste. I admit your taste in art is more refined and you might get more out of a Picasso than I do, because I don’t get much.”
If he still wants to look down his nose at me, who gives a shit? Get out of my house, right? But I think the true art-lover will say, “I’m glad you experience something that’s so meaningful to me, even if your taste is blunter and cruder than mine.”
I think this is analogous to if the art student came to me and said, “I never realized how cool the Pythagorean theorem is before. It’s amazing.” Do I look at him and say, “Wow, you’re an idiot”? I would hope not; I would hope to think to myself, “Well, it’s a start,” and say, “Right?!”
ETA: I’d be calling him an idiot because he’s only getting it now, and not back when he learned it for the first time in high school and I realized how cool it was.
I’m sorry, but that’s a very naive view of “how it works”. The elite art cadre certainly promotes the belief that there’s a lot more to art than what you or I personally like. They’re the ones that influence, by their status, what students will be indoctrinated in, and what artworks they will be expected to deem good, even as construction workers mistake the “good” stuff for trash. (This has happened before.) Even as the “art” in front of public buildings, under the full endorsement of the art elite, is a blight on the landscape.
If it were just a matter of “enjoy what you like”, I’d have the same view as you do. But there is significant money spent indoctrinating students in one view of art—which unlike science, lacks a stopping-buck. There is the pretense that you have to enjoy Shakespeare, or the latest splotches on a canvas, to “truly” appreciate art. And as long as they promote their priesthood that decides which art is blessed, and gets the huge grants for museums to “study” and promote it, even as they cant substantiate their opinions … well, then I have a problem.
But why do those things bother you, except in that you don’t like being told you’re low status unless you jump through certain hoops?
Do I really need to explain why it’s bad for people to be wealthy and high status depsite never having produced anything of value, and spend all their time perpetuating what is essentially an information cascade?
Quite a judgment there, “nothing of value”! Because people have to be trained to appreciate it, it’s of no value?
It’s not just the fact that people have to be trained. After all, people must be trained in order to read or use a computer.
The problem is that there’s no clear standard for what counts as successful training. You can check for whether someone can read (at a given level) using tests that everyone will agree about for the results. How do you know when someone’s gotten the right “art appreciation training”? “Oh, well, you see, you have to join our club, and hand around only our people for years and years, and then we still get fooled by monkeys …”
How do you know there’s no clear standard? You’re not an artist.
Falsifiability, basically. Or lack thereof.
Well, my first hint was when the work of a monkey was mistaken for that of an award-winning artist...
I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on this one. Why shouldn’t I?
Arts funding with tax dollars is one particularly direct example.
“But in an online discussion with 90% anonymous handles: what’s holding them back?”
Once again, this is simply very strong evidence that you are wrong. The reason people are insistent is because they happen to know what they like.
With, in the absence of anything better, bucks.
Well, there’s always the blind taste tests where people of various degrees of drink quality naivety rank drinks. Which reliably produce a negative correlation with the elite feedback loop!