Regarding the wine experts: if I understood correctly their recognition of the same wine later is not impaired by their verbal description of it’s taste. But I wonder how accurate their description is, are there even the right words to describe the taste of a wine? I suspect that they just have build up some standard associations of what word to attribute to what taste and then just regurgitate them. If you trained this a lot you can probably do it on autopilot and therefore don’t have to really think, therefore your taste memory is not impaired. That would be my ad-hoc explanation. What do you think?
PS: the “doing without thinking” part would be in contrast to non-experts who would have to deliberately reason and look for the correct words to describe the taste.
I mean, I don’t know if “woody” or “dry” are the right words, in terms of whether they invoke the “correct” metaphors. But, the point is that if you have vocabulary that works, it can allow you to verbalize without undermining your underlying ability to recognize the wine.
I think the training the with vocabulary actually augments verbally mediated recall, not that it turns off the verbal center, but I’m not sure the vehicle by which it works.
I think most of the wine experts who work on their verbal ability to describe wines are wine reviewers who read other people’s wine reviews. I would guess that that means they develop a common vocabulary. In that sense, I’d presume that they’d be almost as good at recognizing a wine from another expert’s description as their own. Or at least that’s what I’d want to verify in order to see if they were describing something that’s in the wine rather than some idiosyncratic feature that’s salient to one but unnoticed by others.
I think the implications for rationalists who want to train their verbal abilities are obvious, but I’ll say it anyway. If you want to train your verbal abilities so what you say about rationality doesn’t cloud your non-verbal understanding, you have to write about rationality and read what others write about it, and do your best to see that you’re talking about the same thing.
Regarding the wine experts: if I understood correctly their recognition of the same wine later is not impaired by their verbal description of it’s taste. But I wonder how accurate their description is, are there even the right words to describe the taste of a wine? I suspect that they just have build up some standard associations of what word to attribute to what taste and then just regurgitate them. If you trained this a lot you can probably do it on autopilot and therefore don’t have to really think, therefore your taste memory is not impaired. That would be my ad-hoc explanation. What do you think?
PS: the “doing without thinking” part would be in contrast to non-experts who would have to deliberately reason and look for the correct words to describe the taste.
I mean, I don’t know if “woody” or “dry” are the right words, in terms of whether they invoke the “correct” metaphors. But, the point is that if you have vocabulary that works, it can allow you to verbalize without undermining your underlying ability to recognize the wine.
I think the training the with vocabulary actually augments verbally mediated recall, not that it turns off the verbal center, but I’m not sure the vehicle by which it works.
I think most of the wine experts who work on their verbal ability to describe wines are wine reviewers who read other people’s wine reviews. I would guess that that means they develop a common vocabulary. In that sense, I’d presume that they’d be almost as good at recognizing a wine from another expert’s description as their own. Or at least that’s what I’d want to verify in order to see if they were describing something that’s in the wine rather than some idiosyncratic feature that’s salient to one but unnoticed by others.
I think the implications for rationalists who want to train their verbal abilities are obvious, but I’ll say it anyway. If you want to train your verbal abilities so what you say about rationality doesn’t cloud your non-verbal understanding, you have to write about rationality and read what others write about it, and do your best to see that you’re talking about the same thing.