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Absolute denial for atheists
This article is a deliberate meta-troll. To be successful I need your trolling cooperation. Now hear me out.
In The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You Eliezer talks about asognostics, who have one of their arm paralyzed, and what's most interesting are in absolute denial of this - in spite of overwhelming evidence that their arm is paralyzed they will just come with new and new rationalizations proving it's not.
Doesn't it sound like someone else we know? Yes, religious people! In spite of heaps of empirical evidence against existence of their particular flavour of the supernatural, internal inconsistency of their beliefs, and perfectly plausible alternative explanations being well known, something between 90% and 98% of humans believe in the supernatural world, and is in a state of absolute denial not too dissimilar to one of asognostics. Perhaps as many as billions of people in history have even been willing to die for their absurd beliefs.
We are mostly atheists here - we happen not to share this particular delusion. But please consider an outside view for a moment - how likely is it that unlike almost everyone else we don't have any other such delusions, for which we're in absolute denial of truth in spite of mounting heaps of evidence?
If the delusion is of the kind that all of us share it, we won't be able to find it without building an AI. We might have some of those - it's not too unlikely as we're a small and self-selected group.
What I want you to do is try to trigger absolute denial macro in your fellow rationalists! Is there anything that you consider proven beyond any possibility of doubt by both empirical evidence and pure logic, and yet saying it triggers automatic stream of rationalizations in other people? Yes, I pretty much ask you to troll, but it's a good kind of trolling, and I cannot think of any other way to find our delusions.
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Comments (571)
Eh, what the heck. Pretty sure I have one, even if I'm not sure whether saying it helps in any way.
"Vegetarianism is morally required. Trivially so. Producing meat involves large amounts of harm, and we would recognize that in most other situations. Worse still, it is actually quite easy and safe for everyone in most cultures."
[Regardless of the truth of this, I have definitely seen people's ADM triggered by it. It's kind of scary, actually.]
ETA: Oh, and slavery - you know the type I mean - seems likeit was a very localized ADM-creator. But I expect any LW-ers who are in favor it are such for ... other reasons.
I'd expect that if you ask a lot of people to post things that are true but which others deny for spurious reasons, you'd get the occasional thing which is true and denied for spurious reasons, and a whole lot of things which are believed with utter certainly and sincerity by that one person and are just wrong.
In other words, any idea listed here, including vegetarianism, is one which we ought to be skeptical of just by virtue of it being listed here. It's a simple Bayseian update on the probability that any given idea is right, given that this thread will predominantly be used to post wrong ideas.
META: How should I vote claims that I think are true but I don't think would trigger absolute denial macros in that many atheists?
As elucidated by Judith Rich Harris in The Nurture Assumption and Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate, and completely contrary to our current cultural fad of attributing all neurosis to the failure of parents to properly nurture their children, parenting has close to zero effect on how children turn out. How our peers interact with us has a far greater impact on personality development than whatever our parents do or don't do, whether they abuse us, slather us with affection every day, ignore us, constantly berate us, constantly tell us we are wonderful, et cetera.
Does this really count as our current culture? As an example, autism was being blamed on parenting style in 1950 but that blame has been successfully opposed by parent lobbies, to the point where I don't think it's the sort of thing that can be mentioned on public television without career damage. (It also appears that there may be some justification for the claim that parenting style causes or exacerbates autism, but that's not the sort of question people are willing to pay for the answer for.)
Isn't that trivially obvious for this culture, given that parents tend to spend very little time with their children? In the relevant studies, do they control for the massive penalties incurred by the default mode of parenting, or examine cases where 'peers' doesn't mean a bunch of unsocialized children in an institutional setting?
Wow. Well I see that my comment has been downvoted out of existence, which I'm pretty sure means that it is a perfect example of that the original post was looking for. FWIW, people hating on this would do well to at least LOOK at the books to which I linked in my comment. Harris' book in particular is beautifully and rigorously argued, and very useful. The chapter in Pinker is a nice encapsulation.
As I'm seeing it right after you made this comment, your comment has been downvoted to -1. That's certainly not "out of existence", nor even worth commenting on. On net, one out of the myriad readers here didn't think your comment was high-quality - wowzers.
No, I'm pretty sure PTSD from parental abuse is a real phenomenon.
Artificial Intelligence is impossible.
Everyone currently alive is going to die.
Humans are not more valuable or significant than other species on Earth. We have simply adapted our definition of success to contain the things we do anyway.
X-Rationalism is a signaling behavior by awkward, socially isolated nerds who've been raised by a diet of bad science fiction to think they're special. The reason why rationalists aren't ruling the world is because 'rationalism' consists of nothing but reading the works of smarter people, nodding sagely, and then stealing their vocabulary wholesale.
Shakespeare isn't the greatest writer ever.
Granted, it's likely he may have been innovative back then, and he may have left a trace on society. So what? The guy picked low-hanging fruits.
Furthermore, I find it difficult to believe no one ever did better since then, especially if considering all cultures and writers, in a span of 400 years. Especially since people's taste in literature and stories vary.
Revering Shakespeare seems like a cached thought and an applause light more than anything. It's like saying the Bible is the greatest book ever written. Both could only become so successful because of the appalling lack of any serious competition.
So, if "greatest" is defined by trace on society...
I agree there's the danger of a cached thought here, but I'm curious what experiment would differentiate between someone thinking Shakespeare is the greatest writer because they've been primed to do so and someone thinking that because Shakespeare was the greatest writer they've read.
For an experiment you could actually pull off without raising people in isolation from the rest of society, I'd take advantage of the fact that the average person doesn't actually know most of the works Shakespeare wrote, and separate out a control and experiment group where the control group reads and gives a rating of their perception of the literary quality of several works of short fiction, including some of Shakespeare's lesser known works, properly attributed, and the experiment group reads and rates the same stories with the works improperly attributed, crediting some nobody writer with a plausible renaissance-sounding name with Shakespeare's works.
Arguably, Shakespeare's primary contribution is in his best-known works, not his lesser-known works. Comparing Shakespeare's second-best to Jonson's second-best seems like a poor way to determine which is better- compare The Alchemist against A Midsummer Night's Dream. Similarly, comparing Ibsen and Shakespeare is a tough problem- in some sense, Ibsen is noteworthy only because his style was so different from Shakespeare's. As EE43026F points out, tastes vary- and there's no taste that seems like the natural judge for "greatest." Taking a random sample of humans alive today and having them decide which is better by majority vote seems like a poor judge, as is taking a random sample of theatre affectionados and having them decide by consensus.
(I am curious, though, how people in the developing world would respond to, say, Shakespeare plays vs. Ibsen plays vs. Hansberry plays. Does Shakespeare win points for adapting so readily to Japan?)
Everything adapts readily to Japan. It's what the culture is built on.
I'm interested. Just how is Japanese culture built on that?
Here is a quick gloss, in broad brush strokes (with a mixed metaphor or two thrown in for good measure). The Japanese have been smoothly appropriating and adopting parts of other cultures since at least the beginning of their recorded history. Their recorded history, of course, began when they adopted Chinese writing.
According to my Grand Theory of Japan, Japan is notable for always seeing itself how it is reflected in the eyes of others (a trait that is visible at all levels of abstraction, from culture to individual). Its name, in its own language, can be interpreted "land to the East" - it was given by the Chinese and happily adopted by the Japanese (in part because it could also be interpreted as "originating from the sun" and that tied in nicely with the Amaterasu (sun goddess) creation myth). Early Japanese people were very concerned with catching up to the level of civilization of China.
When Western powers arrived and started colonizing China, Japan quickly realized it had a new target and started emulating Britain and Germany. Huge changes to the organization of society and social customs swept through Japan with relatively little resistance. First Japan thought they'd earn the respect of the West by colonizing China, since that seemed to be what all the cool kids were doing. When that didn't quite work, they fought (and won) a war against Russia. Soon after, they tried to create an empire in the Pacific, and it would have worked if it weren't for the new economic powerhouse that was the US.
So Japan turned to emulating the US, changing its way of life once again to build an economic power out of toothpicks and rubber bands (billions of them, subsidized by the US). The constitution, which was practically handed to Japan by the occupying US, was soon held to a regard similar to that of the US towards our own constitution.
History lessons aside, you can see the signs of this tendency/attitude everywhere in Japan. The language is about half loan words from European languages, mostly English. Every sort of holiday is celebrated - even though Japan is not historically Christian [1] and most Japanese don't identify as Christians, Japanese people widely celebrate such holidays as Christmas and St. Valentine's Day.
[1]: Just a few centuries ago, all of the Christians were rounded up and crucified. The proffered reason being, Christianity is exclusive and so goes against social harmony. Later, they encountered Protestant Christianity via the Dutch and were happier about that - the Meiji Restoration guaranteed freedom of religion (aside from a brief hiccup), and as a consequence many Japanese attend religious events from Buddhist, Shinto, and Christian traditions (and possibly others), often without really getting why that would ever seem weird.
I don't dispute most of this seriously (and am aware I am responding to an old post, so I don't mind if you don't respond) but how does the seclusion period, where they tried to severely limit contact with the west for a few hundred years, fit into your thinking on the subject?
One groups reaction to Hamlet.
Huh.
I wonder if their judgement of quality was a coincidence? It seems odd that they would judge it a good story, while reinterpreting the plot ... well, not all that comprehensively - not a lot of meaning gets changed...
Anyway, it might be interesting to see if their judgement of story-quality is roughly randomized across Western literature, or if they remain parallel even when interpretations differ.
Not saying I would have done better in the moment, but the author's utter refusal to adapt to different lore and cultural expectations really irked me. Just say it was how the omen got interpreted rather than spoken words!
Something like this is going on when we read Platonic dialogues.
In one of my anthropology classes, this was covered, but we didn't get a copy of the whole piece. Thanks.
This is awesome.
Seconded. I don't think you'll get too much disagreement in this community, interestingly enough. We're all neophiles. But say "modern writers are better than Shakespeare" to most English speakers and you won't even get an absolute denial macro, you'll get something more like <TYPE ERROR>, as though you'd claimed that apple > 6.
Well, I'd disagree. When I hear "greatest writer ever," literary merit is certainly a factor, but I also think of things associated with the "greatness" side of the phrase, like impact on culture, fame, and innovation. But I upvoted the post because I think there's a good point about this being such received wisdom.
one sometimes hears someone say "you only use 10% of your brain." if you tell them this isn't true, you often get a stream of variations of this statement ("it's 10% of your potential...") instead of a simple acknowledgment that maybe they were told wrong.
This is more of a social status thing. Being contradicted and quickly agreeing with the person who contradicted you leads to a loss of social status that people try to avoid. A good way to dodge this barrier is to mention that it's a common misconception, talk about how wide-spread it is, and why it isn't true (evolution isn't THAT incompetent), then ask where they heard it. That lets them take the assertion back without much loss of status.
This is completely the wrong way to go about finding our absolute denial macros. It is clearly not the advice we would offer to any other group.
We would not tell others to make up things they think are obviously true and see if any others in the group are irrational. If anything that's a recipe for cementing groupthink.
We would advise others to go outside the group, examine the evidence as directly as possible, and to study, basic logic, science, and current scientific knowledge.
Well, what if it is too hard?
Imagine that you knew for a fact, that for any person in a community whose beliefs you were poised to challenge, it would feel too dangerous, too boring, too uncomfortable or awkward to actually go outside and closely observe the territory which they have every reason (with the sole exception of your assurance) to model as utterly uninteresting. And yet imagine (it's a bit of a stretch, I know, but please play along for the sake of this exercise) that you care for them enough to try and help them discover truth, or maybe use them to improve your map by observing their struggle. How would you go about making them face the contradiction?
The earth's climate has gone through many large changes in the past and it is natural for it to continue to do so in the future and there is no reason these changes should be for the benefit of the human species.
By "should", do you mean "will" or maybe "should be expected to be", or do you really mean "should"?
There is no rational argument against quantum suicide and the truth of it easily tested. The longer you live without knowing about quantum suicide, the less optimal your life will turn out. At the same time, you cannot look to anyone else's success as social proof for you to do it, you have to be the first.
I believe personal identity is an illusion. Given that, quantum suicide, as it is normally given, clearly wouldn't work. You could do something similar by ending the universe if it's suboptimal, and getting something good by the anthropic principle, but you have to take into account that there's a lot of observer-moment-probability-density before it starts branching and you start destroying it, so you have to take that into account.
Aside from the nice rational argument "I assign large negative utility to dying, and the expected chance of dying if I blow myself up is very high, so I assign negative expected utility to blowing myself up." Utility functions are over the state of the world.
wouldn't the fact that you would indirectly observe the spin by the effect of the gun, collapse the probability wave?
Under the Everett interpretation that's accepted by the majority of LW, there's no such thing as collapse. Here's an index of LW posts dealing with the topic.
Your question does have a valid rephrasing without the word "collapse", and the answer is kinda yes, you can't rule out the possibility of the gun firing. Quantum immortality is only the (controversial) idea that your consciousness cannot disappear completely, but you still end up horribly disfigured or brain-damaged with higher probability than get out unharmed.
If anything like Robin's Mangled Worlds theory is true, quantum suicide would be a bad idea. You would end up living only in worlds of small measure that get mangled by worlds with larger measure in which you are dead.
If you think you're going to have a net positive impact on the world, it makes sense to be present in all the Everett branches you can.
Especially if you consider your own alive-and-well presence a positive property of the world.
I don't know if this is a common counter-argument or not, but you have to be very careful with your suicide, so that the next most likely outcome is not to give you horrible permanent injuries. It seems to me that if the whole multi-universe theory is correct, then at the end of your life, the next most likely outcome to death is another painful last gasp. And another. And so forth..
Also, many people include the happiness of others in their utility function and a quantum suicide would do harm to your friends and family.
If you have worked out the suicide correctly, you should also make bets that you're going to survive. If you lose, you've lost nothing, and if quantum suicide works then you come out richer.
This idea feel a lot like manifesting/affirmations to me.
That doesn't require quantum suicide. It's a good idea regardless.
Unless, of course, you care more about your next of kin having the money than you, but in that case, why are you waiting until you die to give it away?
Does anyone know where they do that? The reverse (life insurance) seems oddly more common.
If you read this site's definition of Epistemic Rationality, logically in order to achieve it you must pay attention to the reality which your map is intended to resemble. Meanwhile, there is ample research indicating that paying attention to people is a hugely powerful social tool for making friends, which translates to increasing the likelihood of finding, entering into, and maintaining romantic relationships (not to mention that paying attention to your significant others may be of some benefit too).
So perhaps the question isn't what should a rationalist be doing if their social / love life isn't so good, but rather are you really pursuing rationality effectively if you haven't seen some of these improvements as a matter of course?
Your rationality is just fine. You're just ugly.
(Now watch yourself go "No I'm not!" "Society's standards are out of whack!" "The opposite gender can't see my true beauty!")
I think I've got a pretty realistic view of my own attractiveness (probably an average rating on the scales of those around me of about a 6.5, but with a lot of variance, thank god).
I'm thinking of someone I work with, who is quite definitely less good looking than just "plain". Aesthetically awful. However, she dresses and does her makeup immaculately, and then projects through personality. And this seems to work for attraction.
And a short fat guy who is brilliantly witty and perceptive and dresses well will never be short of a girlfriend.
MendelSchmiedekamp's message is one of hope: this stuff is reducible and many have reduced it before, so get learning.
As a matter of fact, I am. I've done enough research on facial structure and body type to recognize subtleties that most people will miss consciously. Although I do have nice skin. But that comes from keeping hydrated and away from major sun damage, which may have something to do with rationality.
And, here's the interesting part, I have found major benefits by being rational, in exactly the way I'm describing.
On the other hand, if you want to treat other people as solved systems, and stop worrying about them, I suspect you are out of luck.
I suppose it was only a matter of time before less wrong found the "fnords". Although at moment we seem to be obsessed with the silly or superficial ones. There is an art, parallel to the core art of rationality, in learning to see the assumptions and deceptions we build up in order to function, the accretion of simplifications and half-answers which become unchallenged beliefs so basic that we forget we even believe them.
And as the saying goes once you see the fnords, you see them everywhere.
And there are so many to see, under a thin coat of fear or denial, an idea or a correction lies ready to be revealed. These are cheap, although filled with the thrill of danger, because they frighten and inspire in equal measure.
But deep underneath all that, are the big ones, looming, twisting things which have tunneled their way through our knowledge and practices. These are the ones you need to ignore because they don't just frighten or require accepting what others deny, they mean functionally shifting your entire reference frame. It is as though language itself conspires to make these deeply embedded assumptions and delusions into something inexpressible, weird at best, madness at worse.
If you search patiently and carefully enough you can start to find them. You can even catalog or map them, seeing how they unfold into each other. But that doesn't mean you've figured out how the express them. How do you show them in a way that provides nearly as much engagement as a stream of rationalizations? That's something I'm still working on.
What's an example? [How about one small one and one big one?]
There are limits to the degree to which fnords can be discussed with others. Without doing the hard work necessary to perceive them, others cannot receive benefit from having them pointed out to them - and that can even be harmful, as our mental immune systems will construct defensive rationalizations to protect fnords brought to our attention that we're not strong enough to abolish.
You probably shouldn't drive. It's dangerous, expensive, and should be left to professionals. Take the bus or ride a bike.
More widely, we should support policies that make individual car use prohibitively expensive, but public transit easy and cheap. Generally the only cars on the road should be service related (Ambulances, Fire, Police, Utilities,Buses, Delivery/shipping trucks, Taxi's, Limo's etc.)
This would save lots of money and energy, and tens of thousands of lives per year.
Try hundreds of thousands per year from just accidents, before even counting health benefits of reduced emissions and smog saving more lives.
I'd agree with all of that, except for the "ride a bike" part. If you think piloting a car in city traffic is dangerous, think about piloting a completely unprotected, human-powered device with a very narrow silhouette.
With proper bike-friendly infrastructure, it's far safer. Don't think of "riding alongside car traffic" - instead think of what Europe does with entirely separate bike "roads" separated from the car-traffic by median strips.
Where did you get the impression that European countries do this on a large enough scale to matter*? There are separate bike roads in some cities, but they tend to end abruptly and lead straight into traffic at places where nobody expects cyclists to appear or show similar acts of genius in their design. If you photograph just the right sections, they definitely look neat. But integrating car and bike traffic in a crowded city is a non-trivial problem; especially in Europe where roads tend to follow winding goat paths from the Dark Ages and are way too narrow for today's traffic levels already.
While the plural of anecdote is not data, two of my friends suffered serious head trauma in a bicycle accident they never fully recovered from (without a helmet, they'd likely be dead), while nobody I know personally ever was in a severe car accident. And quick search also seems to indicate that cycling is about as dangerous as driving (with both of them paling by comparison to motorcycles...).
*with the possible exception of the Netherlands, but even for them I'm not sure.
Where did you get the impression that by "it's far safer" that I meant "it's far safer... than driving"?
i am completely ignoring your anecdotes - they cannot be taken for actual data. I have friends that have been in extremely dangerous car accidents. I have a friend who was killed in a car crash. Anecdotes are a bad idea on this.
I'd be happy with real data on the actual base rates of this stuff, and yes, perhaps the bike lanes are not sufficient to overcome the danger of riding off the bike lane. But I don't think it's quite as bad as you're making out. It definitely depends on where you need to get to by bike... but my experience with riding in Perth was that I could ride from the outer suburbs to the city without going through traffic. The same for large portions of Sydney (once you hit the main bike routes along the freeways). If you're riding into the CBD, but get off your bike before hitting the main CBD streets themselves (ie choose your route carefully), then you can get to a goodly portion of the city without hitting the (I agree) utterly ridiculous bad bike lanes
...and that's before even considering Europe.
But yeah, if you have some real data, I'm happy to change my mind.
I actually do avoid driving whenever possible. But then I live in an urban area, and can do that.
My commute to school is about 30 miles, or 50 minutes. If I rode the bike to the nearest bus stop (10 miles, 50 minutes) and rode the buses to school (75 minutes, including 20 of walking and waiting), my commute would take two and a half times as long. It would also be free instead of costing $5.50 in gas each way, and I would burn an extra thousand Calories per day.
While the first part is borne out by statistics, the second is not.
To make a professionals-only drivng regimen feasible, you'd need a massive reorganization of urbanities. Suburbs would no longer be quite so desirable, etc etc. Take your politics out of rationality.
Take your politics out of rationality.
Yikes! can you explain how something that's a good idea for rationalists on lesswrong is bad for society? Should we keep our good ideas secret because if everyone did it the suburbs would be undesirable?
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt but so far this seems more like denial than reason.
Well it certainly isn't denial. As proof I'd offer up my lack of any kind of driving license or vehincle ownership throughout my life.
The idea itself is not what is bad for society. The badness here is the political-ish applying of an idea without thinking through the consequences and dealing with them.
I would certainly not encourage keeping any ideas secret, for then how would the corollaries be resolved?
As a cyclist, I think biking is probably more dangerous than driving...
Yes... in countries where the infrastructure is so poor as to require cyclists to ride in traffic (or in the door zone). In places where this is not the case (see Europe) I'd be interested in seeing if those stats are the same.
Even in Europe, places where you don't have to drive in traffic / door zone are incredibly rare. Bike paths are cool, but as currently implemented they mostly serve to annoy both drivers and pedestrians alike, and there is still a default assumption that where there is no bike path, you'll be driving with traffic.
But... have you framed "danger" apprppriately?
"According to a study by the British Medical Association, the average gain in "life years" through improved fitness from cycling exceeds the average loss in “life years” through cycling fatalities by a factor of 20 to 1."
From http://davesbikeblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/cyclists-live-longer.html.
That's an interesting quote. There are probably other ways to achieve the same fitness benefits though.
It's dangerous, expensive, and therefore absolutely awesome. You're just jealous of all the normal people with cool cars, and that they don't let you drive due to your left arm paralysis.
Well... I can drive, but I still try to do it as little as possible.
That global warming is an important issue.*
*This is not a claim that climate change isn't changing, or that it isn't man made, or that the changes will not have a net negative impact. Rather, even a superficial cost/benefit analysis will quickly show that the benefit or acting towards many other values will have a much higher payoff than any attempt to influence climate change. For example, adding iodine to salt is very cheap, but can save many millions of lives with a high degree of certainty and in a short time frame.
Bjorn Lomborg did some research on this: http://www.ted.com/talks/bjorn_lomborg_sets_global_priorities.html
I don't mean to confirm or deny that global warming is an important issue, but I disagree with the reasoning. Yes, there are lots of things more important than global warming. That doesn't mean that global warming isn't an important issue. It means that global warming isn't the most important issue. A more relevant question is, if you decreased funding to global warming, would the place the money ends up going be something more important or less important?
How exactly does iodine save lives? In my reading, most of the benefits seemed to stem from reduced cretinism & goiters. Which massively impact the economy and quality of life, but I don't see this as actual life & death.
And insecticide-treated mosquito nets in malaria-infested areas can save even more lives per dollar than adding iodine to salt. So, shouldn't we spend money on anything else?
Bjørn Lomborg is with significant pobability a doofus who in Denmark were a known speaker for the governments opinion, which at the time was 'fuck the environment'.
More of an empirical evidence thing, with some logic supporting it: For the vast majority of people, their fat percentage says nothing about their health or how well they're living their lives. The cultural opposition to fatness is status-driven, and should be viewed as signaling gone out of control.
The demand for leanness has made people's lives (including their health) generally worse rather than better.
This looks like evidence against that to me. See also this. (All that publicity for anorexic models is still a Bad Thing, but “opposition to fatness” needn't mean endorsement of emaciation; the latter is signalling gone out of control.)
ETA: FWIW, all other things being equal I feel better (e.g. more stamina) when I'm slimmer; YMMV.
How have you managed the 'all else being equal' part? Most things that cause you to have more stamina* also cause you to be slimmer. It seems more likely that you will have more stamina because all else is almost certainly not equal.
* In the non-trivially-short-term. ie. I'm not talking about drinking 5 bottles of Gatorade giving you more stamina for that day.
By eating less for a couple of months without any other major change of habits.
(provided slimmer is defined in terms of fat mass alone and not total mass: muscle weighs a lot, and...).
Sure, eating a lot by itself also makes me less energetic for a while (probably due to digestion requiring energy), but I'd expect that to be a short-term effect only.
Does anyone really deny this? Or is it simply not socially appropriate to say you want to look better?
I don't think slightly overweight people use the rationale for losing weight to be more healthy. They know they want to do it to just look better.
I don't think either of us have statistics on this.
My impression is that looking better gets conflated with being healthier and proving one's virtue.
People's actions are heavily influenced by instinct for large parts of every day - perhaps all the time. Learned behaviors - such as speech, and driving - are patterns that interconnect various instinctive behaviors.
Doesn't come as a big surprise for me. Instincts are the rocks, early learned behavior is the soil, and nobody can build a house on clouds.
I don't know how many people here suffer from this, but the Animation Age Ghetto, the SciFi Ghetto, and other examples of Public Medium Ignorance are really hard to get people to look past.
Fanfiction is a good one. I always like seeing fanfiction outside its ghetto, where it never occurs to anyone to call it that.
I helped pre-read a Library of Babel My Little Pony crossover fanfic. I noticed that Wikipedia had a section that filled most of a page listing Library of Babel fanfiction without ever referring to it as such.
And I might as well mention, Alicorn wrote a short story called Earthfic where stories taking place in the real world had such a ghetto. I'm pretty sure it was just making fun of the fanfiction ghetto, but it applies pretty much as well to all of them.
Yes. That just means more interesting pop culture for the rest of us.
Hitler had a number of top-level skills, and we could learn (some) positive lessons from his example(s).
Eugenics would improve the human race (genepool).
Human "racial" groups may have differing average attributes (like IQ), and these may contribute to the explanation of historical outcomes of those groups.
(Perhaps these aren't exactly topics that Less Wrong readers (in particular) would run away from. I was attempting to answer the question by riffing off Paul Graham's idea of taboos. What is it "not appropriate" to talk about in ordinary society? Politeness might trigger the rationalization response...)
1st one: Nope, don't think anyone here would dispute that, except on the grounds that it's rather nonspecific.
2nd one: Only if it were in the form of encouraging particularly valuable individuals to reproduce more. Removing even the bottom 50% would have fairly negligible effects compared to doubling the top 1%. Several countries already implement programs to encourage the most valuable members to reproduce more (with mixed success).
3rd one: I find it nearly impossible to find any good data on that either way. Pending evidence, it looks like most of the quality of life and education effects can basically be explained by looking at who got the industrial revolution first. Unless very large effect sizes were found, however, the policy implications would be minimal or nonexistent.
Surely few would argue with that. The more controversial issue is the claim that such differences are genetic.
First one's just plain true.
Second one is probably true. The issue with eugenics isn't that it wouldn't work, it's that it would be unethical to try.
Third one seems to fail the evidence test. It's proposing a significant deficit in a measurable quantity that has not been observed to exist (after correcting for socio-economic status).
From Paul Graham's essay:
Maybe there is something I am missing, but I don't understand his last sentence. How do you take two people, and "subtract one from the other" ?
I think it roughly means to subtract the teenage girl's model for how the world works from the streetsmart guy's model for how the world works. You expect to get the subset of experience a sheltered upbringing would shelter people from.
It struck me that "top-level" is ambiguous. Do you mean high quality or general-purpose?
I don't think that it is taboo to say that Hitler was a good orator or that he was good at mass psychology. But people don't admit to desiring to manipulate crowds; I don't think Hitler has to do with that. I've heard it suggested that a lot of people have the skills to be cult leaders, but they just don't want to be.
Film makers do study Leni Riefenstahl.
Those are excellent points, particularly the first. Adolf Hitler was one of the most effective rhetoricians in human history - his public speaking skills were simply astounding. Even the people who hated his message were stunned after attending rallies in which Hitler exercised his crowd-manipulation skills.
Related to: Mind-killer.
I'll grant you that they're all taboo, but they're not really useful, either. (I mean, some people claim these are true to justify their prejudices, but that's not what we're talking about.) In particular, the statement about Hitler is too vague to suggest what ought to be imitated, and the statement about racial groups focuses on an effect which is almost entirely obscured by historical facts about the distribution of resources.
That said, regarding eugenics: have you read any of David Brin's Uplift books?
That "free will", at least as commonly defined, is largely illusory.
The notion "a common notion of 'free will' exists" is largely illusory.
That doesn't make life any less enjoyable.
What's the "common definition" you're drawing on?
"The ability for a consciousness to nondeterministically make choices"?
But what does that mean? I've asked people who believe in libertarian free will what they are getting at many times. They do not mean that actions are random, and they don't believe they're determined by prior states of affairs. I literally cannot wrap my mind around what else might be possible, let alone what other possible thing could reasonably go by the name "freedom".
They're trying to pretend that the model that we had before we had any idea how the brain worked is still correct. It doesn't mean anything, it's just commonly taken as a given. It would be stupid to say it was random and depressing (but true!) to say that choices are a function of brain states.
When I say free will, I mean that I'm too ignorant to use production rules in a given optimization search space.
As someone who audited a three-credit "Action and Responsibility" class in college, my impression is that there is no more explanation to be had. There are some people who construct more elaborate theories which do have internals (cf. Robert Kane - actually, his "A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will" is short, readable, and accurate as an introduction to the classic theories and to his own), but the "naive libertarians" refuse to believe that it is any more complicated than that.
Edit: What am I doing? You're training to be a philosopher! You're the one who should be telling me!
I find atheists reactive to a complex notion of self where there is no unified singular consistent self. This illusion is pervasive.
I don't understand what you're trying to get across. The word "reactive" is especially ambiguous.
You are not living as much on the edge as you should optimally.
I estimate that most LW Readers are relatively young (i.e. < 40y old). The repair mechanism of your bodies can deal with a lot more than they currently have to handle. To increase your effectiveness multiple routes exist:
physically maybe but with all the distractions dramas and bad language on the internets im overloaded to the point of periodic anxiety and depression
This reminded me of Umeshisms: "If you’ve never missed a flight, you’re spending too much time in airports."
Regarding polyphasic sleep: if you're under, say, 18, don't. The effects it has on the body's developmental processes are not known.
I see no reason for someone to take this advice. Polyphasic sleep has been the norm in many cultures and periods of history, and one might be more inclined to advise, "Regarding monophasic sleep: if you're under, say, 18, don't. The effects it has on the body's developmental processes are not known"
I have not heard this before, even on web sites touting it. Reference? A quick Google only turned up sceptical comments, and "segmented sleep", which isn't what I've understood by "polyphasic sleep".
Well I don't have a reference handy, but the page you just linked to identified "segmented sleep" as a synonym for "polyphasic sleep". It seems to be along the lines I was thinking.
What I understood by polyphasic sleep is the practice of "ultra-short napping to achieve more time awake each day", the point being to get more productive hours per day. There's no suggestion that segmented sleep involves sleeping fewer hours than normal, but it might increase the quality of the waking hours.
From La Wik on segmented sleep: "Peasant couples were often too tired after a long day's work to do much more than eat and go to sleep". I sometimes have days like that, whereupon I'm likely to wake once or more through the night. Maybe I should get up and meditate or something, instead of turning over and falling asleep again.
Well, yes; biphasic sleep (noon siesta) is the natural sleeping pattern beyond infanthood. For extreme schedules like Uberman's, though, there have been lots of reports on odd cravings and the like — such as grape juice — that, e.g. contain elements the body would normally generate itself during sleep.
(Are you really saying that we don't know the effects of monophasic sleep?)
Erm, yeah, what Douglas_Knight said.
Yes, we really don't know the effects of monophasic sleep compared to polyphasic sleep.
I don't understand how that makes sense in context of your original comment.
I only made one comment; saying "yes" probably suggested more coherence with Thom Blake than there really was.
My complaint is naturalistic fallacy.
Well, I think the only reason we as atheists ask this question is to feel as if we are being scientifically rigorous, although we do know, with very good reason, that atheism is true.
But it's good to be sure, isn't it?
For every supernatural explanation it is possible to conceive an explanation whose claims are just as unfalsifiable and yet contradict and refute the claims of the first. Science, naturalism, is the only belief system that actually works on the grounds of evidence and incessant self-scepticism.
Life on other planets will have its own parochial religions, but we can see pretty easily that every species, on every conceivable world will have the atheists. Atheism and science are objective, religion is subjective.
There's no such thing as an absolute denial macro. And I sure hope this to trigger yours.
Have you ever heard creationist talk ? For me that is proof of its existence.
Absolute denial macro can be an artifact of being Bayesian-rational, and being absolutely convinced (P=1, or ridiculously close to it) about something that just happens to be false. If you use your brain's natural ability to generate most plausible hypotheses consistent with data, and P(arm is not paralyzed)=1, then P(it's daughter's arm) > P(arm is paralyzed), so this hypothesis wins. If it's disproved, you just go for the next hypothesis, and you have plenty of them before you have to go for one with P=0 that happens to be true.
No, you wont!
Okay, now for my attempt to actually answer the prompt:
Your supposed "taste" for alcoholic beverages is a lie.
Summary: I've never enjoyed the actual process of drinking alcohol in the way that I e.g. enjoy ice cream. (The effects on my mind are a different story, of course.)
So for a long time I thought that, hey, I just have weird taste buds. Other people really like beer/wine/etc., I don't. No biggie.
But then as time went by I saw all the data about how wine-tasting "experts" can't even agree on which is the best, the moment you start using scientific controls. And then I started asking people about the particulars of why they like alcohol. It turns out that when it comes any implications of "I like alcohol", I have the exact same characterstics as those who claim to like alcohol.
For example, there are people who insist that, yes, I must like alcohol, because, well, what about Drink X which has low alcohol content and is heavily loaded with flavoring I'd like anyway? And wine experts would tell me that, on taste alone, ice cream wins. And defenses of drinking one's favorite beverage always morph into "well, it helps to relax..."
So, I came to the conclusion that people have the very same taste for alcohol that I do, it's just that they need to cook up a rationlizations for getting high. Still trying to find counterevidence...
Your turn: convince me that you really, really like the taste of [alcoholic beverage that happens to also signal your social status].
There's a major confounder here: the hardest, least flavorful drinks are also often the lowest-status (ie: cheap vodka and gin are viewed as poison for inveterate alcoholics).
But I'll answer anyway: I enjoy the almost honey-like taste of a really smooth, high-quality Scotch on the rocks. Yes, you have to put the ice cubes in, otherwise you won't water it down enough to release the flavor and you'll just taste alcohol and alcohol fumes. And it has to be good Scotch.
Other alcoholic drinks I enjoy: full-bodied, unacidic wines; fruity wines (Gerwurtzterminer and Riesling are favorites... yes I know white wine is low-status for men, shut up jerk); porters, especially coffee-flavored porters, red ales, and even the occasional blond ale. Hot wine, especially hot mulled wine, is really excellent once you learn how to avoid breathing in the fumes and instead taste the flavor released by the heating. Lager is drinkable but mostly just "carbohydrate-flavored" to me, and I consider vodka, arak, and brandy godawful. Oh, and hard ciders are excellent, not only because the well-made ones pack plenty of flavor from the fruit and spices, but because they're sufficiently nonalcoholic that they offend the taste-buds and dull the mind even less than beer.
For reference, I also enjoy massively spicy food, to the point that my flatmates often urge me to open the kitchen window after cooking a curry. I figure, if someone likes spicy food, and also likes drinks that burn while getting you a bit intoxicated, that's not actually too incongruous.
I do think your thesis holds mostly true for heavy drinking of cheap, flavorless beverages with the purpose of getting drunk, as I myself am completely baffled why some cultures or subcultures have social norms in favor of reaching for drunkenness levels I've never seen anyone actually enjoy. It mostly seems to be an excuse for bad behavior they're too inhibited to engage in without alcohol as an excuse, an effect that shows up when you give them placebo alcohol as part of a control group.
Personally, I also kinda hate being severely drunk, as it makes me sleepy and sentimental, and nowadays the sentiment comes out as melancholy for being in a long-distance relationship.
Anyway, that's my overly long social confession for the evening. Gym time!
Convincing people over internet in matters of taste is a lost cause X-D but I think I can unpack some of my alcohol preferences.
I'll leave all the psychoactive effects outside of this little exposition.
I drink a variety of alcohol -- mostly wine and beer, sometimes hard liquor, rarely cocktails -- and I rather doubt I do it for status signalling reasons since the majority of my drinking happens inside my home. I drink it for the taste.
Mostly I drink with food and that's a large part the taste synergy. Let me give specific examples. I prefer high-tannin high-acidity red wines with grilled meat. I find that this pairing works very well (note that my red wine varies but usually costs around $10/bottle, so it's not anything hoity-toity). In the summer I like green vine (vinho verde) from Portugal which is light and very acidic. It is precisely this high acidity that I want from it and it delivers.
My taste in beers changes over time. Some time ago I really liked double bocks and Belgian dubbels. Then they started to taste too sickly sweet to me, so I changed to IPAs for a bit. But then they became too hoppy and I went to English and Scottish ales. At the moment I am kinda in-between stages and mostly drink porters.
Do note that as far as I can see, all this is driven by taste -- I drink mostly at home and I have no idea what beer might or might not be in fashion at the moment (so no status signaling) and I don't care about alcohol content of the beer.
All in all, averaging over different situations, I probably drink 70% for the taste, 25% for the psychoactive effects, and 5% for status (I will decline all offers of Bud Light and such and may roll my eyes at the offer X-D)
You claim that "experts" have been proven not to know the difference between expensive wine and non... but I sure can tell the difference between "wine I like" and "wine I would rather pour down the sink", and that distinction is all that matters when it comes to me choosing wine to drink (or not).
I also second InfinitelyThirsting - if it could come without the buzz (or even just at minimal buzz) I'd prefer it. The buzz (and I would not characterise it as euphoria for me) isn't the part that's fun for me.
Also - yay mead (I make mead) :)
http://amazingmead.wordpress.com - the loved one's mead blog, which I wrote the last two posts on.
Looks cool.
My main post for mead is this one: http://www.squidoo.com/mead-three-weekends which covers only basic mead-making... but fairly in-depth. I've been expanding the FAQs
I think you are not aware of research in acquired taste. It turns out that the effect of particular foods and drinks on psychological states create some deep subconscious associations. Take this as a clear and striking example:
"A study that investigated the effect of adding caffeine and theobromine (active compounds in chocolate) vs. a placebo to identically-flavored drinks that participants tasted several times, yielded the development of a strong preference for the drink with the compounds.[3]"
I think that's why I do enjoy beer now, even though I thought exactly as you did several years ago. I thought it was a huge collective rationalization. Which I still think is a big part of it, specially among teenagers and young adults who like to boast about being strong drinkers and how oh-dear they love alcohol so very much. But grown up people do drink, say, one beer alone and seem to enjoy it quite a bit. But without the pleasant relaxation that usually follows, though, the taste would not be agreeable. So we see a deep neurological change in the way we process taste.
As a young man raised on gourmet foods and interesting tastes, as well as reasonably sound in my general understanding of human evo-biology let's make two things clear:
Barring that, I like whisky. It has an interesting taste composition and the immediate kick and feel of the alcohol content is likewise momentarily envograting. That I afterwards get pleasantly intoxicated is merely a nice bonus.
But everyone has had some kind of pleasure centre training, so how do you tell the two things apart? Two friends of mine who were raised as vegetarians once decided to try meat (when they were in their teens), and didn't like it.
This feels like a wrong question.
Is there even such a thing as "natural good taste?" or are there only the pleasure center configuration that newborns start out with?
I can attest to knowing several people who don't like sweet candy or sweet things in general, even though that should be one of the "natural" preferences, and I don't think one would have to look that much for someone who wouldn't eat pure blubber, even though that is also one of these evolutinary encoded thingies.
So what did you mean by “Pleasant Taste is within reasonable limits an exact science”?
That statement comes from my experience in cooking. The interesting thing in gastronomy is that the spices don't really matter as long as you don't use too many of them.
In my own vocabulary I like to distinguish the concepts "taste" and "aroma" as pertaining to "tastebuds" and "olfactory bulb" respectively. Indeed when people say "this tastes like garlic" they mean "this smells like garlic." This is also why unpleasant tasting things taste less unpleasant when you block your nasal passages by some means.
There are five different types of taste buds:
One kind reacts to alcohol groups on small organic molecules, i.e. fructose, glucose, aspartame, sorbitol ans so on, "sweet taste."
One kind reacts to hydronium ions (or rather contains a direct protone channel,) "sour taste."
One kind reacts to sodium Ions, "salt taste."
One kind reacts to many amino acids, "savory taste."
One kind reacts to a variety of manily toxic and some non-toxic compounds, "bitter taste."
The interesting thing is this: If two or more of the above are balanced, the overall sensory stimulous is percieved as "pleasant." This is why soda has acid as well as sugar content, this is why kitchen salt is almost universally used (especially many kinds of meat which usually only needs salt), this is why coffee goes well with sugar and milk (milk neutralizes some of the otherwise high acid content).
Once your dish has the five basic tastes in balance you can literally add any aromas to it and it will still taste "pleasant."
A few things:
In as far as I have ever heard that is only the case with bitter taste which is a far more compound tastebud. I would like to see any studies on a supertaster in terms of sweetness.
These are triggerings of of the cold, heat and pain receptors which are completely different from taste receptors. If you want to argue that you have to argue consistency and texture of the foodstufss as well. I am presenting a simplified view, akin to if you just sprayed flavoured liquid onto the tongue and measured neural activity in the olfactory bulb and taste buds. If you aren't used to eating capsaicin the heat and pain sensations completely overpower the tastes and aromas, if you are used to it, we are again reduced to balancing the five basic taste sensation.
Yes, but that is returning to neural artifacts of individuals, is it not?
Sure, so long as you acknowledge that neural artifacts of the same individual can change with time.
You apparently replied to one of my retracted posts.
I no longer agree with the opinion stated by my past self; though good point.
How should I do that? Will you fMRI my brain while I'm drinking it?
(Also the "that happens to also signal your social status" part doesn't apply to me. I don't like most spirits, I don't think I would be able to tell vodka from a mixture of pure water and ethanol in a blind test, but there are quite a few relatively cheap wines and beers I do like, as well as some expensive wines I hate.)
I'm still disappointed that wine doesn't taste like sparkling cider, a drink that's designed to look like wine but taste good.
A relatively simple way to test whether you actually like the taste of alcohol specifically: take a reasonable quantity of your favorite alcoholic beverage, beer/wine/mixed drink/whatever, and split it into two containers. Close one, and heat the other slightly to evaporate off most of the actual ethanol. Then just do a blind taste test. This does still require not lying to yourself about which you prefer, but it removes most of the other things that make knowing whether you like the taste hard.
I personally don't care enough to try this, but just the habit of thinking "how could I test this?" is good.
How do I know that the heating doesn't evaporate or otherwise affect stuff other than ethanol?
I don't know for sure either way, and can't think of an experimental way to check off hand. I don't think that heating is likely to do anything to the other components of most drinks, and you might be able to make a better guess with domain knowledge I don't have.
I think ethanol will generally evaporate more quickly than water, so you might also be able to get a similar test by simply closing one portion into a container with only a little air, and leaving another open for a long enough time, overnight maybe. will still lose some water, which is I guess a more real problem with heating as well.
shrug, the details weren't really the point, just wanted to emphasize the idea of thinking of ways to test whatever you're interested in physically instead of just reasoning about it.
AFAIK, it will utterly destroy many of the volatile components of wine that make it taste so complex and interesting. That's why alcohol-free wine tends to be so bland and uninteresting.
I'd be willing to do a taste-test on alcohol-free wine vs wine that I already know that I like... If you hide the non-alcoholic one in sufficient number of normal ones I probably wouldn't guess which one it was (I'm not good enough at telling which wine is which that I'd spot a particular wine by taste, just whether I like them or not).
Maybe you could try adding a little more ethanol to one of the two glasses.
I completely agree with your assertion. As an avid drinker, I find that I don't like drinks that taste nice nearly as much as ones that don't. The taste seems to me to be a signal of alcoholic effect; alcopops (sweet and alcoholic) get it wrong one way, and <1% alcohol beer gets it wrong the other way.
That said, I do like some beers better than others. Hoppy rather than fruity is good, for instance.
I recall reading somewhere on LessWrong that a highly effective way to stop eating chocolate is to get a pound of M&Ms and put them in your mouth and chew them up and taste them, then spit them out, and after a while chocolate will taste awful. This would suggest there's a lot more to liking foods than just what your taste buds (and sense of smell) say.
Edit: And how could I forget coffee. Tastes terrible in itself - decaf is utterly missing the point - but taste+buzz is something one can have strong and even discussable personal preferences on, and I just had my morning cup of something awful and went "mmmm, coffee."
I wouldn't ever wanna stop eating chocolate, at least delicious 80+ percent cocoa chocolate. It has little sugar but plenty of quality fats and cardioprotective and anti-inflammatory polyphenols. It's still a bit addictive for some reason (flavor? phenylethylamine? theobromine? ) but if you eat quality chocolate daily, well, if you don't go really overboard I imagine it'd do you no harm.
It's a YMMV, sure. But I can see people who need to give the stuff up - though my internal model of other humans tells me they'd be horrified at the idea of doing something that would actually work to cut them off from chocolate.
Interesting. Btw, why did my old comment suddenly get two replies?
Well, I've been systematically (if desultorily) reading all of LW from the beginning. So I got to your comment and, given the local norm that it's just fine to respond to a comment or post from years ago, responded to it. I presume bcoburn saw my comment in "Recent Comments", went to your original and felt like responding too.
I am doing the same right now, BTW.
This is, indeed, exactly what happened.
I'm eagerly awaiting years-later responses to my own early comments :-D
waves
:-)
Is that part of what you have referred to as "internet as television", David?
Yep! Things to read while waiting for Tomcat to finish restarting ... if I'm going to use the Internet as a television, I want at least to be watching something good.
I got through the Sequences, and it occurred to me that I didn't really understand the history of the culture of LessWrong, let alone the history of the history. So I thought reading the lot would be a nice way to approximate that. And I'm finding some fantastic posts I would never have seen without doing this.
In my observation the 'lie' operates to a significant extent on the other side of that 'taste' line. Sure rationalizations play a part too but to some extent 'acquired taste' is literally accurate. The 'taste - status reward' pairing actually does change what tastes good.
I tried for a long time to find an alcoholic drink I like in the assumption that I was missing out on something everyone else was privy too. While I did find some drinks I liked, I decided that it was the high sugar or fat content (rum & coke or a white russian) that I liked, and not the alcohol. Since that is the only part I like, it is much cheaper and healthier to achieve the same taste with non-alcoholic drinks and artificial sweeteners.
I will agree with you that a lot of alcohol is like that, in particular beer. But you can't say that acquiring a taste means forcing yourself to like something; we have to acquire almost all tastes. A kid who isn't fed a variety of foods will never like a variety of foods. There are people out there who don't like FRUIT, I mean, really. Not just like there's a fruit they don't particularly enjoy, they don't like any fruit.
But there are some alcoholic drinks that ARE delicious. I don't mean anything regular. My favourite drink has no substitute: mead. Honey wine. It's a beverage made from honey, and delectable (well, unless it's a dry wine). I don't like any dry wines, just sweet ones. Fuki plum wine is another favourite of mine, and again, there is no similar substitute. I would be careful of saying you don't like alcohol at all, because it's possible you've just had bad stuff (and each kind of alcohol is different, too). I've never liked eggplant, bleach--until someone actually cooked it properly for me, using the right gender pod. (For the record of anecdotal proof, my sister hates alcohol, but even she likes Fuki.)
And the "other" effects of alcohol have no bearing on me. I wish those drinks weren't alcoholic actually, because I'm pretty much straight edge. If I drink something, I make sure it's with food, and only a glass, and drunk slowly, so that I'm not mentally affected at all, not even a "buzz". Trust me, if I could get nonalcoholic versions, I would, but it isn't just the lack of a market that stops that. For example, St Germaine is a fantastic liquor created from elderflowers hand harvested from mountains in Europe. And it damned well tastes like FLOWERS, or like how flowers smell anyways. I've eaten flowers, they don't taste like flowersmell. And there are syrups available made from elderflowers, but none of them are any good. Alcohol can catch and preserve flavours that are lost in any other processing.
(Somewhat unfortunately, I also really enjoy the tastes of harder alcohols, like spiced rum and aged whiskey, but you can't really drink much of that before effects start happening, so I don't.)
But if you don't like alcohol, you may never acknowledge that there are some good things out there, amidst the muck. I have a nearly perfect analogy: I don't like mushrooms. To me, all those fancy dishes that toss in truffle oil or other mushroom-derived products are ruining good food, and just being pretentious. Sure, a part of my brain knows that people who like mushrooms enjoy the extra savoury flavour, but to me it's gross, and inexplicable why so many gourmet dishes have mushrooms in them--much like your confusion as to why someone would pay more for wine than a milkshake, I have no idea why someone would pay hundreds of dollars for a truffle. If it isn't savoury enough, add beefstock, or something. But that's just my irrational, self-centered brain. The rest of me knows people out there really do like mushrooms, and that to them, it makes the food better, just like I believe bananas make every baked good better, but my friend who hates bananas would disagree.
I find the idea that people don't like being intoxicated suspicious. Experiencing euphoria from intoxication has a lot do with with brain chemistry, and it would be very odd if some humans recieved this effect and others did not.
Now, I can understand the intellectual response of "I don't like being intoxicated" as "I don't like the (loss of control/mental sluggishness/depressive effects) that accompanies intoxication." After all, those could easily go against your personal values.
But in terms of enjoying something, I don't think that those concerns are paramount. I enjoy the taste of foods that I consciously know are bad for me: eating them goes against my personal values (live a long life, have energy for the next task, etc.) but I still experience pleasure upon eating them. And it strikes me that it is quite possible to consciously find something distasteful while non-consciously finding it enjoyable. In other words, your conscious brain might say "I don't enjoy the other effects of alcohol, only the taste" while your tongue tells your subconscious "Hey! This is the stuff that gives us the happy feeling!"
The only real test, I suppose, would be to find two drinks that were, taste-wise, indistinguishable with one producing the "other" effects of alcohol while the other doesn't. Then, see if there was a stronger "liking" associated with the prior substance over time, particularly with people who self-report not enjoying those effects in alcohol while otherwise enjoying its flavor. I have a strong suspicion that the test would show that even if little enough of it was served that neither group felt outward signs of intoxication that the group that got the alcoholic batch would show stronger liking over time. (In fact, the less the "I don't enjoy intoxication" batch consciously know that they are being given alcohol, the better for their self-reporting.)
Another n=1: I like the way intoxication feels when I'm intoxicated, but over last couple of months I've gone from wanting to enter that state often to avoiding all alcohol on purpose. What changed was realizing on an emotional level that I have tons of interesting (or necessary) things to do and alcohol limits that by taking away evening (to drink) and the next day (I feel cognitively worse 'till next afternoon, even if I didn't have a hangover). At some point the prospect of drinking became anxiety-inducing for me.
Drug effects can be heavily culturally mediated; Hanson has posted some material on alcohol in particular.
(Another n=1: I was surprised and dismayed the first time I had enough alcohol to qualify as even partially drunk, and realized that I felt incredibly depressed. This happened twice more, and I eventually gave up alcohol as a bad job. This is annoying because it limits my mead consumption, even though it also means I never need to worry about alcoholism.)