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taryneast comments on Absolute denial for atheists - Less Wrong
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I guess I forgot to mention the other premise the argument uses: Y is a lot more expensive (per unit mass or volume). Given that alcoholic drinks cost a lot more, you would think that people would only pay the premium if they thought there were something better about it.
I claim that it cannot be the taste, because the taste is clearly dominated by cheaper alternatives
Except that my other issue with alcohol is that, within a given drink class, I can't distinguish the taste very much. All beers, for example, taste to me like sourness and bitterness that stings as it goes down. To the extent that I do discern a difference, it's that some aren't as painful or gross to drink. And what really perplexes me is that the least bad, most tolerable beer I've found is ... Guiness.
Over the years, I have not noticed these wonderful subtleties. There are differences, sure, but the overwhelming bitterness and sting dominates them.
(ETA: The sting of carbonated beverages also dominated my experience when I first tried them out, which is why I didn't regularly want them until I was about 10 and found one with enough of the right sweetness to outweigh the pain. Today, I still experience that sting.)
By the way, if want to give yourself a sixth sense, I would recommend echolocation or magnetism, which humans have been able to pick up, and which seem to have a lot more practical use.
And you prove my point. I think what happened is that you recongized a social benefit to voicing appreciation for beer, and learned all the right code words to use, and now can pattern-match beers to the right description well enough for social purposes.
I hate almost all beer. I can discern the differences between them, and there are some beers that, on some days are drinkable - and some I even get to the point of liking - but I would never pay money for beer when other alternatives are available.
Beer is low in my preference ordering.
I like wine. i can distinguish between many different kinds and i can distinguish a preference ordering that I would consider to be correlated with the "quality" of wine. There is no other way to get the flavours of wine apart from... actually drinking wine. you can't buy an equivalent pleasure because there isn't one. I am willing to pay for that particular pleasure.
wine is reasonably high in my preference ordering> so is cider and mead.
but sometimes I prefer cider over wine, sometimes I prefer mead over cider, and a lot of times I prefer coffee over all of them.
preferences for taste change on a daily and even hourly basis. Just like with food. Sometimes you want to go for something sweet, sometimes salty, sometimes umami... thus it goes with drinks. I rarely go for sweet - I usually prefer tangy flavours or complex interesting flavours such as that of fruit juices or red wine.
There is no way you can say that I gain no pleasure from alcoholic drinks apart from the taste. and sometimes - I gain more (temporary) pleasure from a higher-priced glass of wine than all the non-alcoholic drinks in the world... because I like the taste, and it's exactly what I want right then at that time.