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.

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.

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.

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.)

"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.

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.