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loqi comments on Bizarre Illusions - Less Wrong
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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?
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/
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*
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.)