SilasBarta comments on Open Thread: February 2010, part 2 - Less Wrong

10 Post author: CronoDAS 16 February 2010 08:29AM

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Comment author: SilasBarta 22 February 2010 08:31:01PM *  0 points [-]

You mean, replicate the pleasure from expensive wine? (I'm going to assume you genuinely like the act of drinking wine.) Easy: accept that it's an illusion, then buy the cheap stuff (modulo social status penalties) and prime it the way good wines are. (This may require an assistant.) Gradually train yourself to regard them as the same quality. If you can trained to put it on a pedestal, you can probably be trained to take it off.

If it's unavoidable that you discount the taste due to your residual knowledge that the wine is low-class, then accept that you're overpaying because of a unremovable bias. (Not a slight against you, btw -- I admit I was the same way with CFLs for a while, in that I couldn't discard the knowledge, and thus negative affect, that they're CFLs rather than incandescent, and thereby pointlessly overpaid for lighting.)

On the more realistic assumption that you've simply been trained to like wine via a process that would equally well train you to like anything, get some friends together and train yourselves to like V8. (The veggie drink, not the engine.)