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Lumifer comments on Outside the Laboratory - Less Wrong
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Or fatty.
Shouldn't pretty much any cooked food be a super-stimulus considering the relevant ancestral environment and why we intricately cook food in the first place?
Super-stimuli could be different for different age groups. I've never seen anyone love plain pasta, they like their ketchup and sauce too.
Not sure about that. Fat makes food more tasty (mostly through contributing what's called "mouth feel"), but it doesn't look like a super-stimulus to me.
Well, depends on how do you want to define "super-stimulus". I understand it to mean triggering hardwired biological preferences above and beyond the usual and normal desire to eat tasty food. The two substances specifically linked to super-stimulus are sugar and salt.
Again, super-stimulus is not the same thing as yummy.
I'm not sure it's that simple -- chocolate is more of a super-stimulus than fruits for most people.
True. On the other hand, take away the sugar and see how many chocoholics are willing to eat 99% dark chocolate :-/
Ever seen a child lick butter off a slice of bread? Don't tell me they would lick off just salt too.
I've seen both. In the case of salt it's lick finger, stick it into the salt bowl, lick clean, repeat.
Ah, now that you reminded me I've seen the latter too, dammit.
Dunno about 99% (though if you set the bar as low as "willing to eat" I probably would), but I do find 85% dark chocolate quite addictive (as in, I seldom manage to buy a tablet and not finish it within a couple days). But I know I'm weird.
A couple of days! :-) That's not what "addiction" means.
I meant it in the colloquial ‘takes lots of willpower to stop’ sense, not the technical ‘once I stop I get withdrawal symptoms’ sense. (Is there a technical term for the former?)
(OK, it does seem to me that whenever I eat chocolate daily for a few weeks and then stop, I feel much grumpier for a few days, but that's another story, and anyway it's not like I took enough statistics to rule out it being a coincidence,)
The verb "like" and a variety of synonyms :-D
Not quite -- I'm talking about the upper extreme of what Yvain here calls “wanting”, though that word in the common vernacular has strong connotations of what he calls “approving”.
I know some chocoholics. Trust me, if it takes you a couple of days to finish a chocolate bar, you're not addicted :-D
Is there something wrong with binging or compulsion? Withdrawal symptoms would imply dependence, but not necessarily addiction.
Did our preferences mostly evolve for "tasty food" or for raw meat, fruit, vegetables, nuts etc? I thought super-stimulus usually means something that goes beyond the stimuli in the ancestral environment where the preferences for the relevant stimuli were selected for.
I don't understand how you draw the line between stimuli and super-stimuli without such reasoning.
I guess it's possible most our preferences evolved for cooked food, but I'd like to see the evidence first before I believe it.
ETA: I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with super-stimuli, so let's drop the baggage of that connotation.
Well, I actually don't want to draw the line. I am not a big fan of the super-stimulus approach, though obviously humans have some built-in preferences. This terminology was mostly used to demonize certain "bad" things (notably, sugar and salt) with the implication that people can't just help themselves and so need the government (or another nanny) to step in and impose rules.
I think a continuous axis going from disgusting to very tasty is much more useful.
Well, sure. Similarly, a continuous axis designating typical level of risk is more useful than classifying some activities as "dangerous" and others as "safe." Which doesn't mean there don't exist dangerous activities.
So you disagreed with the connotation. I disagree with it too, and edited the grandparent accordingly. I still like the word though, and think it's useful. I suppose getting exposed to certain kind of marketing could make me change my mind.