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hyporational comments on Outside the Laboratory - Less Wrong
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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.
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.