One thing I will say: it seemed to me like Works in Progress already was a sort of unofficial rationalist magazine and there might be something to the idea that having a bunch of them is somewhat counterproductive.
Works In Progress is a Progress Studies magazine, I'm sure these two movements look exactly the same to everyone on the outside, but we're very invested in the differences between them.
Progress Studies is a group that wants to do something like accelerate scientific progress and economic growth.
In theory effective altruists are in theory a group that wants to figure out the most efficient ways to do good under a utilitarian framework. In practice they're a specific community that has (lightly, to a degree) settled on specific strategies for doing good. Most effective altruists are pretty concerned about the risks of technological progress, eg superintelligent AI or bioengineered pandemics. So in theory they might want to accelerate the forms of technological progress that fight those risks, but slow the forms that cause those risks.
Although both groups are socially connected (they're both Silicon Valley STEM types competing for a few channels of influence, especially telling billionaires how to spend their money), and although they share the same rationalist technocratic big-picture mindset, they're opposites insofar as PS mostly thinks about the benefits of accelerating technologies, and EA mostly thinks about the risks. This is an unfair oversimplification and both groups are much more nuanced than this, but it's good enough for a short summary.
Although both groups want to end poverty, EA mostly thinks about this in terms of "how can we help cure diseases and end world hunger", and PS mostly thinks in terms of "if we accelerate the economy fast enough, that will take care of itself".
Also both groups have some interests that the other one doesn't care about at all. For example, EA in trying to consider how to improve the world in utilitarian terms thinks a lot about animal suffering, but that's not as relevant to Progress Studies. Progress Studies cares a lot about figuring out exactly why the Industrial Revolution happened and whether we could do something similar again, and EA thinks we probably have bigger things to worry about.
Really? I guess AI risk is quite speculative but Givewell is as supported by the evidence as is just supporting economic growth. And factory farming being bad also seems very well supported by evidence. As does preventing war and pandemics.
Taiwanese chips for the article on the CHIPS act, plant-based chicken for the article on futuristic suffering-free chicken, expensive Korean food for the article on the Korean economic miracle, nuclear hot sauce for the article on nuclear escalation, white wine dyed red for the article on blinded wine tasting.
I kinda feel like that dude didn't even *try* to figure it out before posting, because I'm no supergenius* and I felt it was immediately obvious and fairly cute/amusing; *I* chuckled, Scott. *I* chuckled.
I've read that the bottom of the wine hierarchy is now much better than it was a half century or so ago, due to advances in technique and presumably competition. Multiple authors saying "there really isn't any true 'plonk' anymore" compared to what they encountered in the 1960s or before. (Which is the opposite of how most comparisons between youth and the present tend to go.)
I wonder if that compresses the quality range relative to when the bonfides of premier crus et al. established their cachet. Even if there's a detectable difference, it may not be as great as it once was.
(In principle, the same process could make recent top end wines even better than their predecessors, but I haven't seen it suggested that that has happened.)
Unfortunately it’s a bit complicated than that. Wines have gotten better but it’s hard to compare jugs wines to a Grand Cru. Wines at the absolute bottom of of the wine hierarchy tend to be unbalanced. Meaning (in this case) that the amount of sugar is too high for how much acid is in the wine. It’s done intentionally because the marketplace generally prefers sweeter tasting wines, but due to the lack of balance it gets reviewed poorly. So right off the bat it’s hard to suggest that the bottom of the pyramid has gotten closer to grand cru’s because in some ways they are different wines. To carry the pizza metaphor forward, the absolute cheapest wines are like a pizza with 10lbs of mozzarella cheese on it. If you never eat pizza or are a child, you might think that’s the best pizza ever. If you eat pizza 9 times a week you are probably going to be overwhelmed by that much dairy.
This raises another issue though. Why do we rate the wines that most people actually like really low and put wines that only hardcore wine drinkers like at the top? Most of the true experts despise wine scores and think it’s bullshit, but a lot of the market still seems to be driven by them.
Many such cases. It happens in genre movies and books as well - the more casual fan wants a traditional representation of some element while the critic who soaks in this wants to see something new done with it.
The "casual fan" versus the "expert" sounds like a false dichotomy to me. Any industry is going to cater to the bottom line/dollar sign. Maybe this alone explains why Budweiser is so popular? Railing against the "expert" begins to sound like sour grapes for those who never educated themselves on whatever topic they are commenting on. American movies from the mainstream all follow a very specific format that is insisted upon by the producer and the investors. The French system is/was different in that the director was viewed as auteur.
Americans are masscult people by nature. Accept that fact, glory in it even, and do your thing, but please stop grumbling against the "experts."
The sweet spot is to to appear high status will selling in bulk. Budweiser's advertising emphasises quality and heritage rather than "gets you drunk cheaply".
That's Dwight MacDonald's take on America in a nutshell, at least from what I remember of his Midcult/masscult essay. Readers of the New Yorker are just like the masscult that they try to distance themselves from; they're just one floor up and have a nicer view but they still live in the mediocrity.
I’d argue the sweet spot is selling high status while selling bulk. Meiomi has made a lot of money selling unremarkable wine pretending it’s high quality.
Not very rigorous but practical: how about we just put box wines in a separate category? Just like the various wine specialties (port, martini etc). This solves the dichotomy nicely - you have "pure wines" with their hierarchy and audience, and box wines, with their hierarchy and audience. They rarely overlap in practice, not more often then a wine drinker would buy a Port.
Also, rating per type is great. I have a friend who's a beer judge, and one of the important parts is whether the beer tastes the way this type of beer is *supposed* to taste. "International Lager" isn't exactly an exciting category for beer afficionados, but it *is* a category with certain expectations to it, and you can judge beers in this category against each other.
My problem--if I can call it that--with the average wine drinker is that they know very little about what they are putting in their mouths because they've never taken the time to develop a vocabulary for what they are tasting. My brother-in-law, who got fascinated by wine, once remarked that he would like to try an expensive bottle of Cab just to see what the fuss was about. I said that he would just be tasting red wine as he always does because he hadn't developed a language for his palate. I cook and so I am aware of umami as a flavor and so I've grown accustomed to it, but it took a while to come to terms with that flavor profile.
As for the common wine drinker's palate, no thank you! Vanilla, oak, toast, and butter are all barrel flavors that are easy for winemakers to manipulate and use to mask a poor quality grape.
And not every expensive wine is expensive because of its taste.
You have the location for one--a winemaker in Sonoma uses a white grape from Lodi as a base their sparkling wine, but they sell that wine at Sonoma prices.
You have the size of the "block" or growing area--higher elevations do not produce the same yield as lower elevations and so they are pricier.
French oak barrels are very expensive, while French oak chips are not. The owner of Bonny Doon pissed off Ice Wine makers by placing his grapes in the fridge to mimic the late harvest and so brought his "Vi de Glaciere" to market for a much lower price than what those Canadian winemakers up near Niagara were able to sell for.
Longer time in the barrel also means longer wait which adds dollars to the wine.
I don’t know, we obviously agree on a lot but I’m not sure I’m on board with vocabulary being the cause. Like you wouldn’t say someone can’t appreciate good pizza until they have learned the vocabulary for their palate. Or that every cheeseburger tastes the same until you have a vocabulary. Just because someone can’t eloquently put into words why two wines taste different doesn’t mean they can’t tell that two wines taste differently and that they prefer one over the other. It’s just that certain flavors are more familiar and might be enjoyable to people when drinking a smaller quantity. The vocabulary thing seems like the elitist type of language that pushes people away from wine to start with.
After reading some of the comments and thinking more about the discussion, one thing has struck me. To people not heavily involved in wine it seems scandalous that the $1000 bottle probably isn’t appreciably better than the $80 bottle. While that fact seems completely anodyne to everyone involved in wine. Like most experts I talk to think spending that amount for anything other than educational purposes is mostly a waste. But the assumption from outside is that people in the industry must obviously think that Chateau Margaux is of course always 10x better than Smith Haut Lafitte. And that saying otherwise would rock the industry to the core. When in reality it’s basically common knowledge.
I’ll be honest, I’m not going to watch that video. It’s 20 minutes long. Am I safe in assuming that it basically says, “our ability to perceive the color brown is dependent on whether or not we have the language to accommodate it?”
The idea that language impacts perception is pretty obvious and agreeable. However, I think your claim goes pretty far beyond this. Think about, let’s say I taste pyrazine in a green bell pepper. I am obviously able to taste it, otherwise how would I know that a green bell pepper tastes like a green bell pepper? But when I taste a Chinon with that exact same methoxypyrazine all of a sudden I can’t taste it? How is it possible that I can taste that chemical when it’s in bell pepper form but can’t taste that chemical in wine form until after someone has taught me the vocabulary? How would the vocabulary of “green bell pepper” even make any sense?
The thing about vocabulary that I do believe is that it impacts memory. I can put two wines in front of novice (and I experienced this when I was a novice) and they can immediately understand that the two wines taste different, even if they can’t describe it. They can understand that one has more complex flavors than another. However, it can be hard to recollect how a wine that you had two months ago tasted unless you have a vocabulary for remembering it. So if you have one wine two weeks after another wine, if you lack the experience and vocabulary your memory will essentially tell you that they tasted the same.
I also think that when people say all wine tastes alike, 65% of the time it isn’t because they lack the expertise to differentiate wine. Rather it’s because they only drink Central Valley California wine that really does all taste the same.
Experts tend to like wines that challenge them, that are "interesting," while casual wine drinkers like wines that are pleasant, comforting, and easy to drink. There shouldn't be any reason to condemn either of these preferences.
Merlot, well known for being reliably smooth and lush but often not a very subtle or complex wine, saw its market share drop temporarily after the 2004 film Sideways, in which one of the protagonists disparages it severely. I always thought that was a little unfair.
I might be a scrub at wines, but there's no question that actual Champagne gives me a very different buzz than even very nice Champagne-wannabe !
(I think I saw someone calling it "bubbly joy", which I can only agree with.)
Also, it's a bit weird to see the phrase "$10 plonk", or is that for a ~5 L cubi, rather than a bottle ? Or is it just that high Californian cost of living ?
P.S.: Never mind, 10€ for a 0.75L bottle seems to be today indeed on the bottom end for reds, I guess I might have gotten confused by table whites and pinks typically being around half that (and bottom tier Champagne not being *that* much more expensive), and especially quite a bit of inflation the last time I bought a red a few years ago !
I'm real skeptical that alcohol can give a different high based on small differences in the grapes used and stuff. A lot of people can't tell any difference or can barely tell a difference between entirely different substances — e.g., morphine and heroin, or various benzos, various substituted amphetamines, etc. — but the same active ingredient in mildly different grape juice causes a different high?
I agree. And yet my experience keeps repeating itself. Though I admit it's highly susceptible to various confounders : the ritual itself is probably the biggest one : you don't drink champagne and beer in the same situations !
P.S.: No wait, I forgot that I was actually comparing Champagne to other sparkly whites. No idea how much "it's not 'real' Champagne" can be a confounded here. I will also have to specifically try Cremants as it has been suggested to be a good alternative.
About 20 years ago I was visiting France coming from Romania (a country of good wines but also, at the time, poverty. Much less so now). I was absolutely floored that we could drink the cheap wines - in Romania, the bottom shelf was probably literally dangerous. Last time I tried a bottom shelf bottle I took one sip, stopped, went to the sink to spit it out and never tried again - it was NOT wine. In France on the other hand one of the best things we tried was a 2 eur bottle of Port.
My personal rules is still to just skip the cheapest wines, and drink what I feel like over 6 eur - except in France where I just drink what I feel like.
Anecdotic, but 100% in support of what you're saying.
You bring back fond memories of drinking Premiat wines during my college years. These Romanian wines were sold in the US very cheaply at the time due to some strange import deal with PepsiCo. The story I heard was that Romania was strapped for foreign currency, so they were literally trading wine for Pepsi syrup. Whether or not this was true, their red wines became favorites among my friends. We thought they were better and more interesting than anything we could afford from California. I think they were about $3.75 a bottle.
Just normal food coloring. A lot of red (something like a quarter of one of those tiny bottles) plus one drop of blue. After I revealed it someone said that it was "the wrong color for a Rioja", which is something I have no idea how to parse and suggests that you might need more knowledge than I have to get it exactly right.
Funny, I would have thought it would have been the wrong flavor for a Rioja as well.
I've heard the red/white wine study discussed at the university cafeteria in Paris. Of note: (a) people discussed it accurately - as Scott has - as a case of how givens (in this case, whether the wine is red or white) affect perception (a molecule present in the nose of both some reds and some whites, say); (b) it was not considered scandalous. Lots of reds cannot possibly be confused for whites (way too much tannin) but some particular reds (light in tannin) taste much like some whites - "objectively speaking", i.e., roughly the same molecules are dominant in the smell and flavour profiles, if I understand correctly - even if they are perceived differently.
But Rioja? I haven't had a Rioja that is light enough yet (in flavor or in color), but perhaps I am just ignorant.
You might like this scene from the sitcom "Black Books", where Bernard and Manny have drunk by mistake a £7,000 bottle of wine and are trying to recreate it in order to replace the bottle:
Just a fun note about scents that people don't want to admit exist (smells like cat urine from your article).
One of my friends likes the smell of whiteout. We (her friends) were understandably concerned, so I suggested that we contact some perfume companies to see if they had anything that smelled like it (for those of you not familiar with whiteout, think paint).
After laughing, the couple of companies I called denied having such a line of products. So we went to a mall to try in person. The first place we struck out at, but then we found a remarkable honest vendor who was indeed able to find a match for whiteout. My friend did buy it
I love the concept of taking something designed to obscure one's sense of sight and using it to obscure one's sense of smell. Next will be a recording of people brushing whiteout onto paper to cover up ambient noise and trigger the tingles. Whiteout does it all!
Ok. So, Scott, how does your investigation of "wine discernment"* inform your consideration of jhanas?
* I really did not like the title of the piece. Shouldn't it have been "Is wine discernment fake?"?
What maybe might also be considered in such investigations is the problem of "false precision". In this substack, I find that almost always when someone brings up IQ as a measure for something there is an undercurrent that 105 is somehow really different than 95. Or when ranking is involved in anything. To me these are versions of failure to understand variation. See W E Deming.
Re IQ: See part two of https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/19/beware-summary-statistics/ , I think "the set of all people with IQ 95 vs. the set of all people with IQ 105" is a very different question than "one guy who got a 95 on an IQ test vs. one guy who got 105".
I agree that wine, the drink made of fermented grapes, definitely exists and the article wasn't about denying that.
Re: jhanas - it looks like wine expertise is mostly real, so I'm not sure what I should update on. When experts flail, it seems to be at questions around picking up very small gradations, and whether any attempt to be careful enough not to miss them also leads to hallucinating ones that aren't there. I think this is different from "are you feeling orgasmic bliss right now vs. just feeling normal?"
I got a different take away from your wine article. Not that wine discernment is mostly real but highly precise wine discernment (especially without significant training, practice and natural ability is _mostly_ BS but there are _tiny_ group of super tasters.
Is a super wine taster like a super meditator?
Clearly I thought from your article that there is such a thing as feigned or self deception in the ability to actually be a wine super discerner. But, if I understood your position on jhanas, you were unwilling to assert the same skepticism to jhana claims.
The purpose of your consideration of jhana was, as I understood it, the idea that maybe jhana could be used as a as therapeutic. But if it really hard to programmatically train wine tasting discernment skills, I would think that jhana attainment (assuming it's existence) is a lot harder than being a good, let alone expert, sommalier.
So the original question: what does your wine discernment investigation tell you about an investigation into jhana attainment as potential non-addictive therapeutic.
I think part of a rationalist protocol is skepticism without cynicism. But I got the sense that you have not applied the same amount of skepticism to these two things.
As to false precision issues, while related to wine discernment claims, that might be best for an open thread.
I think both are hard, because they require hardware. Wine tasting just needs a good nose. I got COVID in the first wave (Europe), my smell went away completely for ~2-3 weeks, then returned partially, had parosmia since, and it's now getting better. Finally I was able to taste/smell a nice Sauvignon Blanc just last month. But the whole experience is less intensive, less legible, harder to dwell in/on it, harder to feel, harder to use it to compute [to compare it to previous experiences, harder to recall when trying to compare with subsequent experiences]. (And I tried a few times in the years since, and initially there was basically zero noticeable improvement, and now it starts to cross into the okay-ish territory.)
Grokking/getting meditation probably also requires a certain brain and personality. (At least this is my hypothesis. Otherwise half the world would be Zen Buddhists by now, right? Also it's likely very hard to teach/memeify, compared to "God personally sacrificed himself to help bear our sins, so get yourself together and be a bit selfless for the community", and so on. It'll be interesting to see how much neurofeedback can change this.)
Isn't the question "have you been feeling better than drugs orgasmic bliss for 10 minutes straight, the kind you can just float in, while you hardly had some of your attention spent on sustaining it" vs "have you been having a vague but kind of vivid-ish sense of orgasmic bliss while stressing yourself for 10 minutes to try to remember it and mostly succeeding"?
And of course there might be a middle ground like "feeling endless joy for living, seeing, for the sunlight, the trees, the colors, seeing other people walking on the street, feeling every step while I'm moving, anticipating meeting with my friends, at that super great pizza place" (which was a very weird fireworks-in-my-brain episode after half a day of down mood at home, followed by anxiety of waiting for said pals at said pizza place, all completely sober .. *shrug* ... turns out endless joy runs out fast, but maybe jhanas are careful cognitive/emotional loops that keep it going for a while).
Is this a magazine that will take submissions and then publish them based on quality? (Comparisons to rating wines left unstated.) I don't see a way to submit things, contact the editors, or provide feedback in any way.
I did enjoy the articles I've read, but it also seems like the authors are a collection of friends. Seems fine for a first article (who else is going to publish to your nascent magazine?) but is that intended to be the future mode as well?
What kept the French fighting for 58 days at Dien Bien Phu when they should have long before surrendered? Vinogel, "a dehydrated block of wine that could be rehydrated with water. Nicknamed “Tiger Blood” by troops, it was often eaten as a solid block, no doubt to maximize the concentration of alcohol."
(If anyone was wondering how you can dehydrate wine and keep the alcohol, which you'd think would boil or evaporate away first, apparently "Vinogel was a dehydrated wine product, reduced to 1/3 of its volume and gelled to maintain alcohol titration." So, not like 'dry water', but I guess the gel itself was enough to retain alcohol.)
I work in the data side of the wine business. Just a couple of comments on what is a really good article.
The actual difference between red and white wine can be far less than a someone not ITB will naively guess. Color is not a reliable indicator of many qualities. There are incredibly light (in body) red wines and white wines made like red (more contact with grape skins) that fell like reds. In short, the variance within a class can be larger than between classes. And since wine is typically a mostly natural agricultural product with a lot of human choices, the variance between the same wine across vintages is often larger than across types. To account for this, nearly every one of the studies you mention you the most processed, industrial product wines available. The wines are also picked to be as homogenous as possible so the deck is stacked.
Somm training and prowess relies on typical examples of the wine. I can pull out something that will trick nearly everyone but that is just being deliberately obscurantist versus a test of ability. They also train on the exact opposite of the wines mentioned above as used in these studies. The goal is also not merit, but identification. Many people - self included - love atypical wines more in areas where the typical is quite frankly banal or bad. This carries over where legal tasting panels used to assess whether a wine qualifies to meet their requirements are known to disqualify wines for being too good (ie atypical.)
Nobody in the biz - except maybe major commercial producers - use really great statistical methods in any form. When I looked at the methods of some of the 'it's all the same studies' don't use solid methods like the triangle test. (It has been a spell since I've look at these in details, tbf.) And nobody in the wine industry or hospitality industry does either. There is effectively zero statistical rigour including on related industry claims like wine preservation tools. And we won't even touch how badly the term 'double blind' get used among wine people.
Competitions. Gold medal is very misleading. Pretty much all wine competition assign "Gold" to the upper 25% or some cutoff of ALL entries. The goal isn't a serious evaluation - it is commerce. When I did judging, we were encouraged to round up when in doubt - the opposite I'd do professionally where if you are on the fence, it is the lower option. The variance in immense and most "Gold" are innocuous wines that don't offend anyone. The only way to analyze this would be to take Triple or Consensus Gold which meant ALL tasters were in agreement that this was a Gold level wine. That particular article was garbage, tbh.
Undervalued is the immense disconnect between our words and what we perceive in taste. We just aren't good at it without training or reference points and this applies to even wine critics and writers. And a lot is just personal history. My favorite example is "chocolate." If person A grew up on Hershey and person B grew up on 90% cacao, their experience and reference of chocolate are almost incommensurate.
I read once that the biggest difference for red/white wine, as far as regular consumers go, is that white wines are typically served chilled. Cooling any wine to 2-8°C was said to have a larger effect on flavour/mouthfeel/expectations compared to the relatively small differences in chemistry from different grapes at 25°C. As a result, drinking any wine chilled makes it taste "white". Is this something that's relevant for sommeliers or competitions? Or do the professionals end up comparing wines at more similar temperatures (either deliberately, or maybe because they taste in the cellar instead of the fridge)?
If you cool a red wine that was in a barrel for months, has a lot of tannin & a lot of acids and alcohol and the usual ingredients needed to feel that the wine has a "full body", that you can almost "chew", stays in your mouth for long, the aftertaste lingers for a long time, etc... so if you cool that then you'll feel that it's meh.
Whereas fresh young white wines made with a reductive technique (steel tank, no air) drank warm is also a bit meh.
Of course it's mostly about personal preference, but as far as I know barrel aged full body wines are the ones that go well with warmer drinking temperature, and has nothing to do with color directly. (Because color is due to a few weeks of coloring on the grapes, and the grapes already largely determine what the winemaker will do with it - eg. put it on the grapes for color *and* put it in a barrel for body. Of course, of course, the soaking on the grapes does alter the taste significantly, but not as much as the other factors. See "orange wines", white wines soakes on the skin of white grapes.)
I really appreciate this context on the cultural/business, especially re: competition ratings. It helps me understand how meaningful or significant those ratings are--both in the context of interpreting articles like this that make arguments based off them, and also in the context of being at my local liquor store trying to pick a bottle.
Sidebar thingy is neat. Section captions that appear on mouseover should be in a typeface either more or less similar to the body text. Hamburger and eponymous * could stand to fade in and out over about half a second.
IIRC a lot of flavours have some nasty smells in them below the threshold at which we can pick them out individually but high enough to give a more complex flavour. Aldi UK wine is generally not unreasonable considering its price range.
I suspect that wine is much like art: it's pretty easy for everybody to agree that a particular piece is terrible. And that a particular piece shows significant skill. But trying to determine which of two different artworks is "better" is far harder. I'd note a significant difference between the experts and the general public here, as well. The public at-large seemed to like the works of Thomas Kinkade. The art world hated his stuff.
A simple way to distinguish good from bad is to drink just good or expensive stuff for a while, then you will quickly notice the bad. I first experienced this with whiskey, but it works for wine too.
After a while, one can also distinguish that some wines seem simplistic or one-note, while others are more subtle. I suppose the subtle ones are better. I prefer them, at least.
One has to wonder if it's a good idea to learn to dislike cheap wine, though. How can that possibly benefit the typical consumer (as opposed to the expert)? As opposed to learning to like expensive wine more than before, which seems potentially productive.
Liking cheap stuff is great! It saves you money! :-)
I’m not surprised people don’t rank expensive wines better than cheaper:
1. Cheaper products of all kinds are usually sweeter. I taste tested bourbon and the cheapest was the sweetest. People like sugar, so that will break those rankings
2. Aficionados want to not be bored. They’ve tried the popular flavors and are now seeking out niche flavors. People who haven’t gotten bored yet will rank the popular flavor above the niche flavor.
There's probably something interesting to say here about how west coast IPAs happened in the world of craft beer over the past couple decades. People who started to get into beer noticed that IPAs had these really strong hoppy flavors, and they could identify them, and so they got into beers with really intense versions of these. Many purists prefer lighter beers, and beginners almost always do, but this middlebrow level likes the things that taste distinctive.
I have a half baked theory of why American beer is like American politics: excessively polarised. Unsophisticated Rube's drink watery stuff like Budweiser, so "sophisticated" types feel the need to overreact, signalling their status by drinking ridiculously hoppy IPAs.
My perception of IPA's these days is that they tend towards fruit salad. I avoid them. My recollection of IPAs back in the day was that they were dry and astringent. I liked them back then.
The idea that heavily hopped IPAs are the be-all end-all of American craft beer is about as out of date as referring to teenagers as “Millenials”.
(And for what it’s worth, regular Budweiser’s biggest problem isn’t that it’s “watery”, as much as it’s unbalanced. Not nearly enough hops to offset the sweetness from malt and the fillers (corn and rice))
Good take. We were in Czech Republic a couple of years ago BP. I thought I had died and gone to beer heaven. Most of the beers were pilsners (Plzen called Pilsen in German is a Czech city). Those beers are well hopped. You see hops growing all over the country.
I'm fully persuaded the Czechs have collectively made some kind of horrifying deal with Satan, by the terms of which in exchange for Czech beer the Prince of Darkness collects the souls of everyone born within 250 klicks of Pražský hrad during this millenium and the next.
The Czechs are notoriously atheist, but I think it has more to do with historically being caught in the middle of all the religious wars and getting sick of it, rather than an explicit deal with Satan. I also think that if they did make some sort of a deal, Satan would be spending all his time trying to find a way out of it.
I'm not trying to badmouth either Pilsners nor anyone who enjoys Pilsners--beer has enough variety for everyone to have something to their taste!--but I personally find them to be a little too lightly flavoured to be a primary drinking beer. Medium-bodied ales (or the more flavour-heavy lagers, which excludes almost anything in the American mainstream) are for me a better mix of drink-qua-drink and general experience, whereas a sufficiently light Pilsner can sometimes feel like it's dominated by its own effervescence.
I do recommend trying Czech pilsners before writing the entire class off. As a friend once said after trying his first Czech beer "this has everything you'd want from a lager... *and flavour*".
(You should also try Czech dark beers - "tmavé pivo" - if you're ever in the country; they're a lot harder to get outside)
I’m actually the same, I can tell that a good Pilsner is a good beer, but I just like beer (even lighter beers) to be a bit more heavily flavored. There’s a local place here that makes a great dry hopped lager that fits the bill - not bitter, just “crisp”, but the dry hopping really takes it to the next level.
Pure alcohol should not be bitter at all (although almost all beer will have some bitter notes) - maybe you’re hypersensitive to bitter flavors, or have a mild alcohol allergy?
I strongly agree that alcohol itself tastes bitter.
It's a different bitterness than that of beer/hops, and it is evident in all drinks with a significant alcohol content. That bitterness was - and is - a barrier to my enjoyment of alcoholic drinks.
And I once knew an alcoholic who claimed he perceived alcohol as distinctly sweet. So there may be individual variation in how alcohol 'tastes'.
This is true, buts it is craft breweries’ fault. They are the ones who argued that style=quality, and then when Ab InBev started making overly hopped beers the whole craft beer movement blew up. It was a monster of their own creation. The same thing is happening in the natural wine scene now.
I first encountered IPAs in Boston in the 90s - enjoyed them for a couple years as something new & different, but burnt out on the excessive bitterness. Now I can’t stand the damn things. Porters and stouts are more my speed (unless it’s super hot out, when an ice-cold Miller High Life does the trick). But some of the gose-style sour beers which are starting to get popular are pretty great. Just wonder whether I’ll still enjoy them years from now, or burn out on them like I did with IPAs (or the banana-clove notes of Belgian-style ales).
Hmm. This thread seems to have all the snobbery I associate with wine drinkers. I'm a never winer (whiner?) who grew up during an era when every town in our great state (not CA) had its own brewery. Some were delicious, some decidedly less so. Often the purity of the local water was heavily touted. The difference between beer drinkers then, who enjoyed a variety of unique brews--each with its diehard fans and its detractors--and todays "craft" beer drinkers, is that craft beer drinkers can't seem to just say, "I like this one; that's not for me," but instead try to elevate their status by imitating the sophisticated and unintelligible vocabulary of sommeliers.
This is probably some of it - lighter lagers and blonde ales have so few ingredients that it’s hard to make them great unless you really really nail the technique.
Sweetness was key to the successful marketing ploy of the Pepsi Challenge of the early 1980s: Pepsi has about 10% more sugar than Coke, so when poured out in tiny glasses for the Pepsi Challenge, the first sip of Pepsi tastes better, at which point you were asked to choose. So Pepsi would win its Pepsi Challenge.
But in real life, lots of people get tired of Pepsi's extra sweetness as they keep on drinking and thus find Coke less tiresome while drinking a full 12 ounces. (I suspect Coke appeals slightly more to adults and Pepsi to kids.)
Bizarrely, Coke executives didn't seem to grasp this and in 1984 brought out New Coke, or as Dave Barry called it, Pepsi-Flavored Coke.
Coke drinkers hated New Coke, so after that unforced error, the same executives who'd botched by switching the recipe to New Coke triumphantly countered their mistake by rebranding old Coke as Classic Coke and launching a huge marketing campaign around authenticity and tradition as it junked New Coke.
Remarkably, Coke came out of this fiasco slightly ahead in market share of where it had been before New Coke.
Probably, expert wine tasters are trained not to overrate the sweeter wine on an initial small sip so as not to fall into the Pepsi Challenge mistake.
I've heard you should just disregard the first sip of anything; the first sip is always a shock to the palate and tastebuds. (Or in predictive coding terms, your top-down and bottom-up sensory processes haven't yet finished arguing about what they're experiencing.) Take the first sip, adjust to it, and then judge the second sip.
Asterisk sounds relevant to my interests, based on the articles above. Does it have an RSS feed or some other sort of syndication? I can use kill-the-newsletter if need be, but that's kind of a hack.
The "experts" were less wrong than simply unaware of their own ignorance. The best of California was simply not available to them in any quantity to make a judgement, so they relied on the default position and what they had been exposed to only affirmed their position. Spurrier went to great effort to pick a tiny subset of great California wines, replicating in person for CA what the market opinion of decades had determined were the best in France.
While there were and still are levels of Gallic chauvinism, the more common reaction was for the French actively investigate wines from other places and then significantly invest in making wines there.
I was once at a blind tasting and said that one of the wines tasted like axle grease, and the others said "oh, riesling often tastes of petrol" (they were Australians), and it turned out, it was indeed a riesling! (And for what it's worth, I did enjoy it.)
One of the best (or at least most interesting-in-a-good-way) rums I’ve ever had was from a shuttered distillery in Kingston. Tasted distinctly of diesel.
Whew! Always a little unsure what kinks the younger generation gets up to these days...
Although I personally haven't had occasion to grease an axle bearing since 1982 or so. Do they even sell grease in cardboard tubes at Pep Boys any more?
Oh yes. Those of us who still maintain farm property, trailers, tractors, implements, etc go through quite a lot of it. https://lucasoil.com/products/grease/red-n-tacky-grease is my go-to, usually dispensed out of a Milwaukee M18 powered grease gun. You can get it at most auto part stores and sometimes general hardware places.
You can also get gasoline like smells in Sauterne's. This is an exceptionally sweet wine that is picked after the grapes have been infected with botrytis cinerea (also known as noble rot). This greatly increases the complexity of flavor. Sauterne is the favored pairing for foie gras.
By far the most surprising and yet, somehow, unoffensive wine flavor I have encountered is bandaid. I have experienced about half a dozen times in 80's era Bordeaux's.
Have you had Islay scotches? A lot of people insist they taste like bandaids (I don’t get that note personally unless I go digging for it - but I do love Laphroaig).
Laphroaig and Lagavulin are probably the two I have mostly drank. I agree that in my experience "bandaids" would be a stretch as a descriptor for either.
Supposedly these aromas are “chlorophenols” - it’s a defect in beer and apparently comes most often with wild yeast reacting with chlorine in city water. Various phenols are of course what gives peated whisky the smoky flavors too. So I buy that it is there. But I guess some people are probably more sensitive to the flavor than others. (One flavor I seem to be sensitive to is whatever it is that gives Simcoe hops a “cat pee” note)
Some of the flavour molecules in a bottle of 'phroaig very much used to be a clod of peat from Jacobean times or somesuch that were dug up, dried out, and burned to dry the malt. Sustainably, one would hope, given that it takes centuries to lay down a shovel's depth of peat.
This looks like an exciting project. If you could, please build an app. I don’t like reading in browsers anymore, an app is just so much better in that it’s optimized for reading, toggling, and saving articles for later.
As a software dev, please don't devote any resources to building an app. Well-formatted html can already be displayed in many different display formats, and this is the perfect use-case for RSS anyway.
But he's got a point in the sense that an app optimized to read HTML... is (supposed to be) a browser ! So it's kind of weird that web developers are trying to "reinvent the wheel" *inside* the browser...
And the state of browsers today in some way is kind of sad : overwhelming Chromium dominance, Firefox barely hanging on... (still "had to" convert its plugins to be compatible with Chromium, but it makes it a 2nd class citizen), and basically only Safari reskins allowed on iOS.
It's kind of weird how we've regressed : for instance Opera notes could be shared across devices, including smartphones, when the iPhone hadn't even been revealed yet !
(Plugins are supposed to fill that feature gap today, but I keep stumbling onto plugins that only work on desktop and not mobile Firefox !)
Crucial nitpick, but browsers aren't "optimized to read HTML" (like you implied), they're optimized to *display* HTML, as the publisher styled it. And often publisher styles are dogshit, full of bloated js trackers, ads, and a general wealth of thing that distract from the reading experience (this site seems fine, but it's an exception).
I'm actually surprised that we haven't seen a browser that really doubles down on "reader mode and user-curation of articles" - though it'll probably come from the "note-taking app" space, rather than the "browser" space. It needs to be big enough that any text-content-focused website that doesn't properly use semantic markup and put their posts into <article> tags[1] gets shamed into compliance.
>basically only Safari reskins allowed on iOS.
I'm really hoping the EU ends up suing Apple over this along with the other things they're hitting Apple for, because it's textbook antitrust (remember, Microsoft got sued for even *bundling* IE for free).
"There can be objectively bad pizza — burnt, cold, mushy — but there isn’t really any objective best pizza. Fancier and more complicated pizzas can be more expensive, not because they’re better, but because they’re more interesting. Maybe wine is the same way."
That's pretty much exactly what the local wine shop person in what was my neighborhood between the 13th and the 14th arrondissement used to say. Good wine for 5eur? It's a stretch but can be done - here's a favorite for doctoral defenses. Most wines she recommended were between 6 and 10 eur. (Of course part of this may have been natural adaptation to my pockets and those of my neighbors.) Above 10eur, she said, you are no longer paying for quality as such, you are paying for complexity.
This reminds me of the fact that psychoanalysis was practiced for decades and people paid good money to go in weekly or daily to have their lives and dreams diced up in Freudian terms. Untold number of published academic papers analyzed movies and literature identifying Oedipal and Electra complex themes.
In undergrad I realized that I could leverage pretty basic analysis gleaned from one abnormal psych course to get fantastic grades on my lit papers. I still maintain Freudian analysis is fine as a critical theory, not terribly useful for psychotherapy
My girlfriend is a lit PhD and apparently Freudian analysis is a big thing in literary analysis. It makes some sense to me - everything in a book is deliberately there, whereas real life has a lot of random noise and so pareidolia is a danger
Your essay about wine tickled a notion I have about the varieties of aesthetic experience. I used to teach college art courses. One of the courses I taught was 'Introduction to Studio,' which was basically a primer on what an artistic practice looks like, but I worked in a bit of art appreciation as a way to help students think about the experience of art. As part of the course, we'd go to the school gallery and look at whatever show was up. One student and I spent some time looking at a seascape photograph, and I walked the student through a chain of associations I had looking at the work—how the composition made me think of highways, then to the idea of the road trip, then to the great expansiveness of America, and how that road trip is something of a new world phenomenon and what might be extrapolated from that. I told the student how my father had never been west of Illinois, but he was going to drive his RV out west the next year, and how I hoped he wouldn't be disappointed or felt that he'd waited too late. I told him how Robert Persig's book shaped my father, and the ominous clouds piled up in the distance within the picture plane of that seascape photograph loomed over the sea like Phaedres over the narrator of that excellent book, and like the limitations of my father's disappointments had loomed over him. I told my student the picture made me sad my father.
I made the point to my student that of course the picture had absolutely nothing to say about my father, but that one of the best experiences of art are when we open ourselves to the associations art can spark. Nothing I said to my student about the picture was bullshit—that's the point; it was just playing free association until I found something meaningful to me, and it enhanced my experience of being there in that gallery, looking at that picture. It's not always that a picture gives you enough to work with or you can be bolloxed to make the effort to appreciate art in that way, but that when you do, you get something truly personal that has nothing to do with the artist's intent.
Sometimes you can taste a glass of wine and try to pull from it jamminess or dried fruit or pepperiness and the terróir of the hills of Napa Valley, and from there you go to your ex-boyfriend who put too much pepper on things, and you wonder what went wrong, and if you're happier now than you would have been if things had worked out. And sometimes, you take a sip and ignore it because you're just stalling until you can think of something to say.
*I understand that most people who talk about wine are not, in fact, doing all this—they are employing bullshit jargon to seem intelligent and discriminating. Nevertheless, there is a type of experience possible that is evocative and lingual and not wholly bullshit.
Pepsi is sweeter than Coke. Pepsi does better in taste tests because taste tests use small servings. With normal serving sizes, the sweetness of Pepsi is cloying.
If you're grabbing for a little something to eat, would you be more drawn to a single Hershey's Kiss, or an equivalent sized bit of steak? If your options for dinner are an 8 oz. filet mignon or an 8 oz. bag of Hershey's Kisses, do you prefer the steak or the Kisses?
I really liked Kelsey Piper's review of Will MacAskill's book - it identified something I could see around the edges in much of the discussion, but hadn't yet drawn out myself. (It also helps clarify that my reaction to longtermist thinking seems to be one that she shares.)
I was a bit less impressed by the ones about monkeypox and pandemic prevention, but I think they're trying to illustrate someone's thought processes, and not necessarily written in the best way to help clarify something for the reader.
Maybe they were to polite to comment that your red wine was 'lacking in body/ depth'. I love a good fruity/ deep red wine. Kendal Jackson pinot noir never displeases me... unless it's gone sour.
>Why Isn’t The Whole World Rich? Professor Dietrich Vollrath’s introduction to growth economics. What caused the South Korean miracle, and why can’t other countries copy it?
Sorry, but this article is absolutely horrendous. Just inexcusably bad. It doesn't even pretend to consider heritable factors, even just to dismiss them. Not a single mention of intelligence, IQ, heredity, genetics, or biological variation of any kind. Isn't it bizarre that high intelligence populations /just happen/ to build good institutions?
Saying that South Korea proves that dirt poor countries can become rich quickly is at best extremely misleading, because South Korea did not enjoy the benefits that poor countries have today in the form of highly developed global trade networks, the internet and availability of knoweldge etc. Nigeria has all the non-intelligence advantages in the world over 1960 South Korea. If South Korea of 1960 sprung into existence today it would industrialize insanely fast.
It would be unfair to expect a professor to talk about this issues publicly. I think if he was going to, he could argue something like:
- South Korea and Taiwan were poorer than Honduras or the Congo in 1950. Then the former two countries took off while the latter two didn't. Maybe this is biological factors which the first two have and the second two don't, but it at least took some policy factors to enable the biological factors, and we should worry about what those are.
- Probably for any given level of biological factor, you'll do better or worse if you have better or worse policies.
- It's still unclear which direction the IQ <---> wealth correlation goes (see eg the rise in Irish IQ from abysmal to First World normal with rising Irish development in the mid-20th century) and we ought to be prepared for at least some of the causation to be wealth -> IQ, in which case it's still important to figure out which policies increase wealth.
I haven't been able to find good information on the IQ of undeveloped Asian areas (eg Korea before its miracle) and my understanding is this is still a topic of debate (for the five people who are still willing to discuss it openly).
I think Vollrath's story is useful for the policy half of possibility-space, and given that it would be impossible to get the article published if he even nodded to the other half's existence it's fine for him to write it the way he did.
Over the last few generations, South Koreans have experienced perhaps the world's largest Flynn Effects for both average IQ and average height (something like 6 inches in height). Young South Koreans used to be shorter than Japanese but now are taller.
It's a serious problem that a "rationalist"-branded publication is afraid to even broach taboo subjects, there's no truthseeking worthy of the name to be had on politically charged topics if such limitations are established from the get-go. Maybe reputation-conscious professors should be encouraged to post anonymously somehow?
The lack of SSC/ACX-tier comments is sorely felt too, I'd say that your review plus the resulting discussion is a miles better overview of this topic.
Damn dude, they just got their first issue out. They have no idea how the populace will react to it. Give them time?
If you’re still unsatisfied, you can always do all of the work it would take to gather even this many articles with a rationality lens on them, plus all the work to edit them to be punchier and less afraid of taboo, and finally all the work to publish that alternative.
"Nigeria has all the non-intelligence advantages in the world over 1960 South Korea. If South Korea of 1960 sprung into existence today it would industrialize insanely fast."
I believe that average IQ matters for economic development, but this is just a factually incorrect statement. In 1960, South Korea was ~20 million people, almost all of whom were ethnically Korean and spoke the Korean language and who existed in a unified political entity called South Korea. Nigeria came into being as a collection of various ethnic groups, speaking a total of >500 different languages, and with a north-south split between Islam and Christianity, all agglomerated together by colonial boundaries. And then throw in oil just to give all those groups something else to fight over.
If you're looking for a natural experiment on the importance of IQ to development, this comparison is not a good one. In fact, if you're going to compare Nigeria to Korea, you ought to compare it to the whole of the Korean peninsula. Koreans are smart, but even they're not smart enough to make Juche work.
What? The US was culturally and linguistically homogeneous (at least, homogeneous enough) throughout most of its history. English-speaking WASPS made it what it is. Sure we had multi-ethnic immigration, but that's what the 'melting pot' was for - you submit your native culture to the dominant American one.
I would disagree, unless we're really talking only about the colonial era and 50 years after. Sure, there are traces of WASPy dominance in New England, among the Boston Brahmins, but I would say as early as the Civil War you find New York City has a seriously polycultural and polyglot influence, Philadelphia has a lot of Italian and German, the Midwest has a stronger German and Scandinavian influence, Appalachia is overrun with Scots-Irish drunkards, Florida by Cuban refugees, the Southwest has a massive Spanish-Mexican-Mesoamerican influence, et cetera. And this is leaving entirely aside the influence of 20th and 21st century immigration, which has been also substantial.
I don't know enough to make a real comparison between Nigeria and India. Nigeria doesn't have a caste system, with all of its seemingly endless subdivisions, and the antagonism between Muslims and Christians seems lower than between Muslims and Hindus in India. Those are positives, but I'm not sure to what extent Nigeria has been able to leverage them.
Both places can certainly be physically overwhelming in similar ways.
Fun fact: North Koreans are very genetically similar to South Koreans. Also Taiwanese are very genetically similar to Chinese.
Somehow there’s extremely large variation in economic outcomes despite the similar genetics! I think that rather suggests that genetic variation in intelligence is not the most important factor.
It's definitely not the most important factor between North Korea and South Korea, but that doesn't mean it's not an important factor for other differences.
We wouldn't expect the economic differences between countries to come down to a single factor, there are certainly many factors involved. Is genetics one of them? What sort of data would help us find out?
In all fairness, the special considerations in each case make them quite... untypical. And the overall sample size of under 200 countries doesn't give us very much to work with, statistically.
But anyways: in Korea you have almost the most extreme two systems possible: dictatorship bent on military power and maintaining control, vs free market set up by an extreme outlier of dictator hellbent on making it an economic power.
And Taiwan... I'm just as likely as the next guy to say that "free market good", but Taiwan is a very poor argument for that: it was distilled from the absolute creme of China, in IQ and entrepreneurial spirit, plus a shitton of wealth to get it started.
Both examples are hard to generalize to anything other than "this particular path gets to prosperity".
>genetic variation in intelligence is not the most important factor
It's like saying that money isn't the most important factor for happiness. Sure, it's not enough by itself, but when it's absent, one tends to discover its paramount importance very quickly.
Of course, IQ isn't absent anywhere. Intelligence is normally distributed and at most there is less than 1 sigma difference between any observed large populations. Accordingly, there are plenty of brilliant people in any population to form a successful society. Granted, some low IQ people may be a net drain on the society (much like conservatives in the U.S.) but the society can still prosper. \S
It is intellectually irresponsible to mention "Nigeria" and "intelligence" in the same sentence without also mentioning the Igbo. If they'd won the Nigerian Civil War, you might well be asking why South Korea wasn't doing as well as Biafra.
I don't totally see why you think this is such an overwhelmingly bad omission when this topic isn't that well-understood yet (particularly in terms of which is the root factor and how cyclical development/IQ are), but also it seems like you think genetics are way stronger than I think is plausible based on history.
For example, the world is only a couple of centuries into industrialization, but the Roman Empire lasted for centuries at a higher development level than the world reached afterword for centuries more (see e.g. https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-i-words/), so I dunno how I should rate Italians in terms of presumed IQ. Ditto for China, which was probably the most advanced civilization in the world for hundreds of years, and then fell heavily behind, and now is sort of catching up or something, it's complicated, we'll see in fifty years. Ditto for the Middle East which has at times been at the forefront of mathematics and science but currently sports a variety of mediocre governments.
If nothing else I think it can be safely assumed that non-genetic factors can easily dwarf genetic factors on periods of time at least centuries long.
More so than if expert wine tasters are fake or not, it is if their ideas and preference are applicable to the common person. They are more like connoisseurs in a genetic+social sub-group who are both able to detect, care about, and are interested in expensive wines and the very subtle differences between them.
One also cannot discount the propensity for people to try to 'in group' themselves by adopting the habits, concerns, and interests of the aristocracy. A common theme is the pursuit and interest in rare and expensive items to signify their status. Be it playing golf, going skiing, expensive watches-wine-real estate-handbags-clothes etc. there are many people looking to fit in socially and various 'real' areas of highly specialised 'expertise' develop, often with some element of truth in them with fancy/needless for time telling internal engineering workings of watches and useless wealth signalling gold plating with embedded diamonds.
But for the 95-99% of people who cannot reliably detect faint traces of chemicals and do not want to copycat and fake their own way into/maintain their place in 'high class' social circles by pretending or genuinely coming to care about wine or handbags or watches or cigars, then this information of wine tasting has no applicability. It truly is some dumb rich people thing like caviar, cigars, cheeses, cured pork, and wine.
In terms of expertise and tasting notes etc. being fake...if 92% of people who really try to pass the official wine tasters organisation fail...then by and large one can accurately expect almost every expert they meet to be fake/making it up/not very accurate/deluding themselves. Do those 92% failures who have spent 10+ years 'training their palette' go away and stop telling other people about which wines are better in their social lives? Do they never work in jobs in the restaurant or wine industry to make choices about suppliers or in producing or mixing wine? Of course they do!
So by and large the vast majority of expertise across the entire wine industry is demonstrably fake.
I'd say unless you are in that tiny genetic subset with the nose for it and the desire to 'act rich' or are just a motivated alcoholic or somehow come to appreciate these subtle games to stimulate your genetically gifted nose....then 100% of everything even the real experts say is 100% inapplicable to you and not worth the money for the experience of drinking it. And almost all wine expertise you will come across as a non-multi-multi millionaire in normal/regular fancy restaurants and wine sellers is fake price gouging nonsense.
The average person in the average context leading their normal lives has no need and cannot benefit from drinking wines which cost more, even if it does reliably fit into approved expert opinions. This is because you literally cannot taste or smell it. Even more so anyone would be much better off never drinking any alcohol of any kind, it is a harmful chemical with a few truly fake studies pretending a glass a day is somehow beneficial...it isn't and there are healthier ways to reduce stress than addiction and chemical dependencies. The evidence base for the good of wine is thin at best and industry funded.
The entire thing with wine is just like if a few rich people discovered a small subset of people who are like Beagles or Bears with a superior ability to detect ultra subtle differences most people cannot detect. Then they set up a huge game on top of an existing industry of wine making - and they set their hounds loose to identify rare wine tastes which they can then talk about while they put on airs at their fancy private aristocratic parties and exclusive restaurants. It is just a dumb rich people game with collectors and rarity and tulip bulbs for things almost none of the wealthy patrons can even taste.
Sounds pretty fake to me, even if there are a tiny core group of highly trained beagle people sniffing what are normally undetectable differences and include tastes and smells most people wouldn't appreciate even if they could smell them! Yes more cat piss and oak berry combinations...you can tell these are popular flavours for commoners due to all the oak-berry-nut flavoured non-alcoholic drinks on the market! Next to all the soda and fruit cordials all these 'notes' these experts are seeking out due to the difficulty in producing them and paying for them are...gross!
I don't get more out of drinking expensive wines, but I have rather childish taste buds in general. If somebody who is a connoisseur of French cuisine announced that French wine is fake, I'd be impressed. But how do we know that the Wine Is Fake advocates aren't just generally below average in discernment of taste and smell and are projecting their deficiencies onto most everybody else?
Hey friend, I'm a very broke member of the vanishingly small ACX blue collar contingent, and I don't think of good wine, cheese, cured meat, or a nice cigar as "dumb rich people things" at all. Maybe you don't enjoy things like that, and that's fine. But for me, something like a nice piece of Cowgirl Creamery Red Hawk aftert big joint with an old friend on a rainy day on my way to Pt Reyes is what makes an otherwise difficult, painful, and not very exciting life worth living. I remember with extreme clarity the first time I ever tasted really nice Jamaican rum. My first cuban remains a treasured sense memory, and the vividness of that memory is directly correlated with how novel and intense the taste of that cigar was.
I am an extremely status avoidant person, with an almost pathological mistrust of authority, so I'm pretty confident that my consumption isnt for the sake of seeming high status. Honestly, it just seems to me that you have what most people would consider an immature pallette, and cannot imagine that "90-95%" of people aren't exactly like you. It's totally fine to like what you like, but the sweeping and myopic assumptions you're making about people who like things you don't like are pretty ridiculous.
One of my all time favorite television series was the "Northern Exposure" about the the eccentric residents of a fictional small town in Alaska featuring the fish out of water adventures of a New York City native physician who is assigned to work in the town as repayment for his medical school loans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Exposure
One of my favorite episodes was No. 59: "The Big Feast" originally braodcast on March 22, 1993 • "To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Minnifield Communications, Maurice prepares one of his famously lavish parties, sparing no expense. ... Shelly accidentally breaks a very expensive bottle of Maurice's wine, a 1929 Château Latour, but Eve comes to the rescue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Northern_Exposure_episodes
Eve's rescue involves taking a bottle of ordinary wine, gluing on the original lable and doctoring it with things like peat moss. The bottle is drunk and no one is the wiser.
A notorious case of wine fraud was Rudy Kurniawan He was found to be offering more magnums of the limited edition 1947 Château Lafleur than had been produced, and his Clos St. Denis Grand Cru was labelled with a fictitious vintage. Sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment in 2013 in the United States, he was released in November 2020 and deported to Indonesia. Victims of Kurniawan's fraud include Bill Koch [yes one of those Kochs], who sued Kurniawan in 2009 alleging he sold fake bottles at auction and in private sales ... Koch and Kurniawan settled out of court in July 2014 for $3 million in damages, and Kurniawan should be completely debriefed regarding his knowledge of counterfeiting in the wine industry. Koch claimed to have spent $35 million tracking down the evidence to pursue his case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Kurniawan
I am very skeptical about wine. Most of the wine I buy is under $20 a bottle. I have had some very nice very expensive wines, but I generally don't think the extra cost is rewarded by tastier wine.
I've been making wines for 20+ years ...and first of all, taste is subjective. Experts really are experts. Anyone who can discern the difference between vintages, regions and varietals - damn!
If you can't tell the diff ... who cares? Buy the cheaper wine.
Some people have palates with a greater threshold for flavor.
Or perhaps, the taster offset the pH in his/her mouth by eating a tangerine or a piece of chocolate just before sipping. That can alone shift perception.
Also wine is a living thing in the bottle and its chemistry is constantly changing.
Finally, wine is very expensive to make. Hand harvesting, processing equipment, barrels ($800-$1,000 each), commissions and shipping. It's quite possible that a $100 wine actually cost $90 to make.
Is it also possible that a $1,000 wine costs $900 to make, or a $10,000 wine $9,000? Surely towards the high end there is a point where the price starts disconnecting from the "cost of production + reasonable profit margin" equation?
Your scenario is actually a disconnect from reality. Such wines are perceived more as art. Sure, you can pay a quarter million for a Chateau Margaux 1787. But, are we really talking about flavor anymore? Why do people pay so much for a painting that could have been drawn by a 5-year old?
Agree, 90% in production sounds unlikely to me. Very little margin for anything and anyone else. And there's no particular reason why supply/demand would result in a price just barely above production cost for wildly expensive wines.
Regarding food coloring, as an alternative you can buy black tasting glasses from Riedel (and perhaps others) to avoid such misdirection or vulgar hints.
I'd say identifying vintages seems hardest, if nothing else because it requires a lot of tasting and it can simply be hard to assemble a suitable vertical. (Also provides a devious way to defraud most drinkers.)
Finally, I should also mention that I unscientifically appreciate wine differently depending on the glass from which it is drunk. (Bombshell?)
I find the end of "Making Sense Of Moral Change" *weird*.
In the middle Christopher Leslie Brown argues a lot about the "false dichotomy between sincere activism and self-interested activism".
But then in the end he seems to go *against* this, rejecting antislavery being "part of the natural process of modernization"..?
But wasn't the Great British Empire "exporting antislavery" also partially self-serving ??
Certainly seems to be to me, after all, industrialization only kicked into high gear because of a set of extremely specific circumstances found in Great Britain at the time, which also gave them a large advance on the competition !
So the fact that Great Britain didn't *need* human "energy slaves" any more, would explain quite a lot why it was very politically expedient to bully anyone else that was benefiting from it !
(It's a bit more subtle than that, since it benefited quite a lot from slavery for specifically cotton-picking, but here too the article adds a piece that was missing from my puzzle : it was much more politically complicated for them to bully the growing USA than the various Ottoman-backed Barbary corsairs (et al.) that were already in decline but especially infamous for enslaving Europeans !)
(Unless of course his point was that the industrial revolution was not very likely, but it didn't read to me like that...)
Also, the bit about the USA "exporting democracy" reminded me of a commonly heard criticism about how they're mostly exporting neoliberalism (read : free market trade), which benefits them now that they're top dog, while they were gladly using protectionism while the Great Britain was the top dog. (And of course the Middle Eastern oil criticisms.)
Enjoyed the wine article a lot. Looks like a great magazine.
One thing you didn’t touch on that I think plays into this as well: *tasting* wine is not the same thing as *drinking* wine. Small samples with a regimented tasting method isn’t at all analogous to pouring a tall glass you quaff with snacks around the pool. I do really wonder how much that plays into it. (I’ve heard this as an explanation for the Pepsi taste test thing - Pepsi has a sweeter flavor that’s better in a little sip, but Coke tastes better by the glass).
And there is also mood - you mention different pizza types. I also enjoy Detroit style, it’s probably my “favorite” if I had to pick one, I have ready access to a decent chain that sells it… but it’s probably only about 20% of the pizza I get? Sometimes I just want some other kind of pizza. I enjoy big stout beers, but drink light IPAs more often because they are more refreshing. Etc.
So maybe wine tasting isn’t repeatable because taste just isn’t a repeatable science?
In "Making Sense Of Moral Change", the author claims that the abolition of slavery in England would not have happened when it did if not for the politicization of slavery, caused by the American Revolution.
This runs counter to arguments I've heard on ACX and similar spaces which is that if your goal is to improve policy, the last thing you should do is politicize an issue. Robin Hanson's idea of "pulling the rope sideways" is related to this.
What do people think about this difference? Is one strategy generally better than the other? Are there particular kinds of problems where politicization is a better way to shift policy, and others where it is worse?
Perhaps if you desire to make a significant policy shift, like abolishing slavery, that has many powerful interests against it, then it's necessary to make the issue political or else it's impossible to overcome the resistance against making the change. But if you have some smaller scale policy shift that doesn't have obvious detractors, then keeping the topic apolitical stops any resistance from forming.
In Britain the natural pro-slavery constituency was rather small (just a few rich dudes with foreign plantations) compared to the US. But I guess nobody really thought or talked about the issue much. Once it became politicised in the USA, Britons started taking about it and generally agreed that it was not nice.
Politicising the issue was bad for the US but the spillover effects were good for the UK.
I think if your main problem is that not enough people take your seriously you can do a lot worse than force people to take notice by dragging your issue into the culture war zone.
Minor comment here, since that site doesn't seem to have comments:
> People spend thousands of dollars for fancy wine that they enjoy no more than $10 plonk from the corner store.
This is missing the point. People don't buy wine blinded; they're buying a whole experience that includes 1. knowing what wine you are buying, 2. potentially, others knowing what wine you are buying. Buying an expensive fancy wine is rewarding in various ways that are not directly related to the taste of the wine, and those ways aren't "fake" or "insane".
We can't vote for top comments here but this one would get my vote. I try to avoid being a proselytzier for "The Elephant in the Brain" but I did love the book and do find it often apropos. Huge portions of what we think of as our enjoyment of food or drink or gifts or anything else enjoyed in company is an experience, but specifically an experience of signalling. This isn't bad or fake, it's just baked in to the human enjoyment of things. If I have guests over and I serve them wine, I won't tell them what I paid for it and none of them are experts, but they could all probably guess the cost within 20% plus or minus. Why? Because I'm signalling their value to me, my capacity to buy things, the importance I place on getting together, etc. Similarly if I serve them food it'll be x amount laborious or expensive (within careful limits) to signal these same things. None of this is conscious, but doing it wrong would feel gauche or tacky.
Signalling explanations are pretty much always correct and to the point, but also self-defeating. To engage in them is to defect in the social game, in other words, to signal low-status cluelessness. Everybody except the certain nerd archetype instinctively knows that the social game is more important than truth in public, and so these insights will never penetrate the mainstream.
Not if you don’t value what they signal. If you are already married and have a good group of friends you value and aren’t looking for replacements, what good is signaling you make 20, 50, $200k more a year? You can already signal that much more directly by paying for things like meals and vacations. And you have a lot more money to do that because you didn’t buy a $150,000 car when a $40,000 car will be 97% the same.
I don't agree with Scott's theory of the Pepsi challenge. My perception of the difference between Coke and Pepsi is that Coke is a bit more astringent, which cuts its sweetness some. Pepsi won taste tests because it is sweeter and most people when offered a choice will prefer sweeter foods and drinks.
But, over the long haul, sweetness without balance is cloying. That is why many people prefer Coke.
Coca Cola conducted an experiment when they reformulated the beverage in the late 1970s and marketed it as the New Coke. It was a disaster,at least in the short haul. I heard a very good podcast series about the episode. I think this is it:: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOBn-rdJvxA
Tying into the topic of different people having different flavor sensitivities: I have people in my life who insist they can't taste any difference between coke and pepsi and this notion is borderline incomprehensible to me.
loved the wine article. That "experts can't tell red from white!" study has plagued me for years and I take its invocation to be a reliable sign that I should talk to someone else at the party.
I’m a neophyte perfumer. It’s remarkable how quickly one’s discernment can update itself with minimal training / experience. Certain aromachemicals are used everywhere in perfumery but are never perceived as a discrete scent until you’ve smelled them on their own — iso e super, hedione, many more. Smell these in isolation enough times and you’ll start to recognize them from yards away, and you may also begin to update your framework for what makes a fragrance compelling or beautiful or “good.”
Tangentially: hexanoic acid is used quite a bit in perfumery, contributing in tiny quantities to accords that register as "fruity". Looks like there are a few studies about its appearance in wine as well; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12236692
I think the intent is just raconteurism, which is fine, but I just haven't found many hardcore wine skeptics to be open to updating. I suppose this is frequently downstream of more general attitudes toward concepts of taste/discernment which tend to be pretty hardened
Similarly, I know a fair amount about golf course architecture, which many people find bizarre because it's not usually thought of as an art form even by people who follow building or even landscape architecture. But it's pretty easy to learn to distinguish different golf architects' styles.
On the other hand, the top 1000 or so aficionados of golf course architecture in America have mental skills that I lack, such as the ability to remember and picture in their mind's eye the undulations of each of the 18 greens on a famous golf course. It was rather discouraging to me when I finally realized that I was never going to be able to be a first class golf course critic.
Having no prior experience with or knowledge of golf, during COVID I spent most of a season as a groundskeeper at a pretty high-end golf course. It was eye-opening to say the least. The latter half of my time there I was entrusted with mowing greens, and the combination of art and science that went into that was beyond what I would ever have expected.
Taiwanese chips? You have two bags of mainland Chinese chips flanking one bag of Taiwanese (or at least, not mainland) chips. Did you mean for all the chips to be Taiwanese?
An interesting contrast to wine is Scotch. There the differences can be in your face. My favorite single malts are Talisker and Laphroaig. They both have what I would call a phenolic character with notes of mucked out barn and iodine. Either you like it or you don't. I raised my son well, and he likes them. My daughter in law, OTOH, does not like them. She is OK with Chivas Regal which is at the opposite end of the taste spectrum. My preferred blended scotch is Johnnie Walker Black, which uses Talisker as part of its base.
I don't know anything about what actually goes into scotch, but used to think it was nasty smoky peaty nonsense before trying Macallan 12. Quality seems to scale significantly better with price in the whiskey genre, compared to wines. (Though JW's collaboration-for-the-masses with Game of Thrones was surprisingly not-awful.)
No rocks though - I prefer almost all alcohols at room temperature. If it needs dulling down, then it's not that great to begin with...
Have you tried any Glenmorangie scotch? From my own small experience, I seem to like them a little better than the Macallan 12, but that may just be an individual flavor preference. To me, the Glenmorangie 12 seemed a bit harsher than the Macallan 12, but it was tastier and much cheaper. and the Glenmorangie Nectar D'or was just delightful, and still slightly cheaper.
Not familiar with that one, although I haven't really perused the hard liquor section recently. Will keep an eye out next time. Do know I am not a fan of Glenfiddich, but am a fan of Glengoolie (For The Best Of Times[tm]). Tend to nurse the same bottle for months/years. Harshness is generally a big turn-off for me, even if it comes with taste...I'm happy to pay more for something smoother. (Which also translates to fewer/no hangovers.) Not like unlimited more, money is definitely still in the OBJ class for me, but since the cost is amortized over a long period and shared between multiple drinkers for Special Occasions(tm)...eh. For everyday hards I'd rather go after low-end rum or vodka, since the lower quintile of those markets is a lot nicer than that of whiskey.
I haven't had Glengoolie. I didn't like Glenfiddich 12 as much as Glenmorangie 10 (not 12, my mistake), but I think they were both in the same direction relative to Macallan 12, so maybe that's a warning sign? They're more of a spicy fruitcake and grass nose, at least to me, if that makes sense?
I hear you about the harshness, and its relation to hangovers. I held off on scotches for a long time because they were just so expensive compared to everything else, but eventually I caved. I was mostly into gins, though. :-)
The $10 "Rum of the Gods" or whatever it's called at Trader Joe's is perfectly serviceable. I prefer gold to silver, but different tools for different tasks. There's a bunch of stuff between the $10-20 range that's very...ambiguously better? Like not so much that I'd actually care to pay extra, since silver is just a mixer and golds don't get whiskey-level complex until out of the low-end tier. I think, anyway.
Can never drink gin again, at least if it's juniper-based. Used to eat those berries directly as a kid, anything in that flavour-space provokes a massive disgust reaction now...
You mean the wine tasting article? Not much, I think. It's like the difference between accuracy and precision. Whether or not I'm sick and miserable is a question of accuracy. Whether or not the Bordeaux has avocado notes is a question of precision. There's not as much riding, quantitatively, on the wine as on the misery. Just because I don't taste the avocado doesn't mean I'm having a seriously worse experience of the wine, only a different one (and this is a point Scott's article at least gestures at).
In his famous early "70's "Le goût du vin" ("The taste of wine") , the late great Émile Peynaud wrote ( I condense the whole book a bit...): "It wouldn't be a surprise if a few decades of work by geneticists at UC Davis could equal or best centuries of monks toil."
Far from being a surprise, everybody in the world of wine knew how fast the other producers were catching up. There were no internet but wintners, sommeliers, agronomists and other consultants travelled while investors knew how much money could be made by expanding production to quench the thirst of the fast-growing middle-classes with their fancy aspirations.
I am old enough to have seen and tasted the transition from what passed as wine in Canada in the '60'-70's to what it became twenty years later. The lovely days of spanish, portuguese and yougoslav plonk Canada got in exchange for Bombardier waterbomber aircrafts...
I notice I’m confused about one of the assertions in the pandemic prevention article:
“ The reason why we haven’t seen any credible attempts with pandemic-capable viruses is we haven’t had any pandemic-capable viruses to use. We still don’t know of any.”
What about smallpox? MERS-CoV? Nipah? Ebola? Deadlier influenza strains? Couldn’t these be bad, ackshually, on a global scale if dispersed in airports?
I’m curious what criteria the author might have been using to rule out the deadly and contagious viruses we already know about.
Many of the more deadly suspects (MERS, Ebola) are deadly enough that they can kill the infected population before having a chance to spread to pandemic scale. Smallpox would be a danger though.
The first four are not great candidates for pandemic disease, except in unusually unsanitary and ignorant conditions. They are not easily transmissable, requiring some degree of extended close contact and carelessness -- just walking by someone in an airport will not generally do -- and unlike SARS-CoV-2 people tend to be symptomatic at about the same time they are infectious, so even non-experts can tell someone is sick and avoid them or isolate them.
Influenzas are a different story, they are far more infectious and are infectious before symptoms show, so way more transmissable, but the known modern variants aren't very dangerous. The much nastier 1918 bug has been reconstructed[1], and indeed proves to be considerably deadliner than modern strains in animal studies. But if it were let out it wouldn't be likely to do nearly as much damage as it did in 1918, since 1918 didn't have antivirals, had no idea how to construct a vaccine, and had no testing to determine who was infected and who was not before they showed symptoms.
If you want something to be self-transmitting[2], you probably need it to be quite infectious before symptoms show, which is a somewhat unusual property. The influenzas definitely have it, so those are good candidates with which to work. But...unless you have some notion of what you can tweak to make it a nastier bug, it will be a long, long process of trial-and-error. Influenzas are pretty simple viruses, but they have ~8 genes and ~4500 codons. If you start randoming changing codons to introduce novel amino acids in the proteins and see what happens...rolling a 4500-sided dice over and over again...you will probably be there a while before you stumble across something significantly more infectious or deadly. You can try directed evolution, but this is a slow 'breeding' process of growing cell cultures, culling the winners, repeat. You could try directly constructing a deadlier genome -- if we knew enough about how the structure of the viral proteins makes it infectious or deadly, but alas we do not.
It may also be worth noting that we don't even know whether it is theoretically possible to create an influenza virus as transmissable as they are now and also as deadly as MERS or the Black Death. Perhaps that capability does not lie within the envelope of possible influenza proteins. No amount of reprogramming of the DNA might suffice, in the same way I simply cannot program an Arduino drone to be a killbot if the drone lacks the necessary hardware -- has no miniaturized gigawatt lasers mounted on its chassis.
[2] For actual bacterial warfare, as opposed to mindless terrorism, you do not, because you want it to kill only the people you target, and not (for example) randomly spread it to your own troops or allies. Anthrax[3] has been generally speculated to be the bioweapon of choice, because it is pretty deadly, isn't transmissable from human to human, and can be readily made into highly dispersable spores that can be conveniently stored for a long time.
> But...unless you have some notion of what you can tweak to make it a nastier bug, it will be a long, long process of trial-and-error.
Given all the influenza and sars-like viruses that have been sequenced, pre-existing gain of function research, I would think one would have many options for making much-better-than-random guesses to make if trying to tweak 1918 flu or MERS. E.g., of those 4500 codons in influenza, naively I would imagine some fall in sequences that are highly conserved across strains, and others would have previously identified functional motifs.
Actually, I looked this up, and…I am very slightly relieved that the highly conserved segments are a small proportion of the influenza genome. I kinda wish the research on cataloguing functional motifs in these viruses was classified and compartmentalized, but I suppose that would also frustrate vaccine research. It’s not hard to imagine a near-term world in which these genomes are sufficiently and publicly well understood to make virus design point and click, as has happened in offensive computer software, where ‘exploits’ can be modularly combined with ‘payloads’:
Metasploit, but for the body, is a thing I would prefer to not exist. I hope it’s less plausible than it sounds!
It's not enough to know to be able to correlate genetic sequences with variations in the protein, you need to be able to go all the way to predicting variations in function, and that is profoundly difficult. Even when we know the exact receptor to which we want a small molecule to bind, it is very difficult to predict a priori (either by intuition or in silico) what tweaking this or that aspect of a molecule's structure will improve or degrade binding. Man-centuries of highly-trained med chemist time are devoted to this already, with results that call for a substantial level of stoic determination to perservere.
It's not even enough to predict the exact shape of a novel molecule, which is itself a very difficult and generallly unsolved problem, because binding is a dynamic process -- both the substrate and receptor move and twist about, and to predict binding energetics you would need to predict the motions correctly as well, which involves excellent understanding of the intramolecular forces and the (substantial) force due to the surrounding solvent. Our models of such forces are not adequate to the task, in part because they are inherently many-body, and even possibly in part because they are pretty quantum mechanical sometimes.
I don't think the problem can be solved in software. You're not going to be able after some clever programming of analysis be able to, say, predict that swapping out a gene found in Y. pestis for one found in a random influenza and get a killer virus. The ways in which the various virii and bacteria do their shticks are all exceedingly complex chains of molecular machinery, which we don't understand, and building a Frankenstein blindly and having it work is like swapping a page of the blueprints for an F-22 with a page from the blueprints of a Virginia-class attack sub and hoping to get a really awesome weapon. Overwhelmingly likely result is nonfunctional garbage, and even when you get something that can limp off the group the chances you'll learn something that you can use to tweak your approach is low. Too little is known of the "hardware" to go back and fix what's wrong with your "software."
If we don't commit suicide as a species I think it's likely someday we will be able to design viruses to do what we want de novo -- which is very exciting, opens up the idea of "gene surgery" to fix any random thing wrong with your DNA -- but that day is long in the future, when we have done a great deal of challenging spadework figuring out how the long chain of molecular machines involved in viral infection and immune response work in detail. Maybe in 100 years it might be plausible, I think. That'd be great, just in time to benefit my great-grandchildren.
"You can try directed evolution, but this is a slow 'breeding' process of growing cell cultures, culling the winners, repeat...But...unless you have some notion of what you can tweak to make it a nastier bug, it will be a long, long process of trial-and-error. ."
Are losers not effectively self-culling? Paul Ewald used fluid-borne pathogens (which have greater genetic variation) to demonstrate that rapid passes from one host to another selected for those pathogens capable of most effectively using host resources. Rapid viral multiplication, combined with not needing a healthy mobile host for transmission, reliably selected for the more virulent strains without detailed expertise required.
The biggest drawback in terms of weaponization would presumably be dealing with the potential species barrier. But that seems surmountable... splice together a virus which used a particular cellular receptor, say.
Sure, but in the lab you want to *pick* your losers to speed up the process. The big time sink so far as I know is growing the cultures. How many generations do you need of random genetic variation + culling to find something much improved? A mere thousand? That's about 3 years. Ten thousand? Looking at 20-30 years. And so on.
It doesn't seem hard to use directed evolution to produce *less* deadly viruses, as they seem to evolve that way naturally anyway. I believe this is how some whole virus vaccines used to be, and maybe still are made: you pass them through cultures repeatedly until they stop killing.
The tricky bit is trying to get them to be *more* deadly, because that's not a natural evolutionary direction. I mean, when a virus is more deadly, it quite naturally excites more of an immune response, because cells respond vigorously to attempts to kill them. But more of an immune response tends to be bad for the viruses -- even if it doesn't wipe them out, it reduces their numbers -- so they tend to evolve away from that as fast as they can. For a virus "success" is "I get to reproduce and nothing tries to kill me," and that evolutionary endpoint is best represented by a wholly benign virus, one that is very infectious but not deadly at all.
So you probably need some kind of vigorous intervention and creative culling process to continuously select for more infectious *and* more deadly viruses, which is an unnatural endpoint.
" as they seem to evolve that way naturally anyway."
Ewald argues the contrary case, in explicit contradiction to Burnet and White's model of virulence which was based on airborne pathogens. Pathogens evolve towards benign co-existence only when doing so helps their spread. Malaria is one of the more deadly pathogen in terms of people killed, and it benefits from more incapacitated human hosts since that makes it easier for mosquitos to bite the hosts.
So pathogens in nature can experience selective pressures to become either more or less virulent.
Requiring a mobile host and needing the host to survive till the pathogen is transmitted are two things which cause natural pathogens to often tend to evolve to benign coexistence.
On the other hand, if fast-replicating and slow-replicating pathogens are injected into a host then this there's a kind of 'race to the bottom' selecting for the fast-replicating pathogens, assuming that a lab researcher ensures that transmission occurs before host death.
Of course, this technique may not select for certain *kinds* of virulence, like production of cholera toxin, if free-ridership is a potential strategy.
It is possible to select for less virulence in the lab, especially when using a different host, as you mention.
Well, you do remember we were talking about designing a bioweapon of sorts, right? It would be pretty perverse to try to design one that has as complicated a life cycle as malaria. I think workign with airborne pathogens that require mobile hosts (us) for rapid spread is pretty much a sine qua non for that application, which means an observation that there are other routes to evolutionary success for other types of micro-organisms is an interesting footnote but I'm not seeing how it changes the main point.
Are you actually arguing that it should be straightforward to design (either de novo or by selective breeding) a deadly pandemic pathogen for use in some kind of bio-terrorism? Or are you just saying the whole business is pretty complicated, and I've simplified it significantly for the sake of an Internet comment? With the latter, I totally agree. If you mean the former, though, I'd like to hear the argument.
My point regarding Malaria was simply to give just one example of natural evolution towards high virulence.
Moxoma virus (1950) and Calicivirus (1995) and are examples of highly transmissible pathogens which were weaponized by CSIRO in Australia for use against rabbits and might provide some insight into an attempt to kill as many targets as possible. (Admittedly, CSIRO started out with a hemorrhagic virus, in the case of calicivirus, which would already have some virulence factors in its genome. But they did ramp up lethality quite a bit. Ewald argues that increasing lethality is possible for various and more mild pathogens. )
Pathogenic strains of calicivirus can be transmitted by "direct contact with infected rabbits, fomites, transmission via equipment and clothing, transmission by vectors including flies."
1. Do pathogens naturally evolve towards non-virulence?
Answer: Not always. They can be made to evolve towards increased virulence. Ewald's models for disease virulence, which address the possibilities of ramping up virulence, are not 100% accepted among scientists in regards to pathogens in nature but they seem pretty reasonable and supported by evidence. I'm not sure of the reason for a lack of total acceptance and it may just be a matter of what people learned in school and never re-learned later in life. If you just want to kill lots of targets, that's a rather simple request to fulfill, given fairly basic equipment. (If you want to not die in the process of creating your bioweapon, that may be a harder ask.) Ewald's book The Evolution of Infectious Disease (published in the early 90s) makes an argument for his model of disease virulence. He undoubtedly has more recent works on the topic, but that's one that I'm familiar with.
Answer: I'm not really addressing this and have no particular position on this topic.
"Are you actually arguing that it should be straightforward to design (either de novo or by selective breeding) a deadly pandemic pathogen..."
Yes. It has been done with technology much older than what we have today. Calicivirus was ramped up to somewhere around 99% lethality when initially released. It dropped to about 90% lethality by the time it made its way across Australia after it was released to the wild due to a supposed 'containment breach' from CSIRO facilities.
"... for use in some kind of bio-terrorism? "
I have no solid position on what kind of pathogen would be "good for bioterrrorism." I mean, anthrax is considered a potential bioweapon candidate specifically because human-to-human transmission is *low.* There is comfort in knowing that a plague, once released, won't rebound back and decimate your own friends.
Making a pathogen that was selective in some peculiar yet useful way (for example; a pathogen which targets younger men rather than older individuals or women, for use against soldiers) is something which may exist, but which I'm not familiar with in detail and would probably, I'm guessing, require a good bit more expertise than just trying to rack up as large a body count as possible. Perhaps selectivity ( or not killing yourself in the process of creation) is a more limiting criteria in bioweapon manufacture than just ramping up lethality? i.e. not killing those people you want to leave alive is probably a much harder problem than maximizing kills. But then, this is just idle speculation on my part. Not knowing a bioterrorists goals or values I can't really speak to what weapon fits well in their hand.
Regarding your section on blind testing expensive vs. cheap wines, my dad's favorite party game is what he calls Cheap Date; it is, simply, a blind taste test of six wines of varying price. Everybody ranks them, and then you get to laugh about who has expensive/cheap taste. Not much rigor, but it is fun.
RE the notion that experts can't tell the difference between cheap and expensive wines, could it just be that the wine *producers* are the ones at fault here? They're the ones who decide which of their barrels goes in the expensive bottle and which goes in the cheap one. If that assignment is made randomly w/r/t to objective wine quality, then wine experts aren't going to be able to pick expensive wines based on quality. Have the studies ruled out this kind of effect? I mean I'd expect wineries to use tasting experts to figure out how much they should be charging for their wine, but maybe they don't?
They 100% don’t use tasting experts to determine how much to charge for their wine. The price is almost 100% reputation based and reputation only changes slowly over time. Best case scenario is they submit their wines to a wine reviewer and base scores off of that. However, most wine reviewers are thought of pretty poorly in the industry. Putting a score on wine is like putting a score on art. Like, sure you can do it. But there’s so many factors at play it’s kind of dumb.
A winery will sort by quality to determine what makes it to their flagship wine and what ends up in their entry level wine. However, that sorting happens when sorting the grapes. By the time the juice has fermented and made it into barrels, it’s pretty much pre-determined where it’s going to go. The only decision at that point is what mix of each grape variety to use in the finished blend.
The reason that it’s hard to tell ultra-high quality wines from merely above average wines is because there isn’t a huge a difference frequently, which actual wine experts will be the first ones to point out.
I got a bit of wine training for a job at a restaurant known for its wine selection and knowledge (10 hour somm class, on the job training including monthly tastings and discussions, got to talk to a number of Italian producers we'd bring in for special dinners, etc.) Some scattered thoughts on your article:
1. The stuff in the Somm doc is about learning a huge number of wines as they are typically expressed. It would probably be fairly easy to find deliberately tricky and unusual wines that they would get wrong. For the areas they really focus on (e.g. France) thay can get remarkably granular, like being able to know which particular bank of the Rhone the grapes were grown on. This seems like a magic trick or scam, but even with my relatively small amount of training, I was able to blindly pick out characteristics that distinguish Barberas produced in Alba vs. Asti -- two towns about 20 miles from each other. I can't believe it's all bullshit because I've been able to do that kind of thing.
2. I've also experienced the predictive coding effect. When I was taking that course, sometimes the instructor would pick out a taste characteristic that I hadn't gotten, but after he mentioned it I could taste it. On one hand that's clearly a psychological effect, on the other hand it's kind of fun if you don't take it too seriously, like when you exit the movie theater and discover that your friend saw the film from a completely different angle than you, but now that they mention it, you can sort of see where they identified that theme....
3. The assumption people have that enjoyment of wine ought to be perfectly correlated with price is odd to me. From my experience if you pay at least $10 for a bottle it's almost certainly going to be drinkable and might be delicious. Only the bottom shelf stuff is a gamble/rank. That wasn't necessarily true 50 years ago, I've been told, and the dialog around wine maybe hasn't caught up. But with most things, you pay for quality to a certain point, after which you pay for novelty and name recognition. Like, most people are going to recognize that you're probably going to get a more complex cheese at $20/lb vs. $5/lb. But if you're paying $50/lb it's going to be something weird and/or historically famous and/or made through an extremely laborious process. I'd expect the same general pattern with cured meats or coffee or sneakers or beer. So why do we test wine on a purely price vs. enjoyment scale entirely above the threshold where wine is usually at least alright?
4. Following from the above, what's wrong with catering to the uber-nerds looking for new or pristine experiences in whatever thing they're nerdy about? A couple of days ago I watched a video of a guy going over the minute differences between different types of expensive coffee grinders. He's looking for the best possible grind according to a number of criteria, and he has fun seeking that out. I've got nothing against that, it's just not my area of nerdery. I'll take the adequate grinder that costs 1/10th the price. I don't that means the expensive grinders are a scam, just that some people are willing to pay 10x more for a 10% increase in grind consistency because they're nerds.
5. I completely ignore all wine awards. Every wine producer I've talked to admitted that it's a bunch of nonsense and a dumb game they have to play to stay in business. I got the strong impression that there's a bunch of unscrupulous stuff going on with some of the awards too.
6. I've definitely smelled goat in a wine, though I think my exact descriptor was "a wet dog in a barn". Usually that's an indication of something gone wrong, but with this particular wine it was intentional. It tasted strongly of tobacco, btw, and it was delicious.
7. My favorite descriptor in the Somm doc was "freshly opened can of tennis balls", which I did actually smell in a wine once!
Anyways, I enjoyed the article and think it's largely correct, from my limited experiences in the field.
There isn't anything wrong with catering to the uber wine nerds but that's not the message sent by the industry or wine experts. The message isn't here's one kind of wine a few people might like but that these wines are better.
I mean it's not that different than the situation with literature. Truth is most ppl prefer Harry Potter to Proust and their isn't anything wrong with that yet we are constantly bombarded with the message that one is better than the other. That is fake for wine and literature.
When wine is on the same level as whether you prefer Diablo or Wizardry as the base of your RPGs then there will be nothing to complain about but instead wine is a massive status game that you can't escape in certain social situations. Granted RPG nerds are trying to make their hobby as snobby as wine currently is but they haven't succeeded yet.
As always the problem with the hobby isn't the hobby, it is the hobbyists.
There is a Lord Peter Wimsey short story from a 1928 collection which revolves around being able to distinguish wines in a blind taste test (it does get a bit silly but I don't know if Sayers is poking mild fun at the whole business of wine tasting or really does mean to indicate that her hero has a fabulous palate):
""If I had to be impersonated by somebody," murmured the latter gently, "it would have been more flattering to have had it undertaken by a person to whom all white wines were not alike. Well, now, sir, this admirable vintage is, of course, a Montrachet of—let me see"—he rolled the wine delicately upon his tongue—"of 1911. And a very attractive wine it is, though, with all due deference to yourself, monsieur le comte, I feel that it is perhaps slightly too sweet to occupy its present place in the menu. True, with this excellent consommé marmite, a sweetish wine is not altogether out of place, but, in my own humble opinion, it would have shown to better advantage with the confitures."
"There, now," said Bredon innocently, "it just shows how one may be misled. Had not I had the advantage of Lord Peter's expert opinion—for certainly nobody who could mistake Montrachet for Sauterne has any claim to the name of Wimsey—I should have pronounced this to be, not the Montrachet-Aîné, but the Chevalier-Montrachet of the same year, which is a trifle sweeter. But no doubt, as your lordship says, drinking it with the soup has caused it to appear sweeter to me than it actually is."
The count looked sharply at him, but made no comment.
"Have another olive," said Peter I kindly. "You can't judge wine if your mind is on other flavours."
"Thanks frightfully," said Bredon. "And that reminds me——" He launched into a rather pointless story about olives, which lasted out the soup and bridged the interval to the entrance of an exquisitely cooked sole.
The count's eye followed the pale amber wine rather thoughtfully as it trilled into the glasses. Bredon raised his in the approved manner to his nostrils, and his face flushed a little. With the first sip he turned excitedly to his host.
"Good God, sir——" he began.
The lifted hand cautioned him to silence.
Peter I sipped, inhaled, sipped again, and his brows clouded. Peter II had by this time apparently abandoned his pretensions. He drank thirstily, with a beaming smile and a lessening hold upon reality.
"Eh bien, monsieur?" enquired the count gently.
"This," said Peter I, "is certainly hock, and the noblest hock I have ever tasted, but I must admit that for the moment I cannot precisely place it."
"No?" said Bredon. His voice was like bean-honey now, sweet and harsh together. "Nor the other gentleman? And yet I fancy I could place it within a couple of miles, though it is a wine I had hardly looked to find in a French cellar at this time. It is hock, as your lordship says, and at that it is Johannisberger. Not the plebeian cousin, but the echter Schloss Johannis berger from the castle vineyard itself. Your lordship must have missed it (to your great loss) during the war years. My father laid some down the year before he died, but it appears that the ducal cellars at Denver were less well furnished.""
Food and drink are such an essential component of Wimsey stories you have to wonder if Sayers was hungry all the time, or just sufficiently dedicated to her craft that she was willing to do extreme amounts of research. Interestingly, Lord Peter was just as discerning and sophisticated with respect to clothes, but details of that are largely absent from the stories.
I think almost all that stuff cheese/sneakers/beer is just a stupid as wine. I am generally highly suspicious of status goods.
For instance I make a ton of money and am debt free and drive a 7 year old CRV. Would I enjoy a nicer car more? Absolutely probably a few percentage points more. Is that worth dozens/hundreds of hours of my labor? No not at all.
Wow, I hadn't thought about the smell of a "freshly opened can of tennis balls" in 15 years, but now that you mention it, I can still sort of recall it.
I think there is something kinda missed from "Is Wine Fake" and the mention of how people generally like cheap wine - some sorts of alcoholic drinks are more expensive than others.
Like, for instance, I like port, don't mind red wine, and hate white wine. And port costs more than red wine which costs more than white wine. So there is a real expense-vs.-quality tradeoff if I want to buy alcohol, though there are also things that I would simply be making a mistake to buy (e.g. champagne, which I hate because it's white but which costs more than red wine).
I am super-unconvinced by "The Illogic of Nuclear Escalation". Taking out missiles on the ground is actually pretty relevant in terms of saving Western lives, and due to modern US warheads being typically sub-megaton actually burning a major city takes a lot of them. And there is the question of how easy it is to deter an enemy, and the question of "well, if this opponent can't be deterred, don't we still need the ability to actually destroy them in order to prevent the proverbial Nazis Win scenario?".
Forcing the PRC to suffer state failure, for instance, would probably take several hundred warheads, not including missiles shot down by their ABM or used against the PLA's own nuclear stockpile. If you want to still be able to do that in the event of a PLA surprise attack that destroys some of the US nukes on the ground, well, you're going to need a stockpile at least as big as what the USA has, potentially more.
>Today, no one argues we should restore slavery. It’s illegal everywhere on the planet, even though it operates in the shadows. There’s a consensus by the 21st century that slavery is beyond the pale.
Pffft. Punitive slavery is totally still a thing (whether for civil crimes or of POWs), and conscription is totally still a thing (permanently in much of South-East Asia and Israel, in emergencies even in the West; even volunteer militaries are an exact match for indentured servitude). There are *certain forms* of slavery/unfree labour that have been abolished, and *private citizens* are no longer allowed to hold people as slaves, but to say there's a consensus that "slavery is beyond the pale" is either flat wrong or using a rather-narrow definition of "slavery" that comes close to the reversed No True Scotsman.
(Of course, prison labour and conscription are a lot more justifiable than hereditary slavery, and the government control helps to counter some of the excesses! There is some real achievement here! But let's not kid ourselves.)
I think if you are lumping in prison work and volunteer army service as “slavery” you are using an incredibly different version of the word than most people.
I called the latter "indentured servitude", not "slavery", because you can call indentured servitude "not slavery" with a straight face; people have the choice to not sign up for it (some people consider indentured servitude "slavery", some don't; that's fair enough as long as you're consistent). I called conscription "slavery".
Prison work is acknowledged as a form of "slavery or involuntary servitude" in the 13th amendment to the US Constitution (which banned slavery *other than* as criminal sentence). As I've said, it's (a lot) more justifiable than the Triangle Trade. But pretending it's not slavery is self-deception; it is very definitely forcibly extracting labour from people who have not agreed to it, and we call it "slavery" when ancient cultures did exactly the same thing - "you did a crime, so you're a slave now either for X time or for life" - albeit in a more decentralised fashion (i.e. the slaves were held privately rather than in specifically-built prisons).
I'm not saying that punitive slavery is *bad*, particularly in a country that doesn't have the surplus to have people eating and not working (nearly all criminals would prefer to be enslaved than executed, and that's the realistic alternative), but I'm a big fan of calling things what they are.
They didn't say "volunteer army service", they said "Conscription", as in show up to basic training or go to jail or worse. That's most certainly unfree labor (and of a particularly dangerous nature), whether you want to describe it as slavery or not. (for whatever it may be worth, Wikipedia lists their conscription article as being "Part of a series on slavery")
Alright, I will acknowledge a mistake on my part. They did mention volunteer military service. Specifically, in an aside they said "even volunteer militaries are an exact match for indentured servitude". I feel that magic mushroom explicitly drew a distinction between volunteer service and conscription in their post, describing only conscription as slavery. They did not 'lump in' volunteer army service with slavery, they described it in terms of a related but distinct concept.
You're assuming that "Nazis Win" is a worse scenario than an all-out nuclear counter-attack, I wouldn't be too sure about that...
Otherwise, have you actually read all of the article ? Your comments about ground warheads and the "burning a major city" requirement sounds like you haven't ?
>You're assuming that "Nazis Win" is a worse scenario than an all-out nuclear counter-attack, I wouldn't be too sure about that...
From a nationalist POV, there's the problem of the follow-up invasion; you need to make sure the enemy is in no state to capitalise on you being blown up.
From an internationalist POV, the PRC in particular is showing worrying signs of being a stable totalitarian state, so allowing it to seize hegemony by winning a nuclear war is literally a failed-continuation X-risk.
>Otherwise, have you actually read all of the article ? Your comments about ground warheads and the "burning a major city" requirement sounds like you haven't ?
You're not going to get all of them on the ground, and it becomes less feasible the more there are. But the current PRC arsenal is quite small (and their SSBNs are almost all spotted leaving port and shadowed by US SSNs, rendering them ~useless).
My basic projection of a USA vs. PRC war over Taiwan in the near future goes something like this: the US would have to attack PRC missile bases and radars inside China in order to use ships and planes near Taiwan, which would partially degrade the Chinese deterrent and force hair-trigger alert fearing a US alpha strike; sooner or later a false alarm results in shit going nuclear; the PRC arsenal gets depleted via use and a US counterforce attack; the PRC refuses to surrender and wants a white peace; the US won't accept a white peace after a bunch of cities sprouted mushroom clouds, can't invade China and doesn't want to give the PRC time to build more nukes, so it starts methodically burning Chinese cities until surrender or state failure. There are some turn-off points, but this looks like the main line to me. And the last step would plausibly require calling up the stockpile nukes.
I'd argue you are kinda answering the wrong question in "is wine fake". I think what most people want to know is if there is really any sense in which the expert loved wind is better of is it just a different taste?
Ok, the wine experts like it more but it's not at all clear they haven't simply associated those tastes with sophistication and even if they naturally prefer those tastes it in no way implies that they are actually any better. I mean is an award for best condiment that only hires ppl who like mustard more than ketchup fake? I think there is a strong sense in which it is.
Now I'm sure some ppl will insist that few ppl are really claiming that. But that's a motte-bailey tactic with wine just as it is with books. Sure, when challenged directly on it quite a few ppl who study or even teach literature will try and suggest they are just exposing ppl to certain kinds of writing just as wine experts will often say that you should drink what you like.
Yet that attitude doesn't reflect the message they send whenever they aren't being directly challenged. You aren't going to find yourself reading Harry Potter in English class nor will someone whose taste in wine resembles mine (I want my wine to taste like my soft drinks) will get taken seriously in wine evaluation no matter how expertly they can distingush the tastes.
So yah it's fake, or perhaps the better word is corrupt, because it's not an honest attempt to communicate to the public what they might like. And I admit it's a matter of degree but I think it's clear that many wine experts attempt to suggest that one has a better, richer and more sexy experience if your tastes match theirs with only social pressure not evidence behind it.
I always have a fond spot for your comments because I knew a Peter Gerdes. And I agree this is where most of my frustration comes from.
The hedonic difference between a average $15 bottle and a $500 bottle seems very small and/or backwards. And mostly the whole culture of “wine” is aimed at getting you to move up that price range in hopes of some “better” experience.
Well thank you!! It's good to finally have a bonus from my name! Apparently, it's also the name of a registered sex offender in Iowa (nothing against the guy...for all I know his crime was peeing outside or streaking but it sucks it's third google result for my name).
Is there anyone who can expertly distinguish the tastes and has taste in wine like yours? (If you want your wine to taste like soft drinks why would you drink wine?) The whole idea (in my view) of wine experts is that people who are ultra sensitive to differences between things like this have better opinions (in the case of wine, I don't care very much because wine is not very important to me).
The price of wine is determined by economic factors anyway (no one is claiming one bottle of wine is ten times more expensive because it is ten times better). There are rich people for whom it makes no difference to pay 500 dollars for a bottle, even if they pour half of it on the floor. And then there are people who buy expensive wine bottles in warehouses as an investment.
Of course there are economic factors but the same could be said of the market for soft drinks or really good pizza or donuts (and occasionally u do see something like a cronut comes along where it offers some amazingly new and scarcity drives price).
I've got nothing against ppl with certain tastes paying to indulge them. However, I think it's clear that's NOT what is happening with wine. People keep buying expensive wines that, even though experts might like them more, blind tasting suggests they don't. But no one tries to imply that you aren't sophisticated or somehow are socially less important based on your tastes in those foods.
And I tend to think looking down on ppl as less sophisticated/less elite is generally a harmful thing absent a specific benefit (eg maybe u could say it incentivizes education in STEM but the world isn't better off bc we incentivize knowing weird grape taste facts).
Yes, I agree that in a sense it's no different than the Pepsi/coke thing. A massive effort to influence ppl's perceptions succeeds in getting them to say they like the one that tastes worse more. The difference is that we recognize that as self-serving advertisement so we don't actually really believe them when they tell us coke drinkers are cooler ppl...maybe unconsciously but we consciously judge ppl on their wine tastes.
--
As for your other question I strongly suspect there are supertasters with my preferences...indeed, I think I may have them bc I taste bitter and tart so intensely. But certainly no one develops them bc no one rewards you for developing them by regarding you as sophisticated.
Sorry, I mean to say it's not most of what happens with wine. I bet that amoung those buying the moderately expensive bottles of wine a huge fraction of it is people trying to look sophisticated.
The highly expensive but not absurd bottles of wine do seem to be more often purchased by true afficianadoes (sp?) and that's great for them. Indeed, the kind of ppl who keep the expensive wines at home and hide them bc they don't want to waste them on ppl like me are usually pretty reasonable about the whole thing. The ones who buy their most expensive wines at restaurants or leave them out are like the ppl with the fancy volume of poetry and Proust on their bookshelf rather than the dog eared copy in their backpack.
It's the cultural of wine snobbery and the use of the tasting to pressure ppl into buying more expensive bottles to look sophisticated that bothers me.
I largely agree with you and think you accurately capture what the status seeking, wealthy, wine snobs are trying to do. But the reality is that wine experts come from the wine industry which is made up of hospitality staff, retail employees, farmers, and warehouse staff. The industry is frequently criticized for being a bunch of hipster bros. They can’t afford nice wines and tend to favor obscure and weird, but very affordable wines. Things like Cru Beaujolais. I think what actual experts want is not for people to acknowledge that super expensive wines are better but that people should be drinking lots of different wines. People tend to stick to only one or two very familiar brands, and experts want people try lots of different wines so they drink different styles based on their mood.
Yes, hipster bros tho many of them are employed selling wine to rich snobs so there is a certain bias there. But I think you make a good point. For one group of experts it's about feeling superior to the (both to ppl who just drink the expensive shit and to those who don't know).
And I don't object at all to the ppl who really (whether or not they are tricking themselves) just want to enjoy the wines they like. It's just that they aren't out there making noise. I have a number of colleagues like that and it's fun drinking with them...they don't want to waste their good stuff on me but don't feel any need to judge me about what I want to drink either.
I think it's more just the same effect you see in many areas where lots of the public feels sorta embarrassed about their lack of sophistication so can be cowed by the fear of being labeled unsophisticated and thus goes along with the ppl who use it to imply they are better than you.
And then it gets hard to talk about bc you get the motte-bailey effect with attacks on the ppl using it as a way of being seen as more sophisticated getting met with the defense of the reasonable ppl who just are enjoying what they like (who don't deserve criticism).
I completely agree with you. It bothers me that “low quality wine” gets criticized even though it’s made by super talented people who are being incredibly intentional with how they want the wine to taste. It’s just that the taste they are gunning for tastes good to most people despite getting low ratings. I also get the not wanting to waste good wine thing, I rarely want to waste my good wine on myself.
I just want the wine world to be less elitist. There’s times where elitism is called for, but in a situation as low stakes as wine it never is. There’s a whole non-elitist world of wine out there. I just wish it was more visible to people. Instead the only way wine is presented in popular culture is either as Mommy Juice or as Billionaire Dick Measuring Fluid.
Even though I like wine, I don't live in a wine culture and I don't come in contact much with people who are snobbish about wine (or with people who would boast about spending a lot of money on wine), so this issue doesn't resonate emotionally for me in any particular way. For me to become discriminating about wine I would have to drink a lot more, and I wouldn't do that just for health reasons.
However it is true that wine seems to be a focal point for some people to pretend to be knowledgeable or sophisticated or very picky about what they drink. Even I occasionally encounter someone like this. Often I am skeptical (I mean, I believe there are people who know about wine, but usually from the way some people talk about it, it sounds like they are pretending).
Also the little ritual in restaurants where one person tastes the wine before it is poured out to the company, what is the point of that? They don't let us taste the food before they serve it to us. I guess it's a remnant from the days when there was a greater probability that the wine was spoiled? But what percentage of people really feel that this ritual has some real purpose?
As for the public's lack of sophistication -- in my opinion it's just true that many people are not sophisticated. To tie this in with the semaglutide/obesity discussion, this is why one hears stuff like "how can people lose weight in an environment where the food industry offers hyperpalatable wonderful food that we desire and crave so much?" If people were more sophisticated about what they ate, they could drive past a line of fast food restaurants without the intense craving many apparently experience.
The food and entertainment industries encourage people to be unsophisticated, they want people to consume more easily producible stuff. Then there's the other end of the market, where people are encouraged to think that if they buy expensive things, that means they are sophisticated and cool. But often that's just another way of being unsophisticated.
I'm not saying that people should be embarrassed about that, but that's a separate issue. I'm somewhat embarrassed about not being physically fit, and maybe I shouldn't be, but that doesn't change the fact that I am.
But being sophisticated about wine for me just doesn't seem particularly important. I mean, it's nice for the people who are, but in the same way that it's nice for the people who collect stamps that they like to collect stamps.
The tasting thing with wine is checking if it's gone vinegary. It's really only an issue with old wines. It's kinda silly when you buy a modern bottle buy it doesn't bother me too much.
Regarding being sophisticated, I think there are two different senses of the word. Of course it's generally better for people to have some degree of knowledge about options (though that's no reason to learn to distingush what kind of soil green beens were grown in if you don't like them). However, in this context it more an antonym of basic...but with a heavy dose of exclusivity.
I mean we're social creatures si we cant avoid some desire to be seen as cool, fashionable etc but generally speaking the less with push this the better. And I think that's especially true when its a sense of coolness that's about appreciating designated things that the masses can't appreciate.
Sure, there is an appeal to appreciating things that others don't. But once ppl start aspiring to like a specific thing to have more social status all the benefits from paying attention to something generally ignored is gone and it becomes all about ppl convincing themselves they like something hard to like (and may succeed but less than with something not as hard to like). That seems all bad to me.
Yes, the word can mean different things. You are talking about people wanting to seem sophisticated to other people and I mean having knowledge about something and developed tastes, which usually also implies appreciating "harder" things, without regard to social context.
To me it seems that liking what "everyone else likes" (from which the pressure to conform) has more social benefits than "liking hard things".
There is a class of things like Shakespeare, Proust, fancy wines, high art etc which occupy this weird place where everyone (at least in many circles) sees them as worthy of liking but yet are hard to like. It's that special status I'm critisizing.
I mean it's perfectly reasonable if you happen to llke such things but I'd argue this status creates really awful incentives and they are some of the worst things to try and convince yourself to like. It's not truly adding variety and there are unfortunate incentives which actively discourage the creators of these items from being better in ways that make them more approachable, e.g., if you want to be seen as writing serious literature making your work fun/approachable gets you seen as non-serious even if it retains all the other virtues.
That plus the sneering is my objection. It often makes both art and food actively worse because while sometimes being approachable and fun to non-sophisticates is incompatible with other goals sometimes its beneficial yet these attitudes discourage that from happening because, if a book or art is too approachable enjoying it no longer singles your elite status.
--
The normal cycle of ppl pioneering something new, that becoming fashionable and then fading once it's seen as just copying is relatively fine. The problem pops up when, instead of becoming popular and thus less fashionable the activity protects it's exclusive status by creating higher barriers to entry. That's bad enough when it's the barriers to joining some club but when it's about appreciating some type of food/activity/art it's really bad bc the way you raise that barrier to entry is generally to make the thing harder to enjoy.
Most European wines are named solely by the regional appellation and containing a blend of multiple grape varieties characteristic to the region. A bottle of "Bordeaux" means it's a full-bodied red wine, typically a Merlot/Cabernet blend, from southwestern France. In contrast, "New World" wines are usually single varieties and you'll see both the region and the grape prominently on the bottle. "Napa Valley" means it's from that part of California but it can be any kind of wine - red, white, or cloying pink Zinfandel. I wonder to what extent the ability to tell regions apart is really the ability to tell their characteristic grape varieties apart.
I visited France a few months ago and noted that there were varietal French wines for sale at markets there, generally priced in the low to mid-range and often store brands. The traditional regional blends made up most of the higher-end wines. Also, imported wine, even from nearby Spain and Italy, was only available at the largest supermarkets or from specialty wine importers. And the EU is supposed to be a common market with free flow of goods...
I miss the comments, for the articles in asterisk. I realize it's a "next level" kind of difficulty, if not technical then definitely from a moderation point of view, but still - if properly jumpstarted it could become quite the conversation hub.
The monkeypox prediction was pretty much on spot: "I predict the outbreak will have mostly subsided by the middle of November". (Prediction from mid-September.) The cumulative case number for the US of 30,000 will also be on spot.
In Europe, it has almost been eradicated. Several countries had 50-200 daily cases at peak times. Now it's two orders of magnitude less: ~5 daily cases for all of Europe combined, half of them in Spain.
The US are lagging behind. (The decline started later). They have "only" lost one order of magnitude, going from 500 daily cases to 50.
Otherwise, the rest of the Americas are the biggest concern. Mexico, Colombia and Brazil are each at ~30 daily cases and are going down much more slowly. These three countries plus the US cover more than 2/3 of all reported cases worldwide, currently ~200 daily. At peak times it was ~1000 daily cases globally.
I have talked to health workers and read some interviews of them (for example of some Swiss centers for STIs, and the ones responsible for rolling out the vaccinations.) They assign the successes to the reaction and awareness of the MSM community (men who have sex with men). Knowledge and awareness is extremely high in this community, and a lot of people are very sensitized to any symptoms, and take actions if they discover anything. I must say that as a member of this community, I am pretty proud of the common reaction.
>Featuring eyeless, beakless, featherless, near-brainless chickens that “[resemble] something between an animal and a fruit”.
I can't remember where I first heard it, but was once related an anecdote supposedly from an exec of Tyson (Purdue? Foster Farms?), that chicken is just "a vegetable on legs". Prescient!
Real Chicken(tm) honestly just kinda sucks though. I'm pretty happy the plant-based varieties are so good already, at least in nugget form. Any meat that's only decently-palatable when deep-fried or whatever is just asking to be eaten for lunch by plant alternatives. (Also looking at you, turkey.)
There is a strong tendency to overcook it in my opinion. I never order chicken in restaurants because I am always disappointed. When I roast my own, it’s beautiful.
Chicken is a paltry poultry vessel for other flavours. Not literally the worst substrate ever, but I'd never mistake it for the main dish. I think a common error is to do boneless-skinless...chicken *skins* are hells a delicious, the rendered fat is great (honestly prefer it over bacon fat, heretical I know), bone-adjacent meat has far superiour flavour and texture to boringly bland breasts. I like my poultry meat like I like my coffee: dark. Inasmuch as I like it at all, anyway. Chicken/turkey *broth or stock* is also typically superlative, at least for store-bought stuff...I've yet to find a commercial other-animal-broth-or-stock that didn't suck. And forget all the vegetable-based varieties, blah.
Pretty much anything else chicken can do, duck can do better. Or quail, or squab. Points for wings, though of course those are usually fried. Even turkey beats it for ground meat. I suppose the eggs are pretty good for many things, though that's mostly due to cornering the market - I like duck eggs more, but rarely have the opportunity to get them. (There's also a really low average quality floor for chicken...I've tasted some of the Actually Good Stuff from bougie markets, and it's a marked improvement. But in my mind I'm still ranking it below average beef, fish, shellfish, whatever. Just not my protein.)
I'm not that into wine, but into Whisky! And it is similar with _very_expensive bottles and tastings and stuff.
And I don't know if it is just in my "Whisky-circle" or normal for Whisky drinkers, but not many care about the price of a bottle. A 40EUR bottle can be enjoyed as well as a 400EUR one. The "rule" is: If you like it, you like it!
Which brings us to taste: Taste is very subjective. Mabye you can learn more in those 10 sommelier years and I'm just a layman. But what I taste doesn't mean others taste the same. Some experts also taste things, that I don't even think of!
For example, I was at a tasting and a dram for me was very sweet and "suggery" and I called it a "bonbon taste". My "neighbour" at the bar was/is more involved (owning a Whisky shop etc.) and a better taster than me. And he tasted a "Leckmuschel". I can't translate that exactly :P But it is a _very_ special kind of "bonbon" that at least me didn't ...eat!?licked? ... since I was a kid! Wouldn't have thought about that in the slightest; but it was the "same direction"
Also about this taste: Some wine-lovers will probably come over and kill me now, but I think, that Whisky has a much wider range of flavors than wine! And because of that many people prefer different "styles". And maybe more expensive bottles in their preference will be more enjoyed ... but others will think not much about it!
I admit for myself, that the best Whisky I tasted yet was the most expensive one too. But I have fun with "cheap" ones too. But I wouldn't be able to taste the money-difference. If you are good you can taste if a Whisky is older (meaning: it was in the barrel for a long time) or not. But in current times even "young" Whiskys can be expensive. So it isn't easy to differenciate.
While there is no "red or white" for Whisky, there is a big thing that seperates whiskys: Single Malt (most of the time "one barrel") and Blended (different barrels are "mixed" together). Blended are often regarded as "inferior". But in blind tastings blended Whiskys are often rated quite high; because you can't really taste the difference!
Have you actually bought and tasted a bunch of different wines for this article? If not, then I think it's kinda ridiculous that you write an article about whether X it real just by going and looking at existing research and stuff without actually buying X and trying it when it's relatively cheap and easy to buy.
Are there people who can notice subtle differences in the tastes of, say, coffees or cheeses or between the aromas of perfumes who also believe wine is fake?
Personally, I can't tell cheap wine from expensive, but then I'm not very sophisticated at tasting and smelling anything else either. Other people are clearly much more discerning than I am about discerning differences in foods, so I assume that my lack of ability to notice much about wines is due to my personal deficiencies rather than to wine being fake. If somebody like food critic Corby Kummer of "The Atlantic," who has remarkable ability to notice differences in the taste of foods, said that wine is fake, I'd take him seriously.
But I don't take seriously my own perceptions when it comes to wine. So I just drink boxed wine myself, but I don't tell other people to be like me.
My good friend was a professional taster for Kraft’s Maxwell House research division. He had to pass a bunch of blind taste tests to get the job. He is also the biggest wine snob I know.
The idea of having a palate finely tuned for coffee, and then having to spend all day tasting Maxwell House, sounds a bit like a form of torture to me.
That’s pretty funny…luckily, he was working with researchers.
Apparently, high-paid Ph.D. food scientists and chemists can make a pretty good cup of coffee in the lab. The trick is getting it cost-effective and mass-produced.
I loved the article, but this sentence made me cringe. "Although ordinary people do not prefer more expensive to less expensive wine, some experts do, at least if we are willing to bend the statistical significance rules a little."
You probably know this already, but over the last 5-10 years, there's been growing concern over the focus on "statistical significance." Any "rules" (like p < 0.05 means an effect is "real") are arbitrary conventions and in general, what we really care about is the effect size and the uncertainty around that effect size. A tiny p value could mean either a huge effect that could be detected with a small number of subjects, or it could mean a very small effect that requires huge populations of subjects to accurately estimate the small effect size. For instance, if experts can distinguish expensive from cheap wine with 55% accuracy vs 50% accuracy for laymen, this difference would very likely be classified as statistically significant with p < 0.05, if one ran a study comparing 10,000 experts to 10,000 laymen, but not with a study of 100 experts vs 100 laymen.
Since your writing and analyses are so thorough, I expect you already know this. But seeing the words "bend the statistical significance rules" makes me cringe, so I figured I'd comment. Here's a longer article on p-values, in case it's helpful.
I have thoughts on the Kaplan essay. I think he makes the common mistake of overrating the destructiveness of nuclear weapons, and underestimating the resilience of an enemy country. I'd prefer the margin of safety that comes from having 1,500 warheads instead of going down to only a few hundred. Beyond that, I very much agree that there's not a good case for the new ICBM. The big reason I can think of to keep the ICBM force around is to soak up warheads that might otherwise be going for our cities. And possibly as a hedge against problems with Trident, which could serve as a pretty good replacement if we loaded it with one warhead. But that seems unconvincing.
I do think he's wrong about the bombers. First, they're quite useful for things other than nuclear war, and our existing bomber force is getting old and hard to maintain. The B-2 has always been crazy expensive, and the B-21 promises to be a lot better, while also letting us cut the B-1 and maybe eventually the B-52. And note that the B-1 is not authorized to carry nuclear weapons, and hasn't been for decades. I am not impressed by his suggestion that it is. (And this ignores the need for a new nuclear cruise missile for the bombers, which is in work.) I also would say that we need a new SSBN now, rather than at some point in the future. The Ohios are getting very old, and hard to maintain. (Which, to be clear, is absolutely a thing, and a good reason to stop just refurbishing Minuteman.)
Kaplan has been a hack for decades. How people keep paying him to write I do not know, except maybe he's cheaper than somebody with more perception. He has been wrong on almost every aspect of nuclear policy and deterrence since forever. Have you read Alex Wellerstein? Guy clearly has a point of view, but he has the rigor and honesty of the genuine historian I think.
Curious about your thoughts on a recent War on the Rocks article I saw, which advocated a large fleet of bombers as an excellent weapon for the Pacific theater - a B-whatever can carry a bunch of stand-off anti-ship weapons, and can regularly sortie (with a mid-air refuel) from somewhere out of range of any Chinese weapon except ICBMs. And not cheap, but a wing of bombers is cheaper than a CVN battle group. (Obviously the local staying power of the CVN has its own benefits, but for the particular mission of “survivable strike platform to put lots of warheads on ships crossing the strait to Taiwan” a B-21 seems like a winner)
I am very much in favor of the bomber as a potential anti-shipping platform, although the Air Force seems much less interested than I am. But I think it's largely complementary to a carrier group, and may not be the best option for protecting the Taiwan strait directly. The other big problem (besides the Air Force being stupid) is that we don't currently have any bombers in production, and can't easily expand the force. That said, I'm not sure it's as invincible as the author probably thought, because I'd bet the tankers are forward-based.
This looks like a great magazine. But if one of the points of it is to give the EA movement more academic credibility (I don't know if it is) it doesn't seem very good at it.
A book review. One article that reads like a blog post, Scott even uses Wikipedia as a source. I really like the stuff I've read so far. But it doesn't come across very serious, just like substack but with a nicer design. And maybe higher quality.
All that being said I hope someone makes a podcast for the Asterisk magazine. That would be great.
Typo: on "Do wines ever have 6-carbon carboxylic acids, or 10-carbon alkanes — i.e., goats, armpits or jet fuel?", two chemicals are mapped to three sources as if one-to-one.
To what degree do you expect the difference between usual wine preferences versus more detailed wine preferences to be explainable by the existence of supertasters?
Around a quarter to a third of people are considered supertasters, meaning we have an increased number of papillae on our tongues.
I subjectively feel like I can very clearly taste the difference among various wines, though I don't have the language to describe that difference.
Is it possible that the people who were able to pass the exams were supertasters while the others who failed in the studies weren't?
It would mean reviews from wine critics aren't generalizable to 75% of the population, which sounds about right.
Scott, what a great piece. I've long wanted to synthesize all these wine studies, but my goals were less ambitious than what you crafted in Asterisk. Bravo.
Thanks for diving into the science, and I'm so happy to share your work in an upcoming newsletter.
Somm is the documentary that got me into wine. And if you need a follow up wine doc on actual fake wine, I suggest Sour Grapes.
I am impressed with this magazine, both by the quality of the content and the presentation. I love the footnotes being in the right margin. What a simple and significant improvement to the ease of reading!
Well, pizza, cheeseburgers and wine are all food groups, but wine has always already had an elitist/ high culture aspect to it that doesn't work for cheeseburgers and rarely goes well with pizza, unless you are from New Haven, CT.
The vocabulary only clues us in to the fact that we are dealing with a material that matters greatly to some segment of the culture and while that vocabulary can act as a gatekeeper, it is also helpful for understanding the material and understanding leads to greater appreciation--and more gatekeepers!
I don't know about $1000 bottles of wine tasting the same as an $80 bottle, but I can understand why two wines of similar taste might deviate greatly in price and land value is one such element to consider.
I tasted a $245 bottle from Ridge's Santa Clarita vineyard outside of Cupertino yesterday and while it was nice, it wasn't something that I would buy but I'm sure that Ridge has no problems selling it because Ridge signifies a value within the wine community. And while it does make me wonder who is buying $1000 bottles of wine and why, I can't say that I would ever feel the pressure to buy one; however, if I had the cash and no plans for it I would buy a bottle of $1000+ Screaming Eagle just to try it because it has a reputation for the kinds of value that the wine community embraces.
I also have no problems with gatekeepers--even irony is a gatekeeper of sorts as is the education that you mention. I do however have a problem with closed doors, especially in education where there is all of this talk of "equity." But that's another story.
People getting upset about wine they will never buy or drink strikes me as a bit on the side of Nietzschean "ressentiment." I'm not big on Bordeaux, so I will have to take your word for the Margaux!
Scott, I thoroughly enjoyed your wine-tasting article in Asterisk.
I must admit I likely am accurately described by humourist Dave Barry, who said something like "the average American, blind-folded, would have trouble distinguishing between a fine French wine and a melted popsicle". (Oh phew, I'm Canadian, so it's OK.)
I was reminded of this fine excerpt from Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon Days. Young John Tollefson has written his own 95 Theses, a rant against his repressive Lutheran upbringing. Number 79:
"I revolted by becoming a sensitive person, which I am not. I hate folk music. I don't care for most of the sensitive people I feel obligated to hang out with. Most of them play guitars and write songs about their feelings. I have to pack up my Percy Faith records when they come and put the box in the bedroom closet and pile winter coats on it, and despite the mothballs I'm afraid they'll take one sniff and say, "You like light classical, don't you?"
I pour a round of Lowenbrau, being careful not to pour along the side but straight down so the beer can express itself, and they say, "Did you ever try Dockendorf?" It's made by the Dockendorf family from hand-pumped water in their ancient original family brewery in an unspoiled Pennsylvania village where the barley is hauled in by Amish families who use wagons with oak beds. Those oak beds give Dockendorf its famous flavor.
These beer bores, plus the renovators of Victorian houses, the singer-songwriters, the runners, the connoisseurs of northern Bengali cuisine, the collectors of everything Louis Armstrong recorded between August 1925 and June 1928, his seminal period - they are driving me inexorably toward life as a fat man in a bungalow swooning over sweet-and-sour pork.
There's a point in the Guardian article about wine tasting that alert me:
>The only difference was that one had been coloured red with a flavourless dye.
I have never tasted food dye (and never used any I can recall), but what is "flavourless"? I can recall plenty of things with a very faint taste, but a taste nonetheless, but nothing to be flavourless. And even assuming a food dye in itself can be flavourless, is it not possible that it can alter the taste of what it's added to? I think Scott mention somewhere having used half, or over half of a bottle of food coloring agent for his wine. I don't know how much that is, but that may be a non-nogligeable amount of diluting the wine, thus altering the taste.
If it sounds like unfalsifiable claims, it's because it is (on second thoughts, I should have read that post on internal state instead of skimming over it), but that's a lot of hypothesis that could make the experiments meaningless.
Thanks for the heads up, this mag looks like a nice project. Seconded or thirded: can you please ask them to add RSS? That's the classic hassle-free way to keep in touch with a web publication.
About the wine thing, not much to say, I hardly ever drink it. But I was surprised the article didn't focus more about the distinction between being able to taste differences between wines, and ranking them. These are two completely different things! These are complex organic juices with plenty of variation in chemicals, and a whole subculture has sprung around learning to recognize and discern all sorts of "notes". Fine, great. But that in itself doesn't say anything about which kind of combination is better than another - there's talk of a basic sense of balance, but once you've got the basics covered, which particular combinations of subtle flavors are favored is basically going to be a cultural mushroom, or as the saying goes, a path dependency. If you want to discuss the extent of arbitrariness in wine tasting culture, I would mainly focus on that.
Having served on the board of a Georgist organization, of course, in many ways it is the same question Henry George asks in Progress and poverty (1879). The first pages are still salient, to paraphrase: why amidst the amazing technological advances is there still poverty.
While education and institutions do matter, I think George got the big issue right: land!
"As St. Ambrose put it: "You are not making a gift of what is yours to the poor man, but you are giving him back what is his. You have been appropriating things that are meant to be for the common use of everyone. The earth belongs to everyone, not to the rich."
— Pope Paul VI, Populorum Progressio (1967) in which the church continues it's longstanding investigation of the development of peoples.
is there a chart that shows correlation between "land use efficiency" and prosperity?
Also, I guess there are tons of natural experiments on various state/county borders when land-use regulations change one one side but on on the other. Are there famous ones?
Regarding replication, this problem can't be fixed without changing the underlying attitude that disfavors disproving published results. In many fields trying to show a published effect doesn't exist is seen as a personal attack or at least resented.
My proposal is this: For every published paper the journal reserves 3 slots that automatically go to the best (given some very minimum quality threshold) rebutal pieces submitted within certain time limits (eg 2,4 and 10 years) and the paper, rebuttals and potentially a response from the original authors (not regarded as a new publication) all are packaged together on the online cite. A rebutal publication need not be given the full weight of a publication seen as correct despite the rebutals in hiring as long as it's given decent weight.
I think that's necessary because we can't avoid the fact that it's more valuable to identify a new and surprising phenomenon. It's a genuine skill to have the foresight to know where to look to find new interesting phenomenon and you neither can nor want to require every study that is registered be carried through to the end.
But you do want to clean up the record so reward the ppl who do that.
Seems like nobody pointed this out (and apologies if I'm slow on the ball), so: Scott, you've misspelled "ginkgo" in the beginning of your article. "Gingko" is probably one of the most common non-typo misspellings in the English language, but it's properly (and unintuitively) spelled ginkgo, G I N K G O.
This comment is probably late to the party, but...
Re: "Is Wine Fake" article, I don't know why it's so surprising that we can train our qualia to enhance our perception of the world. Of course, there's a bigger question at play here: how much of our discernment is the result of innate hard-wired biology vs learned abilities? If we divide our qualia into the five senses (which I think is perhaps an overly reductionist way of categorizing our sensorium) we can see lots of evidence that learning plays an important role in our ability to make qualitative judgments about what we're perceiving.
Recently on NPR's Radio Lab. there was a discussion about absolute pitch (aka perfect pitch) which according to Wikipedia: "is a rare ability of a person to identify or re-create a given musical note without the benefit of a reference tone." Radio Lab spoke to some researchers that claimed absolute pitch approached 70% in populations that used tonal languages (Chines), but in populations whose language was not tonal, AP is less than 10%. That suggests that AP is a learned skill—and some other studies suggest that it only can be acquired early in life.
When it comes to vision, cultural anthropologists and linguists have been arguing over whether color categories are inherently programmed into our wetware or whether language and culture have an influence on our categorization of color perception effects. This was in response to the idea that colors were universally delimited by the number of primary color words in a language. For instance, if a language has six basic color words, they were always for black, white, red, green, yellow, and blue. If a language only had four terms, they were for black, white, red, and then either green or yellow. If it had only three, they were always for black, white, and red.
Others countered that this may be true, but just like Inuit have dozens of (agglutinative) terms for snow, and Yiddish has the most terms for unpleasant people, Korean has the most terms for colors—especially shades of yellow. And it's difficult for non-native speakers to learn to distinguish them, but dedicated learners can with some help from native speakers.
Then there's taste. Training and practice will improve one's discernment. I watched a chef friend of mine decode the ingredients in a dish we were served at another friend's restaurant.
Ofc we can increase our discernment but that's missing the real issue. I could probably learn to distinguish a great number of facts about someone's diet by training myself to taste their piss more carefully.
The underlying issue is the implication that it's somehow especially worthwhile or desireable thing to do with wine. It's not even clear that it actually does increase enjoyment and if it does why wine more than smoothies.
I think the suspicion many of us have is that wine is essentially like some forms of high art or architecture. What's really driving the party isn't some simple desire to enjoy their food more. Rather, ppl are deliberately training themselves to like things that are hard for other ppl to appreciate so they can imply they are socially superior to the rabble.
If so, that's both directly harmful (it's basically a kind of bullying/sneering) and not a good way to increase your enjoyment of taste bc, other things being equal, it's probably less fun to learn to better appreciate hard to appreciate things than easy to appreciate ones.
But it's complicated since, as u always find in these situations, there really are some ppl who just do naturally like those kind of tastes and are just enjoying their perfectly reasonable hobby. Then any attempt to attack wine snobbery runs into a motte-bailey where ppl ask you what your problem is with these individuals.
Well, none. Those ppl are great fun to drink with. They get what they love and don't care if you like cheap Moscato as long as you don't drink their good stuff. But other ppl are working very hard to suggest that sophisticated ppl must like wine in a certain way that they do and most ppl only pretend to.
I don't want to come across as a wine snob on a budget, but you have to really give me a reason to try any bottle of pinot under $40. I was talking to a friend who recently moved to Portugal--that's a thing now, I guess--and she told me that their everyday wines are like $3.00 a bottle and some good wines are around $10. I think that the overpriced wine phenomenon is mostly in California, but I could be wrong.
Nice article on wine! One thing I (a French person, not a wine expert) was surprised not to see in the article is a point about price versus ageability. A key point that appears quite consistent among people I know (not wine experts either) is that aged wine tastes good, finer, and better than young wine. But most wines cannot age that long. Some wine can age 3 to 5 years before turning bad, but some can age 20 to 30 years, or even significantly more. A commonly shared opinion in France is that super-expensive wines are also wines that are expected to last really long (when aged in proper conditions, ideally in a cellar). Many French people (owning a cellar) will buy an expensive-ish wine to age it for, say, 15 years, and drink it at a special even. When this happens, it is always a great moment, where the wine really has this well-aged old wine taste which many people love and don't get to taste so often.
So, for me, one of the key distinction between the 2 euros - 15 euros range and the 30 euros - 150 euros range is that the latter is expected to contain wines known to age well for a long time, which is an amazing quality (or even, if you want, a good investment - aged wine can be sold for much higher prices). I don't think I can tell a super expensive wine from a 5 euros wine consistently (France has tons of amazing 5 euros wines), but I'm quite sure (>85%) I will appreciate a 15y old wine that aged well much better than any <5y old red wine more than 80% of the time.
All of the above applies solely to red wine (considerations about aging are not the same for white) and for the price ranges I mentioned, I don't have opinions on the 150 euros range versus the 1000 euros range, having never tried the latter.
I drink a fair amount of wine and catalogue my bottles on cellartracker.com, which is a free web site to keep track of your wines (you can also pay, but it's not required). Many thousands of people use the site and record their own ratings of their wine. When I see a bottle with a high rating from an expert (e.g., wine spectator), I check to see what people on cellartracker.com say about it, a bit like crowdsourcing. It's not foolproof, of course, for some of the same reasons Scott mentions in his article, but if an expert gives a high rating, but the cellartracker ratings are low enough, I'll know it's probably not worth it to buy that wine.
A bit late, but how can experts have blind taste tests between French and Californian wines if they can tell where the wines originate by taste? I don’t understand why experts would agree to this - isn’t even agreeing to do it to acknowledge that they can’t distinguish wines accurately? And if, as Scott concludes, experts can distinguish wines, then why would Californian wines win when blinded but lose when unblinded?
The California wines in question are similar to the French wines in question. Being able to do blind tasting is about being able to distinguish platonic examples. For comparison most people can probably tell the difference between Whiskey, Rum, and Brandy. If you have some experience you can distinguish Whiskey by Region based on knowing what to expect but of course you could be surprised by an unusual example. Regarding why they would be biased when unblinded I think it's helpful to look at the blinded results (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgment_of_Paris_(wine)#The_results). Although a California wine won both categories the results were not as conclusive (although the California wines did better on rematches). If you tasted unblinded then a subtle bias from knowing which is which could easily swing the scores by a few points. Once the first result was announced and California wine became prestigious this bias is reduced.
I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying. Do you think the judges expected ahead of time to not be able to tell if a blinded taste was of a Californian or a French wine? That seems to be the only important consideration here, but either a yes or a no answer seems paradoxical to the whole situation. If yes, then a blinded judging was impossible or even insulting. If no, then the results wouldn’t be surprising.
Yes going in the judges probably expected to be able to tell the French wines from the Californians but realistically they might expect to only have a 80% (I'm making this number up completely) chance of identifying the wines correctly. Distinguishing wine is not a superpower but is instead based on being able to ignore the dominant wine flavor and be able to pick up on more subtle flavors, mouthfeel, and appearance. When judging by region you would provide wines that are most typical of the region rather than the "best" wines from the region so their expected accuracy might be lower (but given I made up the first number we can stick with it). Also one of the characteristics that they previously might have considered characteristic of California wine might have been flaws but these top wines were made without those (e.g. a characteristic I associate with California Chardonnays is too much oak imparting a buttery flavor).
You obviously don't know pinot noir--it's only one of the hardest grapes to grow and French oak ain't cheap either (of course, Ridge uses American oak).
This might have been said, but the constantly updating scroll bar on the left side of mobile articles is a bit distracting. I like its intention, but perhaps it’d be more appealing (and subtle) on the right margin?
Another note: the homepage is a bit unassuming. Though the typefaces and fonts of titles are loud and to my personal taste, the distinction of links verse regular text is not. Perhaps some indication, a border or button, would increase conversions?
What I was missing a little bit is the question "are prices fake?" especially in the fragment about champagne ranging from 400 to 18 pounds per bottle. Wine lovers certainly know that some hard-working and caring champagne makers can make really really good wine and the very expensive champagnes are also very good, but not necessarily always better. Prices have a lot to do with other things than quality. Of course you know that but it was not reflected enough in the piece, I think.
Great article and fun to read. I am a WSET level 4 wine expert and fellow Substack writer at Wine Wanderings. I have been told I am a super sniffer, but more importantly as a biochemistry/microbiology major I do believe in the science of the aromas of wine as you state in your reference to gas chromatography. Thank you for your thought-provoking article.
This magazine sounds great. Subscribed.
Looks great.
One thing I will say: it seemed to me like Works in Progress already was a sort of unofficial rationalist magazine and there might be something to the idea that having a bunch of them is somewhat counterproductive.
Works In Progress is a Progress Studies magazine, I'm sure these two movements look exactly the same to everyone on the outside, but we're very invested in the differences between them.
What *are* the differences? (Note: I don't know Works in Progress.)
Progress Studies is a group that wants to do something like accelerate scientific progress and economic growth.
In theory effective altruists are in theory a group that wants to figure out the most efficient ways to do good under a utilitarian framework. In practice they're a specific community that has (lightly, to a degree) settled on specific strategies for doing good. Most effective altruists are pretty concerned about the risks of technological progress, eg superintelligent AI or bioengineered pandemics. So in theory they might want to accelerate the forms of technological progress that fight those risks, but slow the forms that cause those risks.
Although both groups are socially connected (they're both Silicon Valley STEM types competing for a few channels of influence, especially telling billionaires how to spend their money), and although they share the same rationalist technocratic big-picture mindset, they're opposites insofar as PS mostly thinks about the benefits of accelerating technologies, and EA mostly thinks about the risks. This is an unfair oversimplification and both groups are much more nuanced than this, but it's good enough for a short summary.
Although both groups want to end poverty, EA mostly thinks about this in terms of "how can we help cure diseases and end world hunger", and PS mostly thinks in terms of "if we accelerate the economy fast enough, that will take care of itself".
Also both groups have some interests that the other one doesn't care about at all. For example, EA in trying to consider how to improve the world in utilitarian terms thinks a lot about animal suffering, but that's not as relevant to Progress Studies. Progress Studies cares a lot about figuring out exactly why the Industrial Revolution happened and whether we could do something similar again, and EA thinks we probably have bigger things to worry about.
TIL that I’m a Progress Studies-ist.
It's far better supported by the evidence, so you're also probably more of an empiricist
Really? I guess AI risk is quite speculative but Givewell is as supported by the evidence as is just supporting economic growth. And factory farming being bad also seems very well supported by evidence. As does preventing war and pandemics.
+1
Can we please get an article about the kabbalistic significance of these snacks?
Taiwanese chips for the article on the CHIPS act, plant-based chicken for the article on futuristic suffering-free chicken, expensive Korean food for the article on the Korean economic miracle, nuclear hot sauce for the article on nuclear escalation, white wine dyed red for the article on blinded wine tasting.
I kinda feel like that dude didn't even *try* to figure it out before posting, because I'm no supergenius* and I felt it was immediately obvious and fairly cute/amusing; *I* chuckled, Scott. *I* chuckled.
*(I am actually but I'm making a point here)
That's a bit mean and the connection between the foods and the articles is much less obvious if you don't look at what the articles are.
I've read that the bottom of the wine hierarchy is now much better than it was a half century or so ago, due to advances in technique and presumably competition. Multiple authors saying "there really isn't any true 'plonk' anymore" compared to what they encountered in the 1960s or before. (Which is the opposite of how most comparisons between youth and the present tend to go.)
I wonder if that compresses the quality range relative to when the bonfides of premier crus et al. established their cachet. Even if there's a detectable difference, it may not be as great as it once was.
(In principle, the same process could make recent top end wines even better than their predecessors, but I haven't seen it suggested that that has happened.)
Unfortunately it’s a bit complicated than that. Wines have gotten better but it’s hard to compare jugs wines to a Grand Cru. Wines at the absolute bottom of of the wine hierarchy tend to be unbalanced. Meaning (in this case) that the amount of sugar is too high for how much acid is in the wine. It’s done intentionally because the marketplace generally prefers sweeter tasting wines, but due to the lack of balance it gets reviewed poorly. So right off the bat it’s hard to suggest that the bottom of the pyramid has gotten closer to grand cru’s because in some ways they are different wines. To carry the pizza metaphor forward, the absolute cheapest wines are like a pizza with 10lbs of mozzarella cheese on it. If you never eat pizza or are a child, you might think that’s the best pizza ever. If you eat pizza 9 times a week you are probably going to be overwhelmed by that much dairy.
This raises another issue though. Why do we rate the wines that most people actually like really low and put wines that only hardcore wine drinkers like at the top? Most of the true experts despise wine scores and think it’s bullshit, but a lot of the market still seems to be driven by them.
>>> only hard-core enthusiasts like at the top
Many such cases. It happens in genre movies and books as well - the more casual fan wants a traditional representation of some element while the critic who soaks in this wants to see something new done with it.
Not just genre movies - there's a reason why the term "Oscar-bait" gets thrown around a lot.
The "casual fan" versus the "expert" sounds like a false dichotomy to me. Any industry is going to cater to the bottom line/dollar sign. Maybe this alone explains why Budweiser is so popular? Railing against the "expert" begins to sound like sour grapes for those who never educated themselves on whatever topic they are commenting on. American movies from the mainstream all follow a very specific format that is insisted upon by the producer and the investors. The French system is/was different in that the director was viewed as auteur.
Americans are masscult people by nature. Accept that fact, glory in it even, and do your thing, but please stop grumbling against the "experts."
The sweet spot is to to appear high status will selling in bulk. Budweiser's advertising emphasises quality and heritage rather than "gets you drunk cheaply".
That's Dwight MacDonald's take on America in a nutshell, at least from what I remember of his Midcult/masscult essay. Readers of the New Yorker are just like the masscult that they try to distance themselves from; they're just one floor up and have a nicer view but they still live in the mediocrity.
I’d argue the sweet spot is selling high status while selling bulk. Meiomi has made a lot of money selling unremarkable wine pretending it’s high quality.
Not very rigorous but practical: how about we just put box wines in a separate category? Just like the various wine specialties (port, martini etc). This solves the dichotomy nicely - you have "pure wines" with their hierarchy and audience, and box wines, with their hierarchy and audience. They rarely overlap in practice, not more often then a wine drinker would buy a Port.
Also, rating per type is great. I have a friend who's a beer judge, and one of the important parts is whether the beer tastes the way this type of beer is *supposed* to taste. "International Lager" isn't exactly an exciting category for beer afficionados, but it *is* a category with certain expectations to it, and you can judge beers in this category against each other.
My problem--if I can call it that--with the average wine drinker is that they know very little about what they are putting in their mouths because they've never taken the time to develop a vocabulary for what they are tasting. My brother-in-law, who got fascinated by wine, once remarked that he would like to try an expensive bottle of Cab just to see what the fuss was about. I said that he would just be tasting red wine as he always does because he hadn't developed a language for his palate. I cook and so I am aware of umami as a flavor and so I've grown accustomed to it, but it took a while to come to terms with that flavor profile.
As for the common wine drinker's palate, no thank you! Vanilla, oak, toast, and butter are all barrel flavors that are easy for winemakers to manipulate and use to mask a poor quality grape.
And not every expensive wine is expensive because of its taste.
You have the location for one--a winemaker in Sonoma uses a white grape from Lodi as a base their sparkling wine, but they sell that wine at Sonoma prices.
You have the size of the "block" or growing area--higher elevations do not produce the same yield as lower elevations and so they are pricier.
French oak barrels are very expensive, while French oak chips are not. The owner of Bonny Doon pissed off Ice Wine makers by placing his grapes in the fridge to mimic the late harvest and so brought his "Vi de Glaciere" to market for a much lower price than what those Canadian winemakers up near Niagara were able to sell for.
Longer time in the barrel also means longer wait which adds dollars to the wine.
I don’t know, we obviously agree on a lot but I’m not sure I’m on board with vocabulary being the cause. Like you wouldn’t say someone can’t appreciate good pizza until they have learned the vocabulary for their palate. Or that every cheeseburger tastes the same until you have a vocabulary. Just because someone can’t eloquently put into words why two wines taste different doesn’t mean they can’t tell that two wines taste differently and that they prefer one over the other. It’s just that certain flavors are more familiar and might be enjoyable to people when drinking a smaller quantity. The vocabulary thing seems like the elitist type of language that pushes people away from wine to start with.
After reading some of the comments and thinking more about the discussion, one thing has struck me. To people not heavily involved in wine it seems scandalous that the $1000 bottle probably isn’t appreciably better than the $80 bottle. While that fact seems completely anodyne to everyone involved in wine. Like most experts I talk to think spending that amount for anything other than educational purposes is mostly a waste. But the assumption from outside is that people in the industry must obviously think that Chateau Margaux is of course always 10x better than Smith Haut Lafitte. And that saying otherwise would rock the industry to the core. When in reality it’s basically common knowledge.
The obvious (to me at least) counterargument against language not being important for experience is COLOR.
The best example would be the color brown, which this video does a great job of explaining: https://youtu.be/wh4aWZRtTwU
I’ll be honest, I’m not going to watch that video. It’s 20 minutes long. Am I safe in assuming that it basically says, “our ability to perceive the color brown is dependent on whether or not we have the language to accommodate it?”
The idea that language impacts perception is pretty obvious and agreeable. However, I think your claim goes pretty far beyond this. Think about, let’s say I taste pyrazine in a green bell pepper. I am obviously able to taste it, otherwise how would I know that a green bell pepper tastes like a green bell pepper? But when I taste a Chinon with that exact same methoxypyrazine all of a sudden I can’t taste it? How is it possible that I can taste that chemical when it’s in bell pepper form but can’t taste that chemical in wine form until after someone has taught me the vocabulary? How would the vocabulary of “green bell pepper” even make any sense?
The thing about vocabulary that I do believe is that it impacts memory. I can put two wines in front of novice (and I experienced this when I was a novice) and they can immediately understand that the two wines taste different, even if they can’t describe it. They can understand that one has more complex flavors than another. However, it can be hard to recollect how a wine that you had two months ago tasted unless you have a vocabulary for remembering it. So if you have one wine two weeks after another wine, if you lack the experience and vocabulary your memory will essentially tell you that they tasted the same.
I also think that when people say all wine tastes alike, 65% of the time it isn’t because they lack the expertise to differentiate wine. Rather it’s because they only drink Central Valley California wine that really does all taste the same.
Experts tend to like wines that challenge them, that are "interesting," while casual wine drinkers like wines that are pleasant, comforting, and easy to drink. There shouldn't be any reason to condemn either of these preferences.
Merlot, well known for being reliably smooth and lush but often not a very subtle or complex wine, saw its market share drop temporarily after the 2004 film Sideways, in which one of the protagonists disparages it severely. I always thought that was a little unfair.
I might be a scrub at wines, but there's no question that actual Champagne gives me a very different buzz than even very nice Champagne-wannabe !
(I think I saw someone calling it "bubbly joy", which I can only agree with.)
Also, it's a bit weird to see the phrase "$10 plonk", or is that for a ~5 L cubi, rather than a bottle ? Or is it just that high Californian cost of living ?
P.S.: Never mind, 10€ for a 0.75L bottle seems to be today indeed on the bottom end for reds, I guess I might have gotten confused by table whites and pinks typically being around half that (and bottom tier Champagne not being *that* much more expensive), and especially quite a bit of inflation the last time I bought a red a few years ago !
I'm real skeptical that alcohol can give a different high based on small differences in the grapes used and stuff. A lot of people can't tell any difference or can barely tell a difference between entirely different substances — e.g., morphine and heroin, or various benzos, various substituted amphetamines, etc. — but the same active ingredient in mildly different grape juice causes a different high?
My guess is that the fake champagne has different bubble size which causes absorbtion rates to change noticably
I agree. And yet my experience keeps repeating itself. Though I admit it's highly susceptible to various confounders : the ritual itself is probably the biggest one : you don't drink champagne and beer in the same situations !
P.S.: No wait, I forgot that I was actually comparing Champagne to other sparkly whites. No idea how much "it's not 'real' Champagne" can be a confounded here. I will also have to specifically try Cremants as it has been suggested to be a good alternative.
About 20 years ago I was visiting France coming from Romania (a country of good wines but also, at the time, poverty. Much less so now). I was absolutely floored that we could drink the cheap wines - in Romania, the bottom shelf was probably literally dangerous. Last time I tried a bottom shelf bottle I took one sip, stopped, went to the sink to spit it out and never tried again - it was NOT wine. In France on the other hand one of the best things we tried was a 2 eur bottle of Port.
My personal rules is still to just skip the cheapest wines, and drink what I feel like over 6 eur - except in France where I just drink what I feel like.
Anecdotic, but 100% in support of what you're saying.
You bring back fond memories of drinking Premiat wines during my college years. These Romanian wines were sold in the US very cheaply at the time due to some strange import deal with PepsiCo. The story I heard was that Romania was strapped for foreign currency, so they were literally trading wine for Pepsi syrup. Whether or not this was true, their red wines became favorites among my friends. We thought they were better and more interesting than anything we could afford from California. I think they were about $3.75 a bottle.
What dye did you use to get the coloring right? I may have to try that at my next gathering, seems like a fun gag
Just normal food coloring. A lot of red (something like a quarter of one of those tiny bottles) plus one drop of blue. After I revealed it someone said that it was "the wrong color for a Rioja", which is something I have no idea how to parse and suggests that you might need more knowledge than I have to get it exactly right.
Funny, I would have thought it would have been the wrong flavor for a Rioja as well.
I've heard the red/white wine study discussed at the university cafeteria in Paris. Of note: (a) people discussed it accurately - as Scott has - as a case of how givens (in this case, whether the wine is red or white) affect perception (a molecule present in the nose of both some reds and some whites, say); (b) it was not considered scandalous. Lots of reds cannot possibly be confused for whites (way too much tannin) but some particular reds (light in tannin) taste much like some whites - "objectively speaking", i.e., roughly the same molecules are dominant in the smell and flavour profiles, if I understand correctly - even if they are perceived differently.
But Rioja? I haven't had a Rioja that is light enough yet (in flavor or in color), but perhaps I am just ignorant.
You might like this scene from the sitcom "Black Books", where Bernard and Manny have drunk by mistake a £7,000 bottle of wine and are trying to recreate it in order to replace the bottle:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cd7DK4ji8Fc
The very end of that episode provides a nice punchline to their skill in the matter
Just a fun note about scents that people don't want to admit exist (smells like cat urine from your article).
One of my friends likes the smell of whiteout. We (her friends) were understandably concerned, so I suggested that we contact some perfume companies to see if they had anything that smelled like it (for those of you not familiar with whiteout, think paint).
After laughing, the couple of companies I called denied having such a line of products. So we went to a mall to try in person. The first place we struck out at, but then we found a remarkable honest vendor who was indeed able to find a match for whiteout. My friend did buy it
I love the concept of taking something designed to obscure one's sense of sight and using it to obscure one's sense of smell. Next will be a recording of people brushing whiteout onto paper to cover up ambient noise and trigger the tingles. Whiteout does it all!
Ok. So, Scott, how does your investigation of "wine discernment"* inform your consideration of jhanas?
* I really did not like the title of the piece. Shouldn't it have been "Is wine discernment fake?"?
What maybe might also be considered in such investigations is the problem of "false precision". In this substack, I find that almost always when someone brings up IQ as a measure for something there is an undercurrent that 105 is somehow really different than 95. Or when ranking is involved in anything. To me these are versions of failure to understand variation. See W E Deming.
Re IQ: See part two of https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/19/beware-summary-statistics/ , I think "the set of all people with IQ 95 vs. the set of all people with IQ 105" is a very different question than "one guy who got a 95 on an IQ test vs. one guy who got 105".
I agree that wine, the drink made of fermented grapes, definitely exists and the article wasn't about denying that.
Re: jhanas - it looks like wine expertise is mostly real, so I'm not sure what I should update on. When experts flail, it seems to be at questions around picking up very small gradations, and whether any attempt to be careful enough not to miss them also leads to hallucinating ones that aren't there. I think this is different from "are you feeling orgasmic bliss right now vs. just feeling normal?"
I angrily read JDK's comment and started sweating: "how do I explain all the implications here which I disagree with?!"
As usual, Scott's provided a cogent and reasonable summary of exactly what I wanted to say. Reminds me of 2015 again!
I got a different take away from your wine article. Not that wine discernment is mostly real but highly precise wine discernment (especially without significant training, practice and natural ability is _mostly_ BS but there are _tiny_ group of super tasters.
Is a super wine taster like a super meditator?
Clearly I thought from your article that there is such a thing as feigned or self deception in the ability to actually be a wine super discerner. But, if I understood your position on jhanas, you were unwilling to assert the same skepticism to jhana claims.
The purpose of your consideration of jhana was, as I understood it, the idea that maybe jhana could be used as a as therapeutic. But if it really hard to programmatically train wine tasting discernment skills, I would think that jhana attainment (assuming it's existence) is a lot harder than being a good, let alone expert, sommalier.
So the original question: what does your wine discernment investigation tell you about an investigation into jhana attainment as potential non-addictive therapeutic.
I think part of a rationalist protocol is skepticism without cynicism. But I got the sense that you have not applied the same amount of skepticism to these two things.
As to false precision issues, while related to wine discernment claims, that might be best for an open thread.
I think both are hard, because they require hardware. Wine tasting just needs a good nose. I got COVID in the first wave (Europe), my smell went away completely for ~2-3 weeks, then returned partially, had parosmia since, and it's now getting better. Finally I was able to taste/smell a nice Sauvignon Blanc just last month. But the whole experience is less intensive, less legible, harder to dwell in/on it, harder to feel, harder to use it to compute [to compare it to previous experiences, harder to recall when trying to compare with subsequent experiences]. (And I tried a few times in the years since, and initially there was basically zero noticeable improvement, and now it starts to cross into the okay-ish territory.)
Grokking/getting meditation probably also requires a certain brain and personality. (At least this is my hypothesis. Otherwise half the world would be Zen Buddhists by now, right? Also it's likely very hard to teach/memeify, compared to "God personally sacrificed himself to help bear our sins, so get yourself together and be a bit selfless for the community", and so on. It'll be interesting to see how much neurofeedback can change this.)
Isn't the question "have you been feeling better than drugs orgasmic bliss for 10 minutes straight, the kind you can just float in, while you hardly had some of your attention spent on sustaining it" vs "have you been having a vague but kind of vivid-ish sense of orgasmic bliss while stressing yourself for 10 minutes to try to remember it and mostly succeeding"?
And of course there might be a middle ground like "feeling endless joy for living, seeing, for the sunlight, the trees, the colors, seeing other people walking on the street, feeling every step while I'm moving, anticipating meeting with my friends, at that super great pizza place" (which was a very weird fireworks-in-my-brain episode after half a day of down mood at home, followed by anxiety of waiting for said pals at said pizza place, all completely sober .. *shrug* ... turns out endless joy runs out fast, but maybe jhanas are careful cognitive/emotional loops that keep it going for a while).
Is this a magazine that will take submissions and then publish them based on quality? (Comparisons to rating wines left unstated.) I don't see a way to submit things, contact the editors, or provide feedback in any way.
I did enjoy the articles I've read, but it also seems like the authors are a collection of friends. Seems fine for a first article (who else is going to publish to your nascent magazine?) but is that intended to be the future mode as well?
Clara says they do take pitches, you can send them to info@asteriskmag.com, and she'll edit the site to make that clearer soon.
What kept the French fighting for 58 days at Dien Bien Phu when they should have long before surrendered? Vinogel, "a dehydrated block of wine that could be rehydrated with water. Nicknamed “Tiger Blood” by troops, it was often eaten as a solid block, no doubt to maximize the concentration of alcohol."
(If anyone was wondering how you can dehydrate wine and keep the alcohol, which you'd think would boil or evaporate away first, apparently "Vinogel was a dehydrated wine product, reduced to 1/3 of its volume and gelled to maintain alcohol titration." So, not like 'dry water', but I guess the gel itself was enough to retain alcohol.)
https://youtu.be/_Xr_6n1MIXc
This is very good indeed. Congratulations.
I work in the data side of the wine business. Just a couple of comments on what is a really good article.
The actual difference between red and white wine can be far less than a someone not ITB will naively guess. Color is not a reliable indicator of many qualities. There are incredibly light (in body) red wines and white wines made like red (more contact with grape skins) that fell like reds. In short, the variance within a class can be larger than between classes. And since wine is typically a mostly natural agricultural product with a lot of human choices, the variance between the same wine across vintages is often larger than across types. To account for this, nearly every one of the studies you mention you the most processed, industrial product wines available. The wines are also picked to be as homogenous as possible so the deck is stacked.
Somm training and prowess relies on typical examples of the wine. I can pull out something that will trick nearly everyone but that is just being deliberately obscurantist versus a test of ability. They also train on the exact opposite of the wines mentioned above as used in these studies. The goal is also not merit, but identification. Many people - self included - love atypical wines more in areas where the typical is quite frankly banal or bad. This carries over where legal tasting panels used to assess whether a wine qualifies to meet their requirements are known to disqualify wines for being too good (ie atypical.)
Nobody in the biz - except maybe major commercial producers - use really great statistical methods in any form. When I looked at the methods of some of the 'it's all the same studies' don't use solid methods like the triangle test. (It has been a spell since I've look at these in details, tbf.) And nobody in the wine industry or hospitality industry does either. There is effectively zero statistical rigour including on related industry claims like wine preservation tools. And we won't even touch how badly the term 'double blind' get used among wine people.
Competitions. Gold medal is very misleading. Pretty much all wine competition assign "Gold" to the upper 25% or some cutoff of ALL entries. The goal isn't a serious evaluation - it is commerce. When I did judging, we were encouraged to round up when in doubt - the opposite I'd do professionally where if you are on the fence, it is the lower option. The variance in immense and most "Gold" are innocuous wines that don't offend anyone. The only way to analyze this would be to take Triple or Consensus Gold which meant ALL tasters were in agreement that this was a Gold level wine. That particular article was garbage, tbh.
Undervalued is the immense disconnect between our words and what we perceive in taste. We just aren't good at it without training or reference points and this applies to even wine critics and writers. And a lot is just personal history. My favorite example is "chocolate." If person A grew up on Hershey and person B grew up on 90% cacao, their experience and reference of chocolate are almost incommensurate.
Still a good article on a complicated subject.
I read once that the biggest difference for red/white wine, as far as regular consumers go, is that white wines are typically served chilled. Cooling any wine to 2-8°C was said to have a larger effect on flavour/mouthfeel/expectations compared to the relatively small differences in chemistry from different grapes at 25°C. As a result, drinking any wine chilled makes it taste "white". Is this something that's relevant for sommeliers or competitions? Or do the professionals end up comparing wines at more similar temperatures (either deliberately, or maybe because they taste in the cellar instead of the fridge)?
If you cool a red wine that was in a barrel for months, has a lot of tannin & a lot of acids and alcohol and the usual ingredients needed to feel that the wine has a "full body", that you can almost "chew", stays in your mouth for long, the aftertaste lingers for a long time, etc... so if you cool that then you'll feel that it's meh.
Whereas fresh young white wines made with a reductive technique (steel tank, no air) drank warm is also a bit meh.
Of course it's mostly about personal preference, but as far as I know barrel aged full body wines are the ones that go well with warmer drinking temperature, and has nothing to do with color directly. (Because color is due to a few weeks of coloring on the grapes, and the grapes already largely determine what the winemaker will do with it - eg. put it on the grapes for color *and* put it in a barrel for body. Of course, of course, the soaking on the grapes does alter the taste significantly, but not as much as the other factors. See "orange wines", white wines soakes on the skin of white grapes.)
I really appreciate this context on the cultural/business, especially re: competition ratings. It helps me understand how meaningful or significant those ratings are--both in the context of interpreting articles like this that make arguments based off them, and also in the context of being at my local liquor store trying to pick a bottle.
Thoughts: Whoah that's a lot of typefaces.
Sidebar thingy is neat. Section captions that appear on mouseover should be in a typeface either more or less similar to the body text. Hamburger and eponymous * could stand to fade in and out over about half a second.
IIRC a lot of flavours have some nasty smells in them below the threshold at which we can pick them out individually but high enough to give a more complex flavour. Aldi UK wine is generally not unreasonable considering its price range.
It's bothering me a bit that you need to connect to jquery.com to be even able to see the "foot"notes...
(But a far cry from how much substack's slowness and over-reliance on JavaScript for commenting bothers me.)
I suspect that wine is much like art: it's pretty easy for everybody to agree that a particular piece is terrible. And that a particular piece shows significant skill. But trying to determine which of two different artworks is "better" is far harder. I'd note a significant difference between the experts and the general public here, as well. The public at-large seemed to like the works of Thomas Kinkade. The art world hated his stuff.
A simple way to distinguish good from bad is to drink just good or expensive stuff for a while, then you will quickly notice the bad. I first experienced this with whiskey, but it works for wine too.
After a while, one can also distinguish that some wines seem simplistic or one-note, while others are more subtle. I suppose the subtle ones are better. I prefer them, at least.
Other aspects are more a matter of taste. For instance, I've come to avoid parkerized wine (heavily oaked), including the expensive and praised ones. I also dislike the hugely alcoholic monstrosities of Australia. (Aka "hedonistic fruit bombs", see for instance https://slate.com/human-interest/2011/05/hedonistic-fruit-bombs-the-battle-over-wine-alcohol-levels-rumbles-on.html )
PS. I do find modern art much harder to rank or even appreciate than wine.
I recommend that you branch out beyond yellowtail for Australian wines :)
One has to wonder if it's a good idea to learn to dislike cheap wine, though. How can that possibly benefit the typical consumer (as opposed to the expert)? As opposed to learning to like expensive wine more than before, which seems potentially productive.
Liking cheap stuff is great! It saves you money! :-)
I've found I like good wine more than money.
I’m not surprised people don’t rank expensive wines better than cheaper:
1. Cheaper products of all kinds are usually sweeter. I taste tested bourbon and the cheapest was the sweetest. People like sugar, so that will break those rankings
2. Aficionados want to not be bored. They’ve tried the popular flavors and are now seeking out niche flavors. People who haven’t gotten bored yet will rank the popular flavor above the niche flavor.
There's probably something interesting to say here about how west coast IPAs happened in the world of craft beer over the past couple decades. People who started to get into beer noticed that IPAs had these really strong hoppy flavors, and they could identify them, and so they got into beers with really intense versions of these. Many purists prefer lighter beers, and beginners almost always do, but this middlebrow level likes the things that taste distinctive.
I have a half baked theory of why American beer is like American politics: excessively polarised. Unsophisticated Rube's drink watery stuff like Budweiser, so "sophisticated" types feel the need to overreact, signalling their status by drinking ridiculously hoppy IPAs.
My perception of IPA's these days is that they tend towards fruit salad. I avoid them. My recollection of IPAs back in the day was that they were dry and astringent. I liked them back then.
The idea that heavily hopped IPAs are the be-all end-all of American craft beer is about as out of date as referring to teenagers as “Millenials”.
(And for what it’s worth, regular Budweiser’s biggest problem isn’t that it’s “watery”, as much as it’s unbalanced. Not nearly enough hops to offset the sweetness from malt and the fillers (corn and rice))
Good take. We were in Czech Republic a couple of years ago BP. I thought I had died and gone to beer heaven. Most of the beers were pilsners (Plzen called Pilsen in German is a Czech city). Those beers are well hopped. You see hops growing all over the country.
I'm fully persuaded the Czechs have collectively made some kind of horrifying deal with Satan, by the terms of which in exchange for Czech beer the Prince of Darkness collects the souls of everyone born within 250 klicks of Pražský hrad during this millenium and the next.
The Czechs are notoriously atheist, but I think it has more to do with historically being caught in the middle of all the religious wars and getting sick of it, rather than an explicit deal with Satan. I also think that if they did make some sort of a deal, Satan would be spending all his time trying to find a way out of it.
Interestingly, the last time I was in .cz (about 2016?) I found the hot new thing was locally-brewed IPAs.
I'm not trying to badmouth either Pilsners nor anyone who enjoys Pilsners--beer has enough variety for everyone to have something to their taste!--but I personally find them to be a little too lightly flavoured to be a primary drinking beer. Medium-bodied ales (or the more flavour-heavy lagers, which excludes almost anything in the American mainstream) are for me a better mix of drink-qua-drink and general experience, whereas a sufficiently light Pilsner can sometimes feel like it's dominated by its own effervescence.
I do recommend trying Czech pilsners before writing the entire class off. As a friend once said after trying his first Czech beer "this has everything you'd want from a lager... *and flavour*".
(You should also try Czech dark beers - "tmavé pivo" - if you're ever in the country; they're a lot harder to get outside)
I’m actually the same, I can tell that a good Pilsner is a good beer, but I just like beer (even lighter beers) to be a bit more heavily flavored. There’s a local place here that makes a great dry hopped lager that fits the bill - not bitter, just “crisp”, but the dry hopping really takes it to the next level.
I still don't get that - alcohol itself is kind of bitter. I find even the boring beer almost undrinkable.
Pure alcohol should not be bitter at all (although almost all beer will have some bitter notes) - maybe you’re hypersensitive to bitter flavors, or have a mild alcohol allergy?
I strongly agree that alcohol itself tastes bitter.
It's a different bitterness than that of beer/hops, and it is evident in all drinks with a significant alcohol content. That bitterness was - and is - a barrier to my enjoyment of alcoholic drinks.
And I once knew an alcoholic who claimed he perceived alcohol as distinctly sweet. So there may be individual variation in how alcohol 'tastes'.
This is true, buts it is craft breweries’ fault. They are the ones who argued that style=quality, and then when Ab InBev started making overly hopped beers the whole craft beer movement blew up. It was a monster of their own creation. The same thing is happening in the natural wine scene now.
I first encountered IPAs in Boston in the 90s - enjoyed them for a couple years as something new & different, but burnt out on the excessive bitterness. Now I can’t stand the damn things. Porters and stouts are more my speed (unless it’s super hot out, when an ice-cold Miller High Life does the trick). But some of the gose-style sour beers which are starting to get popular are pretty great. Just wonder whether I’ll still enjoy them years from now, or burn out on them like I did with IPAs (or the banana-clove notes of Belgian-style ales).
American IPAs can sometimes go overboard on the IBUs, it's true...
Hmm. This thread seems to have all the snobbery I associate with wine drinkers. I'm a never winer (whiner?) who grew up during an era when every town in our great state (not CA) had its own brewery. Some were delicious, some decidedly less so. Often the purity of the local water was heavily touted. The difference between beer drinkers then, who enjoyed a variety of unique brews--each with its diehard fans and its detractors--and todays "craft" beer drinkers, is that craft beer drinkers can't seem to just say, "I like this one; that's not for me," but instead try to elevate their status by imitating the sophisticated and unintelligible vocabulary of sommeliers.
I did learn a few years ago why my alienation from the other [wine] moms was so complete, thanks to this New Yorker article. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/how-science-saved-me-from-pretending-to-love-wine
My theory is that it's much easier to make an IPA with a distinctive taste than a lager or a typical blonde ale.
Thanks god, for a few years people have started to make goses, with all the distinctiveness of IPA, but tasting good.
This is probably some of it - lighter lagers and blonde ales have so few ingredients that it’s hard to make them great unless you really really nail the technique.
Sweetness was key to the successful marketing ploy of the Pepsi Challenge of the early 1980s: Pepsi has about 10% more sugar than Coke, so when poured out in tiny glasses for the Pepsi Challenge, the first sip of Pepsi tastes better, at which point you were asked to choose. So Pepsi would win its Pepsi Challenge.
But in real life, lots of people get tired of Pepsi's extra sweetness as they keep on drinking and thus find Coke less tiresome while drinking a full 12 ounces. (I suspect Coke appeals slightly more to adults and Pepsi to kids.)
Bizarrely, Coke executives didn't seem to grasp this and in 1984 brought out New Coke, or as Dave Barry called it, Pepsi-Flavored Coke.
Coke drinkers hated New Coke, so after that unforced error, the same executives who'd botched by switching the recipe to New Coke triumphantly countered their mistake by rebranding old Coke as Classic Coke and launching a huge marketing campaign around authenticity and tradition as it junked New Coke.
Remarkably, Coke came out of this fiasco slightly ahead in market share of where it had been before New Coke.
Probably, expert wine tasters are trained not to overrate the sweeter wine on an initial small sip so as not to fall into the Pepsi Challenge mistake.
I've heard you should just disregard the first sip of anything; the first sip is always a shock to the palate and tastebuds. (Or in predictive coding terms, your top-down and bottom-up sensory processes haven't yet finished arguing about what they're experiencing.) Take the first sip, adjust to it, and then judge the second sip.
Asterisk sounds relevant to my interests, based on the articles above. Does it have an RSS feed or some other sort of syndication? I can use kill-the-newsletter if need be, but that's kind of a hack.
Thanks for the pointer to kill-the-newsletter, which I wasn't previously aware of.
One other comment on the Judgement of Paris :
The "experts" were less wrong than simply unaware of their own ignorance. The best of California was simply not available to them in any quantity to make a judgement, so they relied on the default position and what they had been exposed to only affirmed their position. Spurrier went to great effort to pick a tiny subset of great California wines, replicating in person for CA what the market opinion of decades had determined were the best in France.
While there were and still are levels of Gallic chauvinism, the more common reaction was for the French actively investigate wines from other places and then significantly invest in making wines there.
'Maybe one of those things wine experts say is code for “smells like a goat,”'
FWIW, the polite-ish phrase is 'barnyard' and it's common, and not unpleasant, in reds made from the southern French grape mourvedre.
Aged riesling allegedly tastes of kerosine, but in a good way.
I was once at a blind tasting and said that one of the wines tasted like axle grease, and the others said "oh, riesling often tastes of petrol" (they were Australians), and it turned out, it was indeed a riesling! (And for what it's worth, I did enjoy it.)
One of the best (or at least most interesting-in-a-good-way) rums I’ve ever had was from a shuttered distillery in Kingston. Tasted distinctly of diesel.
Parenthetically curious how you know the taste of axle grease.
I’ve smelled it, and the association of taste and smell is enough to have the thought.
Whew! Always a little unsure what kinks the younger generation gets up to these days...
Although I personally haven't had occasion to grease an axle bearing since 1982 or so. Do they even sell grease in cardboard tubes at Pep Boys any more?
Oh yes. Those of us who still maintain farm property, trailers, tractors, implements, etc go through quite a lot of it. https://lucasoil.com/products/grease/red-n-tacky-grease is my go-to, usually dispensed out of a Milwaukee M18 powered grease gun. You can get it at most auto part stores and sometimes general hardware places.
Riesling is the only wine I like, so far. I love the smell of gasoline, so perhaps we're seeing a pattern here...
You can also get gasoline like smells in Sauterne's. This is an exceptionally sweet wine that is picked after the grapes have been infected with botrytis cinerea (also known as noble rot). This greatly increases the complexity of flavor. Sauterne is the favored pairing for foie gras.
By far the most surprising and yet, somehow, unoffensive wine flavor I have encountered is bandaid. I have experienced about half a dozen times in 80's era Bordeaux's.
Have you had Islay scotches? A lot of people insist they taste like bandaids (I don’t get that note personally unless I go digging for it - but I do love Laphroaig).
Laphroaig and Lagavulin are probably the two I have mostly drank. I agree that in my experience "bandaids" would be a stretch as a descriptor for either.
Supposedly these aromas are “chlorophenols” - it’s a defect in beer and apparently comes most often with wild yeast reacting with chlorine in city water. Various phenols are of course what gives peated whisky the smoky flavors too. So I buy that it is there. But I guess some people are probably more sensitive to the flavor than others. (One flavor I seem to be sensitive to is whatever it is that gives Simcoe hops a “cat pee” note)
I think I recall hearing that this particular taste is from iodine?
Heh, that reminds me of descriptions of Laphroaig scotch, like "burning swamp".
It's not just Laphroaig, whisky tasters love that kind of thing :-)
It's not like burning swamp. it is burning swamp.
Some of the flavour molecules in a bottle of 'phroaig very much used to be a clod of peat from Jacobean times or somesuch that were dug up, dried out, and burned to dry the malt. Sustainably, one would hope, given that it takes centuries to lay down a shovel's depth of peat.
Also a distinctive note in beers brewed with brettanomyces yeast strains.
This looks like an exciting project. If you could, please build an app. I don’t like reading in browsers anymore, an app is just so much better in that it’s optimized for reading, toggling, and saving articles for later.
As a software dev, please don't devote any resources to building an app. Well-formatted html can already be displayed in many different display formats, and this is the perfect use-case for RSS anyway.
Seconded.
But he's got a point in the sense that an app optimized to read HTML... is (supposed to be) a browser ! So it's kind of weird that web developers are trying to "reinvent the wheel" *inside* the browser...
And the state of browsers today in some way is kind of sad : overwhelming Chromium dominance, Firefox barely hanging on... (still "had to" convert its plugins to be compatible with Chromium, but it makes it a 2nd class citizen), and basically only Safari reskins allowed on iOS.
It's kind of weird how we've regressed : for instance Opera notes could be shared across devices, including smartphones, when the iPhone hadn't even been revealed yet !
(Plugins are supposed to fill that feature gap today, but I keep stumbling onto plugins that only work on desktop and not mobile Firefox !)
Crucial nitpick, but browsers aren't "optimized to read HTML" (like you implied), they're optimized to *display* HTML, as the publisher styled it. And often publisher styles are dogshit, full of bloated js trackers, ads, and a general wealth of thing that distract from the reading experience (this site seems fine, but it's an exception).
I'm actually surprised that we haven't seen a browser that really doubles down on "reader mode and user-curation of articles" - though it'll probably come from the "note-taking app" space, rather than the "browser" space. It needs to be big enough that any text-content-focused website that doesn't properly use semantic markup and put their posts into <article> tags[1] gets shamed into compliance.
>basically only Safari reskins allowed on iOS.
I'm really hoping the EU ends up suing Apple over this along with the other things they're hitting Apple for, because it's textbook antitrust (remember, Microsoft got sued for even *bundling* IE for free).
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/article
Indeed, I would add this to my RSS feed in a heartbeat. As far as I can tell though, there isn't RSS for it, this should definitely be added.
"There can be objectively bad pizza — burnt, cold, mushy — but there isn’t really any objective best pizza. Fancier and more complicated pizzas can be more expensive, not because they’re better, but because they’re more interesting. Maybe wine is the same way."
That's pretty much exactly what the local wine shop person in what was my neighborhood between the 13th and the 14th arrondissement used to say. Good wine for 5eur? It's a stretch but can be done - here's a favorite for doctoral defenses. Most wines she recommended were between 6 and 10 eur. (Of course part of this may have been natural adaptation to my pockets and those of my neighbors.) Above 10eur, she said, you are no longer paying for quality as such, you are paying for complexity.
> here's a favorite for doctoral defenses
That says a lot about your neighbourhood, I think...
This reminds me of the fact that psychoanalysis was practiced for decades and people paid good money to go in weekly or daily to have their lives and dreams diced up in Freudian terms. Untold number of published academic papers analyzed movies and literature identifying Oedipal and Electra complex themes.
"was"
In undergrad I realized that I could leverage pretty basic analysis gleaned from one abnormal psych course to get fantastic grades on my lit papers. I still maintain Freudian analysis is fine as a critical theory, not terribly useful for psychotherapy
My girlfriend is a lit PhD and apparently Freudian analysis is a big thing in literary analysis. It makes some sense to me - everything in a book is deliberately there, whereas real life has a lot of random noise and so pareidolia is a danger
Your essay about wine tickled a notion I have about the varieties of aesthetic experience. I used to teach college art courses. One of the courses I taught was 'Introduction to Studio,' which was basically a primer on what an artistic practice looks like, but I worked in a bit of art appreciation as a way to help students think about the experience of art. As part of the course, we'd go to the school gallery and look at whatever show was up. One student and I spent some time looking at a seascape photograph, and I walked the student through a chain of associations I had looking at the work—how the composition made me think of highways, then to the idea of the road trip, then to the great expansiveness of America, and how that road trip is something of a new world phenomenon and what might be extrapolated from that. I told the student how my father had never been west of Illinois, but he was going to drive his RV out west the next year, and how I hoped he wouldn't be disappointed or felt that he'd waited too late. I told him how Robert Persig's book shaped my father, and the ominous clouds piled up in the distance within the picture plane of that seascape photograph loomed over the sea like Phaedres over the narrator of that excellent book, and like the limitations of my father's disappointments had loomed over him. I told my student the picture made me sad my father.
I made the point to my student that of course the picture had absolutely nothing to say about my father, but that one of the best experiences of art are when we open ourselves to the associations art can spark. Nothing I said to my student about the picture was bullshit—that's the point; it was just playing free association until I found something meaningful to me, and it enhanced my experience of being there in that gallery, looking at that picture. It's not always that a picture gives you enough to work with or you can be bolloxed to make the effort to appreciate art in that way, but that when you do, you get something truly personal that has nothing to do with the artist's intent.
Sometimes you can taste a glass of wine and try to pull from it jamminess or dried fruit or pepperiness and the terróir of the hills of Napa Valley, and from there you go to your ex-boyfriend who put too much pepper on things, and you wonder what went wrong, and if you're happier now than you would have been if things had worked out. And sometimes, you take a sip and ignore it because you're just stalling until you can think of something to say.
*I understand that most people who talk about wine are not, in fact, doing all this—they are employing bullshit jargon to seem intelligent and discriminating. Nevertheless, there is a type of experience possible that is evocative and lingual and not wholly bullshit.
Pepsi is sweeter than Coke. Pepsi does better in taste tests because taste tests use small servings. With normal serving sizes, the sweetness of Pepsi is cloying.
Yeah, I came here to say this.
If you're grabbing for a little something to eat, would you be more drawn to a single Hershey's Kiss, or an equivalent sized bit of steak? If your options for dinner are an 8 oz. filet mignon or an 8 oz. bag of Hershey's Kisses, do you prefer the steak or the Kisses?
Excellent analogy.
> cloying
If by which you mean it reasonably offsets the nasty bitterness of the coca, then, yes.
I really liked Kelsey Piper's review of Will MacAskill's book - it identified something I could see around the edges in much of the discussion, but hadn't yet drawn out myself. (It also helps clarify that my reaction to longtermist thinking seems to be one that she shares.)
I was a bit less impressed by the ones about monkeypox and pandemic prevention, but I think they're trying to illustrate someone's thought processes, and not necessarily written in the best way to help clarify something for the reader.
Maybe they were to polite to comment that your red wine was 'lacking in body/ depth'. I love a good fruity/ deep red wine. Kendal Jackson pinot noir never displeases me... unless it's gone sour.
>Why Isn’t The Whole World Rich? Professor Dietrich Vollrath’s introduction to growth economics. What caused the South Korean miracle, and why can’t other countries copy it?
Sorry, but this article is absolutely horrendous. Just inexcusably bad. It doesn't even pretend to consider heritable factors, even just to dismiss them. Not a single mention of intelligence, IQ, heredity, genetics, or biological variation of any kind. Isn't it bizarre that high intelligence populations /just happen/ to build good institutions?
Saying that South Korea proves that dirt poor countries can become rich quickly is at best extremely misleading, because South Korea did not enjoy the benefits that poor countries have today in the form of highly developed global trade networks, the internet and availability of knoweldge etc. Nigeria has all the non-intelligence advantages in the world over 1960 South Korea. If South Korea of 1960 sprung into existence today it would industrialize insanely fast.
It would be unfair to expect a professor to talk about this issues publicly. I think if he was going to, he could argue something like:
- South Korea and Taiwan were poorer than Honduras or the Congo in 1950. Then the former two countries took off while the latter two didn't. Maybe this is biological factors which the first two have and the second two don't, but it at least took some policy factors to enable the biological factors, and we should worry about what those are.
- Probably for any given level of biological factor, you'll do better or worse if you have better or worse policies.
- It's still unclear which direction the IQ <---> wealth correlation goes (see eg the rise in Irish IQ from abysmal to First World normal with rising Irish development in the mid-20th century) and we ought to be prepared for at least some of the causation to be wealth -> IQ, in which case it's still important to figure out which policies increase wealth.
I haven't been able to find good information on the IQ of undeveloped Asian areas (eg Korea before its miracle) and my understanding is this is still a topic of debate (for the five people who are still willing to discuss it openly).
I think Vollrath's story is useful for the policy half of possibility-space, and given that it would be impossible to get the article published if he even nodded to the other half's existence it's fine for him to write it the way he did.
See also my review of How Asia Works, especially the concluding section: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works
Over the last few generations, South Koreans have experienced perhaps the world's largest Flynn Effects for both average IQ and average height (something like 6 inches in height). Young South Koreans used to be shorter than Japanese but now are taller.
It's a serious problem that a "rationalist"-branded publication is afraid to even broach taboo subjects, there's no truthseeking worthy of the name to be had on politically charged topics if such limitations are established from the get-go. Maybe reputation-conscious professors should be encouraged to post anonymously somehow?
The lack of SSC/ACX-tier comments is sorely felt too, I'd say that your review plus the resulting discussion is a miles better overview of this topic.
Damn dude, they just got their first issue out. They have no idea how the populace will react to it. Give them time?
If you’re still unsatisfied, you can always do all of the work it would take to gather even this many articles with a rationality lens on them, plus all the work to edit them to be punchier and less afraid of taboo, and finally all the work to publish that alternative.
I, for one, might read it. Good luck!
"Nigeria has all the non-intelligence advantages in the world over 1960 South Korea. If South Korea of 1960 sprung into existence today it would industrialize insanely fast."
I believe that average IQ matters for economic development, but this is just a factually incorrect statement. In 1960, South Korea was ~20 million people, almost all of whom were ethnically Korean and spoke the Korean language and who existed in a unified political entity called South Korea. Nigeria came into being as a collection of various ethnic groups, speaking a total of >500 different languages, and with a north-south split between Islam and Christianity, all agglomerated together by colonial boundaries. And then throw in oil just to give all those groups something else to fight over.
If you're looking for a natural experiment on the importance of IQ to development, this comparison is not a good one. In fact, if you're going to compare Nigeria to Korea, you ought to compare it to the whole of the Korean peninsula. Koreans are smart, but even they're not smart enough to make Juche work.
So Nigeria's like India then?
Or the USA. Various ethnic groups, religious divides, somewhat arbitrary colonial borders, and oil.
What? The US was culturally and linguistically homogeneous (at least, homogeneous enough) throughout most of its history. English-speaking WASPS made it what it is. Sure we had multi-ethnic immigration, but that's what the 'melting pot' was for - you submit your native culture to the dominant American one.
I would disagree, unless we're really talking only about the colonial era and 50 years after. Sure, there are traces of WASPy dominance in New England, among the Boston Brahmins, but I would say as early as the Civil War you find New York City has a seriously polycultural and polyglot influence, Philadelphia has a lot of Italian and German, the Midwest has a stronger German and Scandinavian influence, Appalachia is overrun with Scots-Irish drunkards, Florida by Cuban refugees, the Southwest has a massive Spanish-Mexican-Mesoamerican influence, et cetera. And this is leaving entirely aside the influence of 20th and 21st century immigration, which has been also substantial.
Without immigration the US would be 3rd world dump.
I don't know enough to make a real comparison between Nigeria and India. Nigeria doesn't have a caste system, with all of its seemingly endless subdivisions, and the antagonism between Muslims and Christians seems lower than between Muslims and Hindus in India. Those are positives, but I'm not sure to what extent Nigeria has been able to leverage them.
Both places can certainly be physically overwhelming in similar ways.
Fun fact: North Koreans are very genetically similar to South Koreans. Also Taiwanese are very genetically similar to Chinese.
Somehow there’s extremely large variation in economic outcomes despite the similar genetics! I think that rather suggests that genetic variation in intelligence is not the most important factor.
It's definitely not the most important factor between North Korea and South Korea, but that doesn't mean it's not an important factor for other differences.
We wouldn't expect the economic differences between countries to come down to a single factor, there are certainly many factors involved. Is genetics one of them? What sort of data would help us find out?
In all fairness, the special considerations in each case make them quite... untypical. And the overall sample size of under 200 countries doesn't give us very much to work with, statistically.
But anyways: in Korea you have almost the most extreme two systems possible: dictatorship bent on military power and maintaining control, vs free market set up by an extreme outlier of dictator hellbent on making it an economic power.
And Taiwan... I'm just as likely as the next guy to say that "free market good", but Taiwan is a very poor argument for that: it was distilled from the absolute creme of China, in IQ and entrepreneurial spirit, plus a shitton of wealth to get it started.
Both examples are hard to generalize to anything other than "this particular path gets to prosperity".
>genetic variation in intelligence is not the most important factor
It's like saying that money isn't the most important factor for happiness. Sure, it's not enough by itself, but when it's absent, one tends to discover its paramount importance very quickly.
Of course, IQ isn't absent anywhere. Intelligence is normally distributed and at most there is less than 1 sigma difference between any observed large populations. Accordingly, there are plenty of brilliant people in any population to form a successful society. Granted, some low IQ people may be a net drain on the society (much like conservatives in the U.S.) but the society can still prosper. \S
It is intellectually irresponsible to mention "Nigeria" and "intelligence" in the same sentence without also mentioning the Igbo. If they'd won the Nigerian Civil War, you might well be asking why South Korea wasn't doing as well as Biafra.
I don't totally see why you think this is such an overwhelmingly bad omission when this topic isn't that well-understood yet (particularly in terms of which is the root factor and how cyclical development/IQ are), but also it seems like you think genetics are way stronger than I think is plausible based on history.
For example, the world is only a couple of centuries into industrialization, but the Roman Empire lasted for centuries at a higher development level than the world reached afterword for centuries more (see e.g. https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-i-words/), so I dunno how I should rate Italians in terms of presumed IQ. Ditto for China, which was probably the most advanced civilization in the world for hundreds of years, and then fell heavily behind, and now is sort of catching up or something, it's complicated, we'll see in fifty years. Ditto for the Middle East which has at times been at the forefront of mathematics and science but currently sports a variety of mediocre governments.
If nothing else I think it can be safely assumed that non-genetic factors can easily dwarf genetic factors on periods of time at least centuries long.
More so than if expert wine tasters are fake or not, it is if their ideas and preference are applicable to the common person. They are more like connoisseurs in a genetic+social sub-group who are both able to detect, care about, and are interested in expensive wines and the very subtle differences between them.
One also cannot discount the propensity for people to try to 'in group' themselves by adopting the habits, concerns, and interests of the aristocracy. A common theme is the pursuit and interest in rare and expensive items to signify their status. Be it playing golf, going skiing, expensive watches-wine-real estate-handbags-clothes etc. there are many people looking to fit in socially and various 'real' areas of highly specialised 'expertise' develop, often with some element of truth in them with fancy/needless for time telling internal engineering workings of watches and useless wealth signalling gold plating with embedded diamonds.
But for the 95-99% of people who cannot reliably detect faint traces of chemicals and do not want to copycat and fake their own way into/maintain their place in 'high class' social circles by pretending or genuinely coming to care about wine or handbags or watches or cigars, then this information of wine tasting has no applicability. It truly is some dumb rich people thing like caviar, cigars, cheeses, cured pork, and wine.
In terms of expertise and tasting notes etc. being fake...if 92% of people who really try to pass the official wine tasters organisation fail...then by and large one can accurately expect almost every expert they meet to be fake/making it up/not very accurate/deluding themselves. Do those 92% failures who have spent 10+ years 'training their palette' go away and stop telling other people about which wines are better in their social lives? Do they never work in jobs in the restaurant or wine industry to make choices about suppliers or in producing or mixing wine? Of course they do!
So by and large the vast majority of expertise across the entire wine industry is demonstrably fake.
I'd say unless you are in that tiny genetic subset with the nose for it and the desire to 'act rich' or are just a motivated alcoholic or somehow come to appreciate these subtle games to stimulate your genetically gifted nose....then 100% of everything even the real experts say is 100% inapplicable to you and not worth the money for the experience of drinking it. And almost all wine expertise you will come across as a non-multi-multi millionaire in normal/regular fancy restaurants and wine sellers is fake price gouging nonsense.
The average person in the average context leading their normal lives has no need and cannot benefit from drinking wines which cost more, even if it does reliably fit into approved expert opinions. This is because you literally cannot taste or smell it. Even more so anyone would be much better off never drinking any alcohol of any kind, it is a harmful chemical with a few truly fake studies pretending a glass a day is somehow beneficial...it isn't and there are healthier ways to reduce stress than addiction and chemical dependencies. The evidence base for the good of wine is thin at best and industry funded.
The entire thing with wine is just like if a few rich people discovered a small subset of people who are like Beagles or Bears with a superior ability to detect ultra subtle differences most people cannot detect. Then they set up a huge game on top of an existing industry of wine making - and they set their hounds loose to identify rare wine tastes which they can then talk about while they put on airs at their fancy private aristocratic parties and exclusive restaurants. It is just a dumb rich people game with collectors and rarity and tulip bulbs for things almost none of the wealthy patrons can even taste.
Sounds pretty fake to me, even if there are a tiny core group of highly trained beagle people sniffing what are normally undetectable differences and include tastes and smells most people wouldn't appreciate even if they could smell them! Yes more cat piss and oak berry combinations...you can tell these are popular flavours for commoners due to all the oak-berry-nut flavoured non-alcoholic drinks on the market! Next to all the soda and fruit cordials all these 'notes' these experts are seeking out due to the difficulty in producing them and paying for them are...gross!
I don't get more out of drinking expensive wines, but I have rather childish taste buds in general. If somebody who is a connoisseur of French cuisine announced that French wine is fake, I'd be impressed. But how do we know that the Wine Is Fake advocates aren't just generally below average in discernment of taste and smell and are projecting their deficiencies onto most everybody else?
Everybody gets more discerning in anything they do a lot of for a long time.
Hey friend, I'm a very broke member of the vanishingly small ACX blue collar contingent, and I don't think of good wine, cheese, cured meat, or a nice cigar as "dumb rich people things" at all. Maybe you don't enjoy things like that, and that's fine. But for me, something like a nice piece of Cowgirl Creamery Red Hawk aftert big joint with an old friend on a rainy day on my way to Pt Reyes is what makes an otherwise difficult, painful, and not very exciting life worth living. I remember with extreme clarity the first time I ever tasted really nice Jamaican rum. My first cuban remains a treasured sense memory, and the vividness of that memory is directly correlated with how novel and intense the taste of that cigar was.
I am an extremely status avoidant person, with an almost pathological mistrust of authority, so I'm pretty confident that my consumption isnt for the sake of seeming high status. Honestly, it just seems to me that you have what most people would consider an immature pallette, and cannot imagine that "90-95%" of people aren't exactly like you. It's totally fine to like what you like, but the sweeping and myopic assumptions you're making about people who like things you don't like are pretty ridiculous.
One of my all time favorite television series was the "Northern Exposure" about the the eccentric residents of a fictional small town in Alaska featuring the fish out of water adventures of a New York City native physician who is assigned to work in the town as repayment for his medical school loans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Exposure
One of my favorite episodes was No. 59: "The Big Feast" originally braodcast on March 22, 1993 • "To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Minnifield Communications, Maurice prepares one of his famously lavish parties, sparing no expense. ... Shelly accidentally breaks a very expensive bottle of Maurice's wine, a 1929 Château Latour, but Eve comes to the rescue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Northern_Exposure_episodes
Eve's rescue involves taking a bottle of ordinary wine, gluing on the original lable and doctoring it with things like peat moss. The bottle is drunk and no one is the wiser.
A notorious case of wine fraud was Rudy Kurniawan He was found to be offering more magnums of the limited edition 1947 Château Lafleur than had been produced, and his Clos St. Denis Grand Cru was labelled with a fictitious vintage. Sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment in 2013 in the United States, he was released in November 2020 and deported to Indonesia. Victims of Kurniawan's fraud include Bill Koch [yes one of those Kochs], who sued Kurniawan in 2009 alleging he sold fake bottles at auction and in private sales ... Koch and Kurniawan settled out of court in July 2014 for $3 million in damages, and Kurniawan should be completely debriefed regarding his knowledge of counterfeiting in the wine industry. Koch claimed to have spent $35 million tracking down the evidence to pursue his case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Kurniawan
I am very skeptical about wine. Most of the wine I buy is under $20 a bottle. I have had some very nice very expensive wines, but I generally don't think the extra cost is rewarded by tastier wine.
A couple comments on "Is Wine Fake?"
A couple of missed points.
I've been making wines for 20+ years ...and first of all, taste is subjective. Experts really are experts. Anyone who can discern the difference between vintages, regions and varietals - damn!
If you can't tell the diff ... who cares? Buy the cheaper wine.
Some people have palates with a greater threshold for flavor.
Or perhaps, the taster offset the pH in his/her mouth by eating a tangerine or a piece of chocolate just before sipping. That can alone shift perception.
Also wine is a living thing in the bottle and its chemistry is constantly changing.
Finally, wine is very expensive to make. Hand harvesting, processing equipment, barrels ($800-$1,000 each), commissions and shipping. It's quite possible that a $100 wine actually cost $90 to make.
Is it also possible that a $1,000 wine costs $900 to make, or a $10,000 wine $9,000? Surely towards the high end there is a point where the price starts disconnecting from the "cost of production + reasonable profit margin" equation?
Your scenario is actually a disconnect from reality. Such wines are perceived more as art. Sure, you can pay a quarter million for a Chateau Margaux 1787. But, are we really talking about flavor anymore? Why do people pay so much for a painting that could have been drawn by a 5-year old?
Agree, 90% in production sounds unlikely to me. Very little margin for anything and anyone else. And there's no particular reason why supply/demand would result in a price just barely above production cost for wildly expensive wines.
Regarding food coloring, as an alternative you can buy black tasting glasses from Riedel (and perhaps others) to avoid such misdirection or vulgar hints.
I'd say identifying vintages seems hardest, if nothing else because it requires a lot of tasting and it can simply be hard to assemble a suitable vertical. (Also provides a devious way to defraud most drinkers.)
Finally, I should also mention that I unscientifically appreciate wine differently depending on the glass from which it is drunk. (Bombshell?)
I find the end of "Making Sense Of Moral Change" *weird*.
In the middle Christopher Leslie Brown argues a lot about the "false dichotomy between sincere activism and self-interested activism".
But then in the end he seems to go *against* this, rejecting antislavery being "part of the natural process of modernization"..?
But wasn't the Great British Empire "exporting antislavery" also partially self-serving ??
Certainly seems to be to me, after all, industrialization only kicked into high gear because of a set of extremely specific circumstances found in Great Britain at the time, which also gave them a large advance on the competition !
https://technicshistory.com/2021/07/13/the-triumvirate-coal-iron-and-steam/
So the fact that Great Britain didn't *need* human "energy slaves" any more, would explain quite a lot why it was very politically expedient to bully anyone else that was benefiting from it !
(It's a bit more subtle than that, since it benefited quite a lot from slavery for specifically cotton-picking, but here too the article adds a piece that was missing from my puzzle : it was much more politically complicated for them to bully the growing USA than the various Ottoman-backed Barbary corsairs (et al.) that were already in decline but especially infamous for enslaving Europeans !)
(Unless of course his point was that the industrial revolution was not very likely, but it didn't read to me like that...)
Also, the bit about the USA "exporting democracy" reminded me of a commonly heard criticism about how they're mostly exporting neoliberalism (read : free market trade), which benefits them now that they're top dog, while they were gladly using protectionism while the Great Britain was the top dog. (And of course the Middle Eastern oil criticisms.)
Enjoyed the wine article a lot. Looks like a great magazine.
One thing you didn’t touch on that I think plays into this as well: *tasting* wine is not the same thing as *drinking* wine. Small samples with a regimented tasting method isn’t at all analogous to pouring a tall glass you quaff with snacks around the pool. I do really wonder how much that plays into it. (I’ve heard this as an explanation for the Pepsi taste test thing - Pepsi has a sweeter flavor that’s better in a little sip, but Coke tastes better by the glass).
And there is also mood - you mention different pizza types. I also enjoy Detroit style, it’s probably my “favorite” if I had to pick one, I have ready access to a decent chain that sells it… but it’s probably only about 20% of the pizza I get? Sometimes I just want some other kind of pizza. I enjoy big stout beers, but drink light IPAs more often because they are more refreshing. Etc.
So maybe wine tasting isn’t repeatable because taste just isn’t a repeatable science?
In "Making Sense Of Moral Change", the author claims that the abolition of slavery in England would not have happened when it did if not for the politicization of slavery, caused by the American Revolution.
This runs counter to arguments I've heard on ACX and similar spaces which is that if your goal is to improve policy, the last thing you should do is politicize an issue. Robin Hanson's idea of "pulling the rope sideways" is related to this.
What do people think about this difference? Is one strategy generally better than the other? Are there particular kinds of problems where politicization is a better way to shift policy, and others where it is worse?
Perhaps if you desire to make a significant policy shift, like abolishing slavery, that has many powerful interests against it, then it's necessary to make the issue political or else it's impossible to overcome the resistance against making the change. But if you have some smaller scale policy shift that doesn't have obvious detractors, then keeping the topic apolitical stops any resistance from forming.
In Britain the natural pro-slavery constituency was rather small (just a few rich dudes with foreign plantations) compared to the US. But I guess nobody really thought or talked about the issue much. Once it became politicised in the USA, Britons started taking about it and generally agreed that it was not nice.
Politicising the issue was bad for the US but the spillover effects were good for the UK.
I think if your main problem is that not enough people take your seriously you can do a lot worse than force people to take notice by dragging your issue into the culture war zone.
*you seriously
Minor comment here, since that site doesn't seem to have comments:
> People spend thousands of dollars for fancy wine that they enjoy no more than $10 plonk from the corner store.
This is missing the point. People don't buy wine blinded; they're buying a whole experience that includes 1. knowing what wine you are buying, 2. potentially, others knowing what wine you are buying. Buying an expensive fancy wine is rewarding in various ways that are not directly related to the taste of the wine, and those ways aren't "fake" or "insane".
We can't vote for top comments here but this one would get my vote. I try to avoid being a proselytzier for "The Elephant in the Brain" but I did love the book and do find it often apropos. Huge portions of what we think of as our enjoyment of food or drink or gifts or anything else enjoyed in company is an experience, but specifically an experience of signalling. This isn't bad or fake, it's just baked in to the human enjoyment of things. If I have guests over and I serve them wine, I won't tell them what I paid for it and none of them are experts, but they could all probably guess the cost within 20% plus or minus. Why? Because I'm signalling their value to me, my capacity to buy things, the importance I place on getting together, etc. Similarly if I serve them food it'll be x amount laborious or expensive (within careful limits) to signal these same things. None of this is conscious, but doing it wrong would feel gauche or tacky.
Signalling explanations are pretty much always correct and to the point, but also self-defeating. To engage in them is to defect in the social game, in other words, to signal low-status cluelessness. Everybody except the certain nerd archetype instinctively knows that the social game is more important than truth in public, and so these insights will never penetrate the mainstream.
Sure but they are stupid and wasteful.
This doesn't follow. Surely signaling and conspicuous consumption can be smart and worth the cost?
Not if you don’t value what they signal. If you are already married and have a good group of friends you value and aren’t looking for replacements, what good is signaling you make 20, 50, $200k more a year? You can already signal that much more directly by paying for things like meals and vacations. And you have a lot more money to do that because you didn’t buy a $150,000 car when a $40,000 car will be 97% the same.
I don't agree with Scott's theory of the Pepsi challenge. My perception of the difference between Coke and Pepsi is that Coke is a bit more astringent, which cuts its sweetness some. Pepsi won taste tests because it is sweeter and most people when offered a choice will prefer sweeter foods and drinks.
But, over the long haul, sweetness without balance is cloying. That is why many people prefer Coke.
Coca Cola conducted an experiment when they reformulated the beverage in the late 1970s and marketed it as the New Coke. It was a disaster,at least in the short haul. I heard a very good podcast series about the episode. I think this is it:: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOBn-rdJvxA
Tying into the topic of different people having different flavor sensitivities: I have people in my life who insist they can't taste any difference between coke and pepsi and this notion is borderline incomprehensible to me.
Did you spot that the word “the” is in this sentence twice?
loved the wine article. That "experts can't tell red from white!" study has plagued me for years and I take its invocation to be a reliable sign that I should talk to someone else at the party.
I’m a neophyte perfumer. It’s remarkable how quickly one’s discernment can update itself with minimal training / experience. Certain aromachemicals are used everywhere in perfumery but are never perceived as a discrete scent until you’ve smelled them on their own — iso e super, hedione, many more. Smell these in isolation enough times and you’ll start to recognize them from yards away, and you may also begin to update your framework for what makes a fragrance compelling or beautiful or “good.”
Tangentially: hexanoic acid is used quite a bit in perfumery, contributing in tiny quantities to accords that register as "fruity". Looks like there are a few studies about its appearance in wine as well; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12236692
The people invoking the study probably intended to filter *their* conversational partners the same way. Win/win.
I think the intent is just raconteurism, which is fine, but I just haven't found many hardcore wine skeptics to be open to updating. I suppose this is frequently downstream of more general attitudes toward concepts of taste/discernment which tend to be pretty hardened
Similarly, I know a fair amount about golf course architecture, which many people find bizarre because it's not usually thought of as an art form even by people who follow building or even landscape architecture. But it's pretty easy to learn to distinguish different golf architects' styles.
On the other hand, the top 1000 or so aficionados of golf course architecture in America have mental skills that I lack, such as the ability to remember and picture in their mind's eye the undulations of each of the 18 greens on a famous golf course. It was rather discouraging to me when I finally realized that I was never going to be able to be a first class golf course critic.
Having no prior experience with or knowledge of golf, during COVID I spent most of a season as a groundskeeper at a pretty high-end golf course. It was eye-opening to say the least. The latter half of my time there I was entrusted with mowing greens, and the combination of art and science that went into that was beyond what I would ever have expected.
loved this article! where my josh heads at 👀
What's a josh head?
Josh wine probably.
josh cellars wine!
Taiwanese chips? You have two bags of mainland Chinese chips flanking one bag of Taiwanese (or at least, not mainland) chips. Did you mean for all the chips to be Taiwanese?
Yeah, fair enough, there was only one kind of Taiwanese chip I could find and Chinese chips also seemed on-topic.
An interesting contrast to wine is Scotch. There the differences can be in your face. My favorite single malts are Talisker and Laphroaig. They both have what I would call a phenolic character with notes of mucked out barn and iodine. Either you like it or you don't. I raised my son well, and he likes them. My daughter in law, OTOH, does not like them. She is OK with Chivas Regal which is at the opposite end of the taste spectrum. My preferred blended scotch is Johnnie Walker Black, which uses Talisker as part of its base.
Lagavulin for me... JWB when I am not feeling fussy... and Im with you all the way.
I don't know anything about what actually goes into scotch, but used to think it was nasty smoky peaty nonsense before trying Macallan 12. Quality seems to scale significantly better with price in the whiskey genre, compared to wines. (Though JW's collaboration-for-the-masses with Game of Thrones was surprisingly not-awful.)
No rocks though - I prefer almost all alcohols at room temperature. If it needs dulling down, then it's not that great to begin with...
Have you tried any Glenmorangie scotch? From my own small experience, I seem to like them a little better than the Macallan 12, but that may just be an individual flavor preference. To me, the Glenmorangie 12 seemed a bit harsher than the Macallan 12, but it was tastier and much cheaper. and the Glenmorangie Nectar D'or was just delightful, and still slightly cheaper.
Not familiar with that one, although I haven't really perused the hard liquor section recently. Will keep an eye out next time. Do know I am not a fan of Glenfiddich, but am a fan of Glengoolie (For The Best Of Times[tm]). Tend to nurse the same bottle for months/years. Harshness is generally a big turn-off for me, even if it comes with taste...I'm happy to pay more for something smoother. (Which also translates to fewer/no hangovers.) Not like unlimited more, money is definitely still in the OBJ class for me, but since the cost is amortized over a long period and shared between multiple drinkers for Special Occasions(tm)...eh. For everyday hards I'd rather go after low-end rum or vodka, since the lower quintile of those markets is a lot nicer than that of whiskey.
I haven't had Glengoolie. I didn't like Glenfiddich 12 as much as Glenmorangie 10 (not 12, my mistake), but I think they were both in the same direction relative to Macallan 12, so maybe that's a warning sign? They're more of a spicy fruitcake and grass nose, at least to me, if that makes sense?
I hear you about the harshness, and its relation to hangovers. I held off on scotches for a long time because they were just so expensive compared to everything else, but eventually I caved. I was mostly into gins, though. :-)
Oh, and do you have any recommendations for nice low-end rum? ;-)
The $10 "Rum of the Gods" or whatever it's called at Trader Joe's is perfectly serviceable. I prefer gold to silver, but different tools for different tasks. There's a bunch of stuff between the $10-20 range that's very...ambiguously better? Like not so much that I'd actually care to pay extra, since silver is just a mixer and golds don't get whiskey-level complex until out of the low-end tier. I think, anyway.
Can never drink gin again, at least if it's juniper-based. Used to eat those berries directly as a kid, anything in that flavour-space provokes a massive disgust reaction now...
Thanks, I'll try that! FWIW, my go-to daily scotch is TJ's Finlaggan, which is medium-peaty (so maybe not up your alley?) but really quite nice.
Ouch about the gin! I've done that to myself with a few foods, but thankfully nothing that I miss.
I love the maltiness of scotch, but prices have more than doubled in the last 10 years. So it’s bourbon Manhattans for me these days
To what extent does this contradict or not contradict Scott's claim that we should trust self-reported internal experiences?
You mean the wine tasting article? Not much, I think. It's like the difference between accuracy and precision. Whether or not I'm sick and miserable is a question of accuracy. Whether or not the Bordeaux has avocado notes is a question of precision. There's not as much riding, quantitatively, on the wine as on the misery. Just because I don't taste the avocado doesn't mean I'm having a seriously worse experience of the wine, only a different one (and this is a point Scott's article at least gestures at).
TIL I have a habit of double-clicking text as I read it, and Asterisk Magazine isn't just a name.
In his famous early "70's "Le goût du vin" ("The taste of wine") , the late great Émile Peynaud wrote ( I condense the whole book a bit...): "It wouldn't be a surprise if a few decades of work by geneticists at UC Davis could equal or best centuries of monks toil."
Far from being a surprise, everybody in the world of wine knew how fast the other producers were catching up. There were no internet but wintners, sommeliers, agronomists and other consultants travelled while investors knew how much money could be made by expanding production to quench the thirst of the fast-growing middle-classes with their fancy aspirations.
I am old enough to have seen and tasted the transition from what passed as wine in Canada in the '60'-70's to what it became twenty years later. The lovely days of spanish, portuguese and yougoslav plonk Canada got in exchange for Bombardier waterbomber aircrafts...
I notice I’m confused about one of the assertions in the pandemic prevention article:
“ The reason why we haven’t seen any credible attempts with pandemic-capable viruses is we haven’t had any pandemic-capable viruses to use. We still don’t know of any.”
What about smallpox? MERS-CoV? Nipah? Ebola? Deadlier influenza strains? Couldn’t these be bad, ackshually, on a global scale if dispersed in airports?
I’m curious what criteria the author might have been using to rule out the deadly and contagious viruses we already know about.
Many of the more deadly suspects (MERS, Ebola) are deadly enough that they can kill the infected population before having a chance to spread to pandemic scale. Smallpox would be a danger though.
The first four are not great candidates for pandemic disease, except in unusually unsanitary and ignorant conditions. They are not easily transmissable, requiring some degree of extended close contact and carelessness -- just walking by someone in an airport will not generally do -- and unlike SARS-CoV-2 people tend to be symptomatic at about the same time they are infectious, so even non-experts can tell someone is sick and avoid them or isolate them.
Influenzas are a different story, they are far more infectious and are infectious before symptoms show, so way more transmissable, but the known modern variants aren't very dangerous. The much nastier 1918 bug has been reconstructed[1], and indeed proves to be considerably deadliner than modern strains in animal studies. But if it were let out it wouldn't be likely to do nearly as much damage as it did in 1918, since 1918 didn't have antivirals, had no idea how to construct a vaccine, and had no testing to determine who was infected and who was not before they showed symptoms.
If you want something to be self-transmitting[2], you probably need it to be quite infectious before symptoms show, which is a somewhat unusual property. The influenzas definitely have it, so those are good candidates with which to work. But...unless you have some notion of what you can tweak to make it a nastier bug, it will be a long, long process of trial-and-error. Influenzas are pretty simple viruses, but they have ~8 genes and ~4500 codons. If you start randoming changing codons to introduce novel amino acids in the proteins and see what happens...rolling a 4500-sided dice over and over again...you will probably be there a while before you stumble across something significantly more infectious or deadly. You can try directed evolution, but this is a slow 'breeding' process of growing cell cultures, culling the winners, repeat. You could try directly constructing a deadlier genome -- if we knew enough about how the structure of the viral proteins makes it infectious or deadly, but alas we do not.
It may also be worth noting that we don't even know whether it is theoretically possible to create an influenza virus as transmissable as they are now and also as deadly as MERS or the Black Death. Perhaps that capability does not lie within the envelope of possible influenza proteins. No amount of reprogramming of the DNA might suffice, in the same way I simply cannot program an Arduino drone to be a killbot if the drone lacks the necessary hardware -- has no miniaturized gigawatt lasers mounted on its chassis.
---------------------
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/reconstruction-1918-virus.html
[2] For actual bacterial warfare, as opposed to mindless terrorism, you do not, because you want it to kill only the people you target, and not (for example) randomly spread it to your own troops or allies. Anthrax[3] has been generally speculated to be the bioweapon of choice, because it is pretty deadly, isn't transmissable from human to human, and can be readily made into highly dispersable spores that can be conveniently stored for a long time.
[3] https://www.cdc.gov/anthrax/bioterrorism/threat.html
> But...unless you have some notion of what you can tweak to make it a nastier bug, it will be a long, long process of trial-and-error.
Given all the influenza and sars-like viruses that have been sequenced, pre-existing gain of function research, I would think one would have many options for making much-better-than-random guesses to make if trying to tweak 1918 flu or MERS. E.g., of those 4500 codons in influenza, naively I would imagine some fall in sequences that are highly conserved across strains, and others would have previously identified functional motifs.
Actually, I looked this up, and…I am very slightly relieved that the highly conserved segments are a small proportion of the influenza genome. I kinda wish the research on cataloguing functional motifs in these viruses was classified and compartmentalized, but I suppose that would also frustrate vaccine research. It’s not hard to imagine a near-term world in which these genomes are sufficiently and publicly well understood to make virus design point and click, as has happened in offensive computer software, where ‘exploits’ can be modularly combined with ‘payloads’:
Metasploit, but for the body, is a thing I would prefer to not exist. I hope it’s less plausible than it sounds!
It's not enough to know to be able to correlate genetic sequences with variations in the protein, you need to be able to go all the way to predicting variations in function, and that is profoundly difficult. Even when we know the exact receptor to which we want a small molecule to bind, it is very difficult to predict a priori (either by intuition or in silico) what tweaking this or that aspect of a molecule's structure will improve or degrade binding. Man-centuries of highly-trained med chemist time are devoted to this already, with results that call for a substantial level of stoic determination to perservere.
It's not even enough to predict the exact shape of a novel molecule, which is itself a very difficult and generallly unsolved problem, because binding is a dynamic process -- both the substrate and receptor move and twist about, and to predict binding energetics you would need to predict the motions correctly as well, which involves excellent understanding of the intramolecular forces and the (substantial) force due to the surrounding solvent. Our models of such forces are not adequate to the task, in part because they are inherently many-body, and even possibly in part because they are pretty quantum mechanical sometimes.
I don't think the problem can be solved in software. You're not going to be able after some clever programming of analysis be able to, say, predict that swapping out a gene found in Y. pestis for one found in a random influenza and get a killer virus. The ways in which the various virii and bacteria do their shticks are all exceedingly complex chains of molecular machinery, which we don't understand, and building a Frankenstein blindly and having it work is like swapping a page of the blueprints for an F-22 with a page from the blueprints of a Virginia-class attack sub and hoping to get a really awesome weapon. Overwhelmingly likely result is nonfunctional garbage, and even when you get something that can limp off the group the chances you'll learn something that you can use to tweak your approach is low. Too little is known of the "hardware" to go back and fix what's wrong with your "software."
If we don't commit suicide as a species I think it's likely someday we will be able to design viruses to do what we want de novo -- which is very exciting, opens up the idea of "gene surgery" to fix any random thing wrong with your DNA -- but that day is long in the future, when we have done a great deal of challenging spadework figuring out how the long chain of molecular machines involved in viral infection and immune response work in detail. Maybe in 100 years it might be plausible, I think. That'd be great, just in time to benefit my great-grandchildren.
"You can try directed evolution, but this is a slow 'breeding' process of growing cell cultures, culling the winners, repeat...But...unless you have some notion of what you can tweak to make it a nastier bug, it will be a long, long process of trial-and-error. ."
Are losers not effectively self-culling? Paul Ewald used fluid-borne pathogens (which have greater genetic variation) to demonstrate that rapid passes from one host to another selected for those pathogens capable of most effectively using host resources. Rapid viral multiplication, combined with not needing a healthy mobile host for transmission, reliably selected for the more virulent strains without detailed expertise required.
The biggest drawback in terms of weaponization would presumably be dealing with the potential species barrier. But that seems surmountable... splice together a virus which used a particular cellular receptor, say.
Sure, but in the lab you want to *pick* your losers to speed up the process. The big time sink so far as I know is growing the cultures. How many generations do you need of random genetic variation + culling to find something much improved? A mere thousand? That's about 3 years. Ten thousand? Looking at 20-30 years. And so on.
It doesn't seem hard to use directed evolution to produce *less* deadly viruses, as they seem to evolve that way naturally anyway. I believe this is how some whole virus vaccines used to be, and maybe still are made: you pass them through cultures repeatedly until they stop killing.
The tricky bit is trying to get them to be *more* deadly, because that's not a natural evolutionary direction. I mean, when a virus is more deadly, it quite naturally excites more of an immune response, because cells respond vigorously to attempts to kill them. But more of an immune response tends to be bad for the viruses -- even if it doesn't wipe them out, it reduces their numbers -- so they tend to evolve away from that as fast as they can. For a virus "success" is "I get to reproduce and nothing tries to kill me," and that evolutionary endpoint is best represented by a wholly benign virus, one that is very infectious but not deadly at all.
So you probably need some kind of vigorous intervention and creative culling process to continuously select for more infectious *and* more deadly viruses, which is an unnatural endpoint.
" as they seem to evolve that way naturally anyway."
Ewald argues the contrary case, in explicit contradiction to Burnet and White's model of virulence which was based on airborne pathogens. Pathogens evolve towards benign co-existence only when doing so helps their spread. Malaria is one of the more deadly pathogen in terms of people killed, and it benefits from more incapacitated human hosts since that makes it easier for mosquitos to bite the hosts.
So pathogens in nature can experience selective pressures to become either more or less virulent.
Requiring a mobile host and needing the host to survive till the pathogen is transmitted are two things which cause natural pathogens to often tend to evolve to benign coexistence.
On the other hand, if fast-replicating and slow-replicating pathogens are injected into a host then this there's a kind of 'race to the bottom' selecting for the fast-replicating pathogens, assuming that a lab researcher ensures that transmission occurs before host death.
Of course, this technique may not select for certain *kinds* of virulence, like production of cholera toxin, if free-ridership is a potential strategy.
It is possible to select for less virulence in the lab, especially when using a different host, as you mention.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/immunology-and-microbiology/attenuated-vaccine
But that's not the only way things can be made to trend.
Well, you do remember we were talking about designing a bioweapon of sorts, right? It would be pretty perverse to try to design one that has as complicated a life cycle as malaria. I think workign with airborne pathogens that require mobile hosts (us) for rapid spread is pretty much a sine qua non for that application, which means an observation that there are other routes to evolutionary success for other types of micro-organisms is an interesting footnote but I'm not seeing how it changes the main point.
Are you actually arguing that it should be straightforward to design (either de novo or by selective breeding) a deadly pandemic pathogen for use in some kind of bio-terrorism? Or are you just saying the whole business is pretty complicated, and I've simplified it significantly for the sake of an Internet comment? With the latter, I totally agree. If you mean the former, though, I'd like to hear the argument.
My point regarding Malaria was simply to give just one example of natural evolution towards high virulence.
Moxoma virus (1950) and Calicivirus (1995) and are examples of highly transmissible pathogens which were weaponized by CSIRO in Australia for use against rabbits and might provide some insight into an attempt to kill as many targets as possible. (Admittedly, CSIRO started out with a hemorrhagic virus, in the case of calicivirus, which would already have some virulence factors in its genome. But they did ramp up lethality quite a bit. Ewald argues that increasing lethality is possible for various and more mild pathogens. )
Pathogenic strains of calicivirus can be transmitted by "direct contact with infected rabbits, fomites, transmission via equipment and clothing, transmission by vectors including flies."
https://www.vetvoice.com.au/ec/diseases/rabbit-calicivirus/
There are two topics here.
1. Do pathogens naturally evolve towards non-virulence?
Answer: Not always. They can be made to evolve towards increased virulence. Ewald's models for disease virulence, which address the possibilities of ramping up virulence, are not 100% accepted among scientists in regards to pathogens in nature but they seem pretty reasonable and supported by evidence. I'm not sure of the reason for a lack of total acceptance and it may just be a matter of what people learned in school and never re-learned later in life. If you just want to kill lots of targets, that's a rather simple request to fulfill, given fairly basic equipment. (If you want to not die in the process of creating your bioweapon, that may be a harder ask.) Ewald's book The Evolution of Infectious Disease (published in the early 90s) makes an argument for his model of disease virulence. He undoubtedly has more recent works on the topic, but that's one that I'm familiar with.
Paul Ewald https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_W._Ewald
2. What makes a good bioweapon?
Answer: I'm not really addressing this and have no particular position on this topic.
"Are you actually arguing that it should be straightforward to design (either de novo or by selective breeding) a deadly pandemic pathogen..."
Yes. It has been done with technology much older than what we have today. Calicivirus was ramped up to somewhere around 99% lethality when initially released. It dropped to about 90% lethality by the time it made its way across Australia after it was released to the wild due to a supposed 'containment breach' from CSIRO facilities.
"... for use in some kind of bio-terrorism? "
I have no solid position on what kind of pathogen would be "good for bioterrrorism." I mean, anthrax is considered a potential bioweapon candidate specifically because human-to-human transmission is *low.* There is comfort in knowing that a plague, once released, won't rebound back and decimate your own friends.
Making a pathogen that was selective in some peculiar yet useful way (for example; a pathogen which targets younger men rather than older individuals or women, for use against soldiers) is something which may exist, but which I'm not familiar with in detail and would probably, I'm guessing, require a good bit more expertise than just trying to rack up as large a body count as possible. Perhaps selectivity ( or not killing yourself in the process of creation) is a more limiting criteria in bioweapon manufacture than just ramping up lethality? i.e. not killing those people you want to leave alive is probably a much harder problem than maximizing kills. But then, this is just idle speculation on my part. Not knowing a bioterrorists goals or values I can't really speak to what weapon fits well in their hand.
Regarding your section on blind testing expensive vs. cheap wines, my dad's favorite party game is what he calls Cheap Date; it is, simply, a blind taste test of six wines of varying price. Everybody ranks them, and then you get to laugh about who has expensive/cheap taste. Not much rigor, but it is fun.
RE the notion that experts can't tell the difference between cheap and expensive wines, could it just be that the wine *producers* are the ones at fault here? They're the ones who decide which of their barrels goes in the expensive bottle and which goes in the cheap one. If that assignment is made randomly w/r/t to objective wine quality, then wine experts aren't going to be able to pick expensive wines based on quality. Have the studies ruled out this kind of effect? I mean I'd expect wineries to use tasting experts to figure out how much they should be charging for their wine, but maybe they don't?
They 100% don’t use tasting experts to determine how much to charge for their wine. The price is almost 100% reputation based and reputation only changes slowly over time. Best case scenario is they submit their wines to a wine reviewer and base scores off of that. However, most wine reviewers are thought of pretty poorly in the industry. Putting a score on wine is like putting a score on art. Like, sure you can do it. But there’s so many factors at play it’s kind of dumb.
A winery will sort by quality to determine what makes it to their flagship wine and what ends up in their entry level wine. However, that sorting happens when sorting the grapes. By the time the juice has fermented and made it into barrels, it’s pretty much pre-determined where it’s going to go. The only decision at that point is what mix of each grape variety to use in the finished blend.
The reason that it’s hard to tell ultra-high quality wines from merely above average wines is because there isn’t a huge a difference frequently, which actual wine experts will be the first ones to point out.
I got a bit of wine training for a job at a restaurant known for its wine selection and knowledge (10 hour somm class, on the job training including monthly tastings and discussions, got to talk to a number of Italian producers we'd bring in for special dinners, etc.) Some scattered thoughts on your article:
1. The stuff in the Somm doc is about learning a huge number of wines as they are typically expressed. It would probably be fairly easy to find deliberately tricky and unusual wines that they would get wrong. For the areas they really focus on (e.g. France) thay can get remarkably granular, like being able to know which particular bank of the Rhone the grapes were grown on. This seems like a magic trick or scam, but even with my relatively small amount of training, I was able to blindly pick out characteristics that distinguish Barberas produced in Alba vs. Asti -- two towns about 20 miles from each other. I can't believe it's all bullshit because I've been able to do that kind of thing.
2. I've also experienced the predictive coding effect. When I was taking that course, sometimes the instructor would pick out a taste characteristic that I hadn't gotten, but after he mentioned it I could taste it. On one hand that's clearly a psychological effect, on the other hand it's kind of fun if you don't take it too seriously, like when you exit the movie theater and discover that your friend saw the film from a completely different angle than you, but now that they mention it, you can sort of see where they identified that theme....
3. The assumption people have that enjoyment of wine ought to be perfectly correlated with price is odd to me. From my experience if you pay at least $10 for a bottle it's almost certainly going to be drinkable and might be delicious. Only the bottom shelf stuff is a gamble/rank. That wasn't necessarily true 50 years ago, I've been told, and the dialog around wine maybe hasn't caught up. But with most things, you pay for quality to a certain point, after which you pay for novelty and name recognition. Like, most people are going to recognize that you're probably going to get a more complex cheese at $20/lb vs. $5/lb. But if you're paying $50/lb it's going to be something weird and/or historically famous and/or made through an extremely laborious process. I'd expect the same general pattern with cured meats or coffee or sneakers or beer. So why do we test wine on a purely price vs. enjoyment scale entirely above the threshold where wine is usually at least alright?
4. Following from the above, what's wrong with catering to the uber-nerds looking for new or pristine experiences in whatever thing they're nerdy about? A couple of days ago I watched a video of a guy going over the minute differences between different types of expensive coffee grinders. He's looking for the best possible grind according to a number of criteria, and he has fun seeking that out. I've got nothing against that, it's just not my area of nerdery. I'll take the adequate grinder that costs 1/10th the price. I don't that means the expensive grinders are a scam, just that some people are willing to pay 10x more for a 10% increase in grind consistency because they're nerds.
5. I completely ignore all wine awards. Every wine producer I've talked to admitted that it's a bunch of nonsense and a dumb game they have to play to stay in business. I got the strong impression that there's a bunch of unscrupulous stuff going on with some of the awards too.
6. I've definitely smelled goat in a wine, though I think my exact descriptor was "a wet dog in a barn". Usually that's an indication of something gone wrong, but with this particular wine it was intentional. It tasted strongly of tobacco, btw, and it was delicious.
7. My favorite descriptor in the Somm doc was "freshly opened can of tennis balls", which I did actually smell in a wine once!
Anyways, I enjoyed the article and think it's largely correct, from my limited experiences in the field.
There isn't anything wrong with catering to the uber wine nerds but that's not the message sent by the industry or wine experts. The message isn't here's one kind of wine a few people might like but that these wines are better.
I mean it's not that different than the situation with literature. Truth is most ppl prefer Harry Potter to Proust and their isn't anything wrong with that yet we are constantly bombarded with the message that one is better than the other. That is fake for wine and literature.
When wine is on the same level as whether you prefer Diablo or Wizardry as the base of your RPGs then there will be nothing to complain about but instead wine is a massive status game that you can't escape in certain social situations. Granted RPG nerds are trying to make their hobby as snobby as wine currently is but they haven't succeeded yet.
As always the problem with the hobby isn't the hobby, it is the hobbyists.
There is a Lord Peter Wimsey short story from a 1928 collection which revolves around being able to distinguish wines in a blind taste test (it does get a bit silly but I don't know if Sayers is poking mild fun at the whole business of wine tasting or really does mean to indicate that her hero has a fabulous palate):
The Bibulous Business of a Matter of Taste
https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/sayersdl-treasury/sayersdl-treasury-00-h-dir/sayersdl-treasury-00-h.html#Page_258
""If I had to be impersonated by somebody," murmured the latter gently, "it would have been more flattering to have had it undertaken by a person to whom all white wines were not alike. Well, now, sir, this admirable vintage is, of course, a Montrachet of—let me see"—he rolled the wine delicately upon his tongue—"of 1911. And a very attractive wine it is, though, with all due deference to yourself, monsieur le comte, I feel that it is perhaps slightly too sweet to occupy its present place in the menu. True, with this excellent consommé marmite, a sweetish wine is not altogether out of place, but, in my own humble opinion, it would have shown to better advantage with the confitures."
"There, now," said Bredon innocently, "it just shows how one may be misled. Had not I had the advantage of Lord Peter's expert opinion—for certainly nobody who could mistake Montrachet for Sauterne has any claim to the name of Wimsey—I should have pronounced this to be, not the Montrachet-Aîné, but the Chevalier-Montrachet of the same year, which is a trifle sweeter. But no doubt, as your lordship says, drinking it with the soup has caused it to appear sweeter to me than it actually is."
The count looked sharply at him, but made no comment.
"Have another olive," said Peter I kindly. "You can't judge wine if your mind is on other flavours."
"Thanks frightfully," said Bredon. "And that reminds me——" He launched into a rather pointless story about olives, which lasted out the soup and bridged the interval to the entrance of an exquisitely cooked sole.
The count's eye followed the pale amber wine rather thoughtfully as it trilled into the glasses. Bredon raised his in the approved manner to his nostrils, and his face flushed a little. With the first sip he turned excitedly to his host.
"Good God, sir——" he began.
The lifted hand cautioned him to silence.
Peter I sipped, inhaled, sipped again, and his brows clouded. Peter II had by this time apparently abandoned his pretensions. He drank thirstily, with a beaming smile and a lessening hold upon reality.
"Eh bien, monsieur?" enquired the count gently.
"This," said Peter I, "is certainly hock, and the noblest hock I have ever tasted, but I must admit that for the moment I cannot precisely place it."
"No?" said Bredon. His voice was like bean-honey now, sweet and harsh together. "Nor the other gentleman? And yet I fancy I could place it within a couple of miles, though it is a wine I had hardly looked to find in a French cellar at this time. It is hock, as your lordship says, and at that it is Johannisberger. Not the plebeian cousin, but the echter Schloss Johannis berger from the castle vineyard itself. Your lordship must have missed it (to your great loss) during the war years. My father laid some down the year before he died, but it appears that the ducal cellars at Denver were less well furnished.""
Food and drink are such an essential component of Wimsey stories you have to wonder if Sayers was hungry all the time, or just sufficiently dedicated to her craft that she was willing to do extreme amounts of research. Interestingly, Lord Peter was just as discerning and sophisticated with respect to clothes, but details of that are largely absent from the stories.
I think almost all that stuff cheese/sneakers/beer is just a stupid as wine. I am generally highly suspicious of status goods.
For instance I make a ton of money and am debt free and drive a 7 year old CRV. Would I enjoy a nicer car more? Absolutely probably a few percentage points more. Is that worth dozens/hundreds of hours of my labor? No not at all.
Wow, I hadn't thought about the smell of a "freshly opened can of tennis balls" in 15 years, but now that you mention it, I can still sort of recall it.
I think there is something kinda missed from "Is Wine Fake" and the mention of how people generally like cheap wine - some sorts of alcoholic drinks are more expensive than others.
Like, for instance, I like port, don't mind red wine, and hate white wine. And port costs more than red wine which costs more than white wine. So there is a real expense-vs.-quality tradeoff if I want to buy alcohol, though there are also things that I would simply be making a mistake to buy (e.g. champagne, which I hate because it's white but which costs more than red wine).
I am super-unconvinced by "The Illogic of Nuclear Escalation". Taking out missiles on the ground is actually pretty relevant in terms of saving Western lives, and due to modern US warheads being typically sub-megaton actually burning a major city takes a lot of them. And there is the question of how easy it is to deter an enemy, and the question of "well, if this opponent can't be deterred, don't we still need the ability to actually destroy them in order to prevent the proverbial Nazis Win scenario?".
Forcing the PRC to suffer state failure, for instance, would probably take several hundred warheads, not including missiles shot down by their ABM or used against the PLA's own nuclear stockpile. If you want to still be able to do that in the event of a PLA surprise attack that destroys some of the US nukes on the ground, well, you're going to need a stockpile at least as big as what the USA has, potentially more.
>Today, no one argues we should restore slavery. It’s illegal everywhere on the planet, even though it operates in the shadows. There’s a consensus by the 21st century that slavery is beyond the pale.
Pffft. Punitive slavery is totally still a thing (whether for civil crimes or of POWs), and conscription is totally still a thing (permanently in much of South-East Asia and Israel, in emergencies even in the West; even volunteer militaries are an exact match for indentured servitude). There are *certain forms* of slavery/unfree labour that have been abolished, and *private citizens* are no longer allowed to hold people as slaves, but to say there's a consensus that "slavery is beyond the pale" is either flat wrong or using a rather-narrow definition of "slavery" that comes close to the reversed No True Scotsman.
(Of course, prison labour and conscription are a lot more justifiable than hereditary slavery, and the government control helps to counter some of the excesses! There is some real achievement here! But let's not kid ourselves.)
I think if you are lumping in prison work and volunteer army service as “slavery” you are using an incredibly different version of the word than most people.
I called the latter "indentured servitude", not "slavery", because you can call indentured servitude "not slavery" with a straight face; people have the choice to not sign up for it (some people consider indentured servitude "slavery", some don't; that's fair enough as long as you're consistent). I called conscription "slavery".
Prison work is acknowledged as a form of "slavery or involuntary servitude" in the 13th amendment to the US Constitution (which banned slavery *other than* as criminal sentence). As I've said, it's (a lot) more justifiable than the Triangle Trade. But pretending it's not slavery is self-deception; it is very definitely forcibly extracting labour from people who have not agreed to it, and we call it "slavery" when ancient cultures did exactly the same thing - "you did a crime, so you're a slave now either for X time or for life" - albeit in a more decentralised fashion (i.e. the slaves were held privately rather than in specifically-built prisons).
I'm not saying that punitive slavery is *bad*, particularly in a country that doesn't have the surplus to have people eating and not working (nearly all criminals would prefer to be enslaved than executed, and that's the realistic alternative), but I'm a big fan of calling things what they are.
You brought it up as a point in a discussion you started out with “slavery is still totally a thing”.
They didn't say "volunteer army service", they said "Conscription", as in show up to basic training or go to jail or worse. That's most certainly unfree labor (and of a particularly dangerous nature), whether you want to describe it as slavery or not. (for whatever it may be worth, Wikipedia lists their conscription article as being "Part of a series on slavery")
They said “even volunteer militaries” it’s in their post.
Alright, I will acknowledge a mistake on my part. They did mention volunteer military service. Specifically, in an aside they said "even volunteer militaries are an exact match for indentured servitude". I feel that magic mushroom explicitly drew a distinction between volunteer service and conscription in their post, describing only conscription as slavery. They did not 'lump in' volunteer army service with slavery, they described it in terms of a related but distinct concept.
I quite liked the nukes article, but then it did speak to several of my interests e.g., better government policy, and not perishing in a fire
You're assuming that "Nazis Win" is a worse scenario than an all-out nuclear counter-attack, I wouldn't be too sure about that...
Otherwise, have you actually read all of the article ? Your comments about ground warheads and the "burning a major city" requirement sounds like you haven't ?
>You're assuming that "Nazis Win" is a worse scenario than an all-out nuclear counter-attack, I wouldn't be too sure about that...
From a nationalist POV, there's the problem of the follow-up invasion; you need to make sure the enemy is in no state to capitalise on you being blown up.
From an internationalist POV, the PRC in particular is showing worrying signs of being a stable totalitarian state, so allowing it to seize hegemony by winning a nuclear war is literally a failed-continuation X-risk.
>Otherwise, have you actually read all of the article ? Your comments about ground warheads and the "burning a major city" requirement sounds like you haven't ?
You're not going to get all of them on the ground, and it becomes less feasible the more there are. But the current PRC arsenal is quite small (and their SSBNs are almost all spotted leaving port and shadowed by US SSNs, rendering them ~useless).
My basic projection of a USA vs. PRC war over Taiwan in the near future goes something like this: the US would have to attack PRC missile bases and radars inside China in order to use ships and planes near Taiwan, which would partially degrade the Chinese deterrent and force hair-trigger alert fearing a US alpha strike; sooner or later a false alarm results in shit going nuclear; the PRC arsenal gets depleted via use and a US counterforce attack; the PRC refuses to surrender and wants a white peace; the US won't accept a white peace after a bunch of cities sprouted mushroom clouds, can't invade China and doesn't want to give the PRC time to build more nukes, so it starts methodically burning Chinese cities until surrender or state failure. There are some turn-off points, but this looks like the main line to me. And the last step would plausibly require calling up the stockpile nukes.
I'd argue you are kinda answering the wrong question in "is wine fake". I think what most people want to know is if there is really any sense in which the expert loved wind is better of is it just a different taste?
Ok, the wine experts like it more but it's not at all clear they haven't simply associated those tastes with sophistication and even if they naturally prefer those tastes it in no way implies that they are actually any better. I mean is an award for best condiment that only hires ppl who like mustard more than ketchup fake? I think there is a strong sense in which it is.
Now I'm sure some ppl will insist that few ppl are really claiming that. But that's a motte-bailey tactic with wine just as it is with books. Sure, when challenged directly on it quite a few ppl who study or even teach literature will try and suggest they are just exposing ppl to certain kinds of writing just as wine experts will often say that you should drink what you like.
Yet that attitude doesn't reflect the message they send whenever they aren't being directly challenged. You aren't going to find yourself reading Harry Potter in English class nor will someone whose taste in wine resembles mine (I want my wine to taste like my soft drinks) will get taken seriously in wine evaluation no matter how expertly they can distingush the tastes.
So yah it's fake, or perhaps the better word is corrupt, because it's not an honest attempt to communicate to the public what they might like. And I admit it's a matter of degree but I think it's clear that many wine experts attempt to suggest that one has a better, richer and more sexy experience if your tastes match theirs with only social pressure not evidence behind it.
This is a much more effortful version of my opinion.
Hate the hobbyists not the hobby.
I always have a fond spot for your comments because I knew a Peter Gerdes. And I agree this is where most of my frustration comes from.
The hedonic difference between a average $15 bottle and a $500 bottle seems very small and/or backwards. And mostly the whole culture of “wine” is aimed at getting you to move up that price range in hopes of some “better” experience.
Well thank you!! It's good to finally have a bonus from my name! Apparently, it's also the name of a registered sex offender in Iowa (nothing against the guy...for all I know his crime was peeing outside or streaking but it sucks it's third google result for my name).
Is there anyone who can expertly distinguish the tastes and has taste in wine like yours? (If you want your wine to taste like soft drinks why would you drink wine?) The whole idea (in my view) of wine experts is that people who are ultra sensitive to differences between things like this have better opinions (in the case of wine, I don't care very much because wine is not very important to me).
The price of wine is determined by economic factors anyway (no one is claiming one bottle of wine is ten times more expensive because it is ten times better). There are rich people for whom it makes no difference to pay 500 dollars for a bottle, even if they pour half of it on the floor. And then there are people who buy expensive wine bottles in warehouses as an investment.
Of course there are economic factors but the same could be said of the market for soft drinks or really good pizza or donuts (and occasionally u do see something like a cronut comes along where it offers some amazingly new and scarcity drives price).
I've got nothing against ppl with certain tastes paying to indulge them. However, I think it's clear that's NOT what is happening with wine. People keep buying expensive wines that, even though experts might like them more, blind tasting suggests they don't. But no one tries to imply that you aren't sophisticated or somehow are socially less important based on your tastes in those foods.
And I tend to think looking down on ppl as less sophisticated/less elite is generally a harmful thing absent a specific benefit (eg maybe u could say it incentivizes education in STEM but the world isn't better off bc we incentivize knowing weird grape taste facts).
Yes, I agree that in a sense it's no different than the Pepsi/coke thing. A massive effort to influence ppl's perceptions succeeds in getting them to say they like the one that tastes worse more. The difference is that we recognize that as self-serving advertisement so we don't actually really believe them when they tell us coke drinkers are cooler ppl...maybe unconsciously but we consciously judge ppl on their wine tastes.
--
As for your other question I strongly suspect there are supertasters with my preferences...indeed, I think I may have them bc I taste bitter and tart so intensely. But certainly no one develops them bc no one rewards you for developing them by regarding you as sophisticated.
Sorry, I mean to say it's not most of what happens with wine. I bet that amoung those buying the moderately expensive bottles of wine a huge fraction of it is people trying to look sophisticated.
The highly expensive but not absurd bottles of wine do seem to be more often purchased by true afficianadoes (sp?) and that's great for them. Indeed, the kind of ppl who keep the expensive wines at home and hide them bc they don't want to waste them on ppl like me are usually pretty reasonable about the whole thing. The ones who buy their most expensive wines at restaurants or leave them out are like the ppl with the fancy volume of poetry and Proust on their bookshelf rather than the dog eared copy in their backpack.
It's the cultural of wine snobbery and the use of the tasting to pressure ppl into buying more expensive bottles to look sophisticated that bothers me.
I largely agree with you and think you accurately capture what the status seeking, wealthy, wine snobs are trying to do. But the reality is that wine experts come from the wine industry which is made up of hospitality staff, retail employees, farmers, and warehouse staff. The industry is frequently criticized for being a bunch of hipster bros. They can’t afford nice wines and tend to favor obscure and weird, but very affordable wines. Things like Cru Beaujolais. I think what actual experts want is not for people to acknowledge that super expensive wines are better but that people should be drinking lots of different wines. People tend to stick to only one or two very familiar brands, and experts want people try lots of different wines so they drink different styles based on their mood.
Yes, hipster bros tho many of them are employed selling wine to rich snobs so there is a certain bias there. But I think you make a good point. For one group of experts it's about feeling superior to the (both to ppl who just drink the expensive shit and to those who don't know).
And I don't object at all to the ppl who really (whether or not they are tricking themselves) just want to enjoy the wines they like. It's just that they aren't out there making noise. I have a number of colleagues like that and it's fun drinking with them...they don't want to waste their good stuff on me but don't feel any need to judge me about what I want to drink either.
I think it's more just the same effect you see in many areas where lots of the public feels sorta embarrassed about their lack of sophistication so can be cowed by the fear of being labeled unsophisticated and thus goes along with the ppl who use it to imply they are better than you.
And then it gets hard to talk about bc you get the motte-bailey effect with attacks on the ppl using it as a way of being seen as more sophisticated getting met with the defense of the reasonable ppl who just are enjoying what they like (who don't deserve criticism).
I completely agree with you. It bothers me that “low quality wine” gets criticized even though it’s made by super talented people who are being incredibly intentional with how they want the wine to taste. It’s just that the taste they are gunning for tastes good to most people despite getting low ratings. I also get the not wanting to waste good wine thing, I rarely want to waste my good wine on myself.
I just want the wine world to be less elitist. There’s times where elitism is called for, but in a situation as low stakes as wine it never is. There’s a whole non-elitist world of wine out there. I just wish it was more visible to people. Instead the only way wine is presented in popular culture is either as Mommy Juice or as Billionaire Dick Measuring Fluid.
Even though I like wine, I don't live in a wine culture and I don't come in contact much with people who are snobbish about wine (or with people who would boast about spending a lot of money on wine), so this issue doesn't resonate emotionally for me in any particular way. For me to become discriminating about wine I would have to drink a lot more, and I wouldn't do that just for health reasons.
However it is true that wine seems to be a focal point for some people to pretend to be knowledgeable or sophisticated or very picky about what they drink. Even I occasionally encounter someone like this. Often I am skeptical (I mean, I believe there are people who know about wine, but usually from the way some people talk about it, it sounds like they are pretending).
Also the little ritual in restaurants where one person tastes the wine before it is poured out to the company, what is the point of that? They don't let us taste the food before they serve it to us. I guess it's a remnant from the days when there was a greater probability that the wine was spoiled? But what percentage of people really feel that this ritual has some real purpose?
As for the public's lack of sophistication -- in my opinion it's just true that many people are not sophisticated. To tie this in with the semaglutide/obesity discussion, this is why one hears stuff like "how can people lose weight in an environment where the food industry offers hyperpalatable wonderful food that we desire and crave so much?" If people were more sophisticated about what they ate, they could drive past a line of fast food restaurants without the intense craving many apparently experience.
The food and entertainment industries encourage people to be unsophisticated, they want people to consume more easily producible stuff. Then there's the other end of the market, where people are encouraged to think that if they buy expensive things, that means they are sophisticated and cool. But often that's just another way of being unsophisticated.
I'm not saying that people should be embarrassed about that, but that's a separate issue. I'm somewhat embarrassed about not being physically fit, and maybe I shouldn't be, but that doesn't change the fact that I am.
But being sophisticated about wine for me just doesn't seem particularly important. I mean, it's nice for the people who are, but in the same way that it's nice for the people who collect stamps that they like to collect stamps.
The tasting thing with wine is checking if it's gone vinegary. It's really only an issue with old wines. It's kinda silly when you buy a modern bottle buy it doesn't bother me too much.
Regarding being sophisticated, I think there are two different senses of the word. Of course it's generally better for people to have some degree of knowledge about options (though that's no reason to learn to distingush what kind of soil green beens were grown in if you don't like them). However, in this context it more an antonym of basic...but with a heavy dose of exclusivity.
I mean we're social creatures si we cant avoid some desire to be seen as cool, fashionable etc but generally speaking the less with push this the better. And I think that's especially true when its a sense of coolness that's about appreciating designated things that the masses can't appreciate.
Sure, there is an appeal to appreciating things that others don't. But once ppl start aspiring to like a specific thing to have more social status all the benefits from paying attention to something generally ignored is gone and it becomes all about ppl convincing themselves they like something hard to like (and may succeed but less than with something not as hard to like). That seems all bad to me.
Yes, the word can mean different things. You are talking about people wanting to seem sophisticated to other people and I mean having knowledge about something and developed tastes, which usually also implies appreciating "harder" things, without regard to social context.
To me it seems that liking what "everyone else likes" (from which the pressure to conform) has more social benefits than "liking hard things".
There is a class of things like Shakespeare, Proust, fancy wines, high art etc which occupy this weird place where everyone (at least in many circles) sees them as worthy of liking but yet are hard to like. It's that special status I'm critisizing.
I mean it's perfectly reasonable if you happen to llke such things but I'd argue this status creates really awful incentives and they are some of the worst things to try and convince yourself to like. It's not truly adding variety and there are unfortunate incentives which actively discourage the creators of these items from being better in ways that make them more approachable, e.g., if you want to be seen as writing serious literature making your work fun/approachable gets you seen as non-serious even if it retains all the other virtues.
That plus the sneering is my objection. It often makes both art and food actively worse because while sometimes being approachable and fun to non-sophisticates is incompatible with other goals sometimes its beneficial yet these attitudes discourage that from happening because, if a book or art is too approachable enjoying it no longer singles your elite status.
--
The normal cycle of ppl pioneering something new, that becoming fashionable and then fading once it's seen as just copying is relatively fine. The problem pops up when, instead of becoming popular and thus less fashionable the activity protects it's exclusive status by creating higher barriers to entry. That's bad enough when it's the barriers to joining some club but when it's about appreciating some type of food/activity/art it's really bad bc the way you raise that barrier to entry is generally to make the thing harder to enjoy.
any chance this magazine will be printed on paper?
Most European wines are named solely by the regional appellation and containing a blend of multiple grape varieties characteristic to the region. A bottle of "Bordeaux" means it's a full-bodied red wine, typically a Merlot/Cabernet blend, from southwestern France. In contrast, "New World" wines are usually single varieties and you'll see both the region and the grape prominently on the bottle. "Napa Valley" means it's from that part of California but it can be any kind of wine - red, white, or cloying pink Zinfandel. I wonder to what extent the ability to tell regions apart is really the ability to tell their characteristic grape varieties apart.
I visited France a few months ago and noted that there were varietal French wines for sale at markets there, generally priced in the low to mid-range and often store brands. The traditional regional blends made up most of the higher-end wines. Also, imported wine, even from nearby Spain and Italy, was only available at the largest supermarkets or from specialty wine importers. And the EU is supposed to be a common market with free flow of goods...
The goods are free to flow, but if there's no buyer at the end, then it will flow slowly.
Next you'll be telling me the Germans don't import much beer...
I miss the comments, for the articles in asterisk. I realize it's a "next level" kind of difficulty, if not technical then definitely from a moderation point of view, but still - if properly jumpstarted it could become quite the conversation hub.
GOD DAMMIT SCOTT GOT ME AGAIN WITH THE THE THING
As a consolation you got me the first way through your comment, though I caught it 1/10th second later.
I wouldn't beat yourself over it, we don't notice that each of our eyes has a freakingly large blind spot either...
http://people.whitman.edu/~herbrawt/classes/110/blindspotdemo.pdf
The monkeypox prediction was pretty much on spot: "I predict the outbreak will have mostly subsided by the middle of November". (Prediction from mid-September.) The cumulative case number for the US of 30,000 will also be on spot.
In Europe, it has almost been eradicated. Several countries had 50-200 daily cases at peak times. Now it's two orders of magnitude less: ~5 daily cases for all of Europe combined, half of them in Spain.
The US are lagging behind. (The decline started later). They have "only" lost one order of magnitude, going from 500 daily cases to 50.
Otherwise, the rest of the Americas are the biggest concern. Mexico, Colombia and Brazil are each at ~30 daily cases and are going down much more slowly. These three countries plus the US cover more than 2/3 of all reported cases worldwide, currently ~200 daily. At peak times it was ~1000 daily cases globally.
I have talked to health workers and read some interviews of them (for example of some Swiss centers for STIs, and the ones responsible for rolling out the vaccinations.) They assign the successes to the reaction and awareness of the MSM community (men who have sex with men). Knowledge and awareness is extremely high in this community, and a lot of people are very sensitized to any symptoms, and take actions if they discover anything. I must say that as a member of this community, I am pretty proud of the common reaction.
>Featuring eyeless, beakless, featherless, near-brainless chickens that “[resemble] something between an animal and a fruit”.
I can't remember where I first heard it, but was once related an anecdote supposedly from an exec of Tyson (Purdue? Foster Farms?), that chicken is just "a vegetable on legs". Prescient!
Real Chicken(tm) honestly just kinda sucks though. I'm pretty happy the plant-based varieties are so good already, at least in nugget form. Any meat that's only decently-palatable when deep-fried or whatever is just asking to be eaten for lunch by plant alternatives. (Also looking at you, turkey.)
Turkey sure…chicken is fucking amazing, and I have no idea what you are taking about “decently palatable”.
There is a strong tendency to overcook it in my opinion. I never order chicken in restaurants because I am always disappointed. When I roast my own, it’s beautiful.
Chicken is just a vehicle for sauce. Turkey is a dry, cardboard-like vehicle for sauce. :P
See I think just chicken and salt is delicious. Especially as a topping on good bread.
Well now we need to get Martin Blank and REF in a room and compare their ability to tell the difference between cheap and expensive wines.
Chicken is a paltry poultry vessel for other flavours. Not literally the worst substrate ever, but I'd never mistake it for the main dish. I think a common error is to do boneless-skinless...chicken *skins* are hells a delicious, the rendered fat is great (honestly prefer it over bacon fat, heretical I know), bone-adjacent meat has far superiour flavour and texture to boringly bland breasts. I like my poultry meat like I like my coffee: dark. Inasmuch as I like it at all, anyway. Chicken/turkey *broth or stock* is also typically superlative, at least for store-bought stuff...I've yet to find a commercial other-animal-broth-or-stock that didn't suck. And forget all the vegetable-based varieties, blah.
Pretty much anything else chicken can do, duck can do better. Or quail, or squab. Points for wings, though of course those are usually fried. Even turkey beats it for ground meat. I suppose the eggs are pretty good for many things, though that's mostly due to cornering the market - I like duck eggs more, but rarely have the opportunity to get them. (There's also a really low average quality floor for chicken...I've tasted some of the Actually Good Stuff from bougie markets, and it's a marked improvement. But in my mind I'm still ranking it below average beef, fish, shellfish, whatever. Just not my protein.)
All my friends in the NorCal wine industry classified wine into two categories: swillable or unswillable.
About your wine:
I'm not that into wine, but into Whisky! And it is similar with _very_expensive bottles and tastings and stuff.
And I don't know if it is just in my "Whisky-circle" or normal for Whisky drinkers, but not many care about the price of a bottle. A 40EUR bottle can be enjoyed as well as a 400EUR one. The "rule" is: If you like it, you like it!
Which brings us to taste: Taste is very subjective. Mabye you can learn more in those 10 sommelier years and I'm just a layman. But what I taste doesn't mean others taste the same. Some experts also taste things, that I don't even think of!
For example, I was at a tasting and a dram for me was very sweet and "suggery" and I called it a "bonbon taste". My "neighbour" at the bar was/is more involved (owning a Whisky shop etc.) and a better taster than me. And he tasted a "Leckmuschel". I can't translate that exactly :P But it is a _very_ special kind of "bonbon" that at least me didn't ...eat!?licked? ... since I was a kid! Wouldn't have thought about that in the slightest; but it was the "same direction"
Also about this taste: Some wine-lovers will probably come over and kill me now, but I think, that Whisky has a much wider range of flavors than wine! And because of that many people prefer different "styles". And maybe more expensive bottles in their preference will be more enjoyed ... but others will think not much about it!
I admit for myself, that the best Whisky I tasted yet was the most expensive one too. But I have fun with "cheap" ones too. But I wouldn't be able to taste the money-difference. If you are good you can taste if a Whisky is older (meaning: it was in the barrel for a long time) or not. But in current times even "young" Whiskys can be expensive. So it isn't easy to differenciate.
While there is no "red or white" for Whisky, there is a big thing that seperates whiskys: Single Malt (most of the time "one barrel") and Blended (different barrels are "mixed" together). Blended are often regarded as "inferior". But in blind tastings blended Whiskys are often rated quite high; because you can't really taste the difference!
So, what do we make from all that?
Enjoy the drink!
Have you actually bought and tasted a bunch of different wines for this article? If not, then I think it's kinda ridiculous that you write an article about whether X it real just by going and looking at existing research and stuff without actually buying X and trying it when it's relatively cheap and easy to buy.
Are there people who can notice subtle differences in the tastes of, say, coffees or cheeses or between the aromas of perfumes who also believe wine is fake?
Personally, I can't tell cheap wine from expensive, but then I'm not very sophisticated at tasting and smelling anything else either. Other people are clearly much more discerning than I am about discerning differences in foods, so I assume that my lack of ability to notice much about wines is due to my personal deficiencies rather than to wine being fake. If somebody like food critic Corby Kummer of "The Atlantic," who has remarkable ability to notice differences in the taste of foods, said that wine is fake, I'd take him seriously.
But I don't take seriously my own perceptions when it comes to wine. So I just drink boxed wine myself, but I don't tell other people to be like me.
My good friend was a professional taster for Kraft’s Maxwell House research division. He had to pass a bunch of blind taste tests to get the job. He is also the biggest wine snob I know.
The idea of having a palate finely tuned for coffee, and then having to spend all day tasting Maxwell House, sounds a bit like a form of torture to me.
"Yep, this batch tastes like crap, ship it"
That’s pretty funny…luckily, he was working with researchers.
Apparently, high-paid Ph.D. food scientists and chemists can make a pretty good cup of coffee in the lab. The trick is getting it cost-effective and mass-produced.
I loved the article, but this sentence made me cringe. "Although ordinary people do not prefer more expensive to less expensive wine, some experts do, at least if we are willing to bend the statistical significance rules a little."
You probably know this already, but over the last 5-10 years, there's been growing concern over the focus on "statistical significance." Any "rules" (like p < 0.05 means an effect is "real") are arbitrary conventions and in general, what we really care about is the effect size and the uncertainty around that effect size. A tiny p value could mean either a huge effect that could be detected with a small number of subjects, or it could mean a very small effect that requires huge populations of subjects to accurately estimate the small effect size. For instance, if experts can distinguish expensive from cheap wine with 55% accuracy vs 50% accuracy for laymen, this difference would very likely be classified as statistically significant with p < 0.05, if one ran a study comparing 10,000 experts to 10,000 laymen, but not with a study of 100 experts vs 100 laymen.
Since your writing and analyses are so thorough, I expect you already know this. But seeing the words "bend the statistical significance rules" makes me cringe, so I figured I'd comment. Here's a longer article on p-values, in case it's helpful.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5665734/
Blinded by the dye.
Dressed up like a Douce:
Another Reisling in the night.
Wine experts remind me GeoGuessr experts.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0hUNY9V3_TI
I have thoughts on the Kaplan essay. I think he makes the common mistake of overrating the destructiveness of nuclear weapons, and underestimating the resilience of an enemy country. I'd prefer the margin of safety that comes from having 1,500 warheads instead of going down to only a few hundred. Beyond that, I very much agree that there's not a good case for the new ICBM. The big reason I can think of to keep the ICBM force around is to soak up warheads that might otherwise be going for our cities. And possibly as a hedge against problems with Trident, which could serve as a pretty good replacement if we loaded it with one warhead. But that seems unconvincing.
I do think he's wrong about the bombers. First, they're quite useful for things other than nuclear war, and our existing bomber force is getting old and hard to maintain. The B-2 has always been crazy expensive, and the B-21 promises to be a lot better, while also letting us cut the B-1 and maybe eventually the B-52. And note that the B-1 is not authorized to carry nuclear weapons, and hasn't been for decades. I am not impressed by his suggestion that it is. (And this ignores the need for a new nuclear cruise missile for the bombers, which is in work.) I also would say that we need a new SSBN now, rather than at some point in the future. The Ohios are getting very old, and hard to maintain. (Which, to be clear, is absolutely a thing, and a good reason to stop just refurbishing Minuteman.)
Kaplan has been a hack for decades. How people keep paying him to write I do not know, except maybe he's cheaper than somebody with more perception. He has been wrong on almost every aspect of nuclear policy and deterrence since forever. Have you read Alex Wellerstein? Guy clearly has a point of view, but he has the rigor and honesty of the genuine historian I think.
Curious about your thoughts on a recent War on the Rocks article I saw, which advocated a large fleet of bombers as an excellent weapon for the Pacific theater - a B-whatever can carry a bunch of stand-off anti-ship weapons, and can regularly sortie (with a mid-air refuel) from somewhere out of range of any Chinese weapon except ICBMs. And not cheap, but a wing of bombers is cheaper than a CVN battle group. (Obviously the local staying power of the CVN has its own benefits, but for the particular mission of “survivable strike platform to put lots of warheads on ships crossing the strait to Taiwan” a B-21 seems like a winner)
I am very much in favor of the bomber as a potential anti-shipping platform, although the Air Force seems much less interested than I am. But I think it's largely complementary to a carrier group, and may not be the best option for protecting the Taiwan strait directly. The other big problem (besides the Air Force being stupid) is that we don't currently have any bombers in production, and can't easily expand the force. That said, I'm not sure it's as invincible as the author probably thought, because I'd bet the tankers are forward-based.
Most importantly, we learned that Scott's pizza preferences are correct. Detroit>NYC>Chicago.
in gustu non est nisi controversia
Neapolitan > St. Louis > > New Haven> sfincione> NYC > Detroit > Chicago
Although the latter two are hardly pizza.
Subscribed
The logo for the magazine looks like Kurt Vonnegut's drawing of an asshole in Breakfast of Champions.
Ha. One of my favorite drawings. Thanks for calling that out.
This looks like a great magazine. But if one of the points of it is to give the EA movement more academic credibility (I don't know if it is) it doesn't seem very good at it.
A book review. One article that reads like a blog post, Scott even uses Wikipedia as a source. I really like the stuff I've read so far. But it doesn't come across very serious, just like substack but with a nicer design. And maybe higher quality.
All that being said I hope someone makes a podcast for the Asterisk magazine. That would be great.
Typo: on "Do wines ever have 6-carbon carboxylic acids, or 10-carbon alkanes — i.e., goats, armpits or jet fuel?", two chemicals are mapped to three sources as if one-to-one.
It might be you're expected to know that only the first two sources make sense with the carboxylic acid, and only the last for the alkane.
To what degree do you expect the difference between usual wine preferences versus more detailed wine preferences to be explainable by the existence of supertasters?
Around a quarter to a third of people are considered supertasters, meaning we have an increased number of papillae on our tongues.
I subjectively feel like I can very clearly taste the difference among various wines, though I don't have the language to describe that difference.
Is it possible that the people who were able to pass the exams were supertasters while the others who failed in the studies weren't?
It would mean reviews from wine critics aren't generalizable to 75% of the population, which sounds about right.
Scott, what a great piece. I've long wanted to synthesize all these wine studies, but my goals were less ambitious than what you crafted in Asterisk. Bravo.
Thanks for diving into the science, and I'm so happy to share your work in an upcoming newsletter.
Somm is the documentary that got me into wine. And if you need a follow up wine doc on actual fake wine, I suggest Sour Grapes.
I am impressed with this magazine, both by the quality of the content and the presentation. I love the footnotes being in the right margin. What a simple and significant improvement to the ease of reading!
Well, pizza, cheeseburgers and wine are all food groups, but wine has always already had an elitist/ high culture aspect to it that doesn't work for cheeseburgers and rarely goes well with pizza, unless you are from New Haven, CT.
The vocabulary only clues us in to the fact that we are dealing with a material that matters greatly to some segment of the culture and while that vocabulary can act as a gatekeeper, it is also helpful for understanding the material and understanding leads to greater appreciation--and more gatekeepers!
I don't know about $1000 bottles of wine tasting the same as an $80 bottle, but I can understand why two wines of similar taste might deviate greatly in price and land value is one such element to consider.
I tasted a $245 bottle from Ridge's Santa Clarita vineyard outside of Cupertino yesterday and while it was nice, it wasn't something that I would buy but I'm sure that Ridge has no problems selling it because Ridge signifies a value within the wine community. And while it does make me wonder who is buying $1000 bottles of wine and why, I can't say that I would ever feel the pressure to buy one; however, if I had the cash and no plans for it I would buy a bottle of $1000+ Screaming Eagle just to try it because it has a reputation for the kinds of value that the wine community embraces.
I also have no problems with gatekeepers--even irony is a gatekeeper of sorts as is the education that you mention. I do however have a problem with closed doors, especially in education where there is all of this talk of "equity." But that's another story.
People getting upset about wine they will never buy or drink strikes me as a bit on the side of Nietzschean "ressentiment." I'm not big on Bordeaux, so I will have to take your word for the Margaux!
Scott, I thoroughly enjoyed your wine-tasting article in Asterisk.
I must admit I likely am accurately described by humourist Dave Barry, who said something like "the average American, blind-folded, would have trouble distinguishing between a fine French wine and a melted popsicle". (Oh phew, I'm Canadian, so it's OK.)
I was reminded of this fine excerpt from Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon Days. Young John Tollefson has written his own 95 Theses, a rant against his repressive Lutheran upbringing. Number 79:
"I revolted by becoming a sensitive person, which I am not. I hate folk music. I don't care for most of the sensitive people I feel obligated to hang out with. Most of them play guitars and write songs about their feelings. I have to pack up my Percy Faith records when they come and put the box in the bedroom closet and pile winter coats on it, and despite the mothballs I'm afraid they'll take one sniff and say, "You like light classical, don't you?"
I pour a round of Lowenbrau, being careful not to pour along the side but straight down so the beer can express itself, and they say, "Did you ever try Dockendorf?" It's made by the Dockendorf family from hand-pumped water in their ancient original family brewery in an unspoiled Pennsylvania village where the barley is hauled in by Amish families who use wagons with oak beds. Those oak beds give Dockendorf its famous flavor.
These beer bores, plus the renovators of Victorian houses, the singer-songwriters, the runners, the connoisseurs of northern Bengali cuisine, the collectors of everything Louis Armstrong recorded between August 1925 and June 1928, his seminal period - they are driving me inexorably toward life as a fat man in a bungalow swooning over sweet-and-sour pork.
You drove me toward them!"
There's a point in the Guardian article about wine tasting that alert me:
>The only difference was that one had been coloured red with a flavourless dye.
I have never tasted food dye (and never used any I can recall), but what is "flavourless"? I can recall plenty of things with a very faint taste, but a taste nonetheless, but nothing to be flavourless. And even assuming a food dye in itself can be flavourless, is it not possible that it can alter the taste of what it's added to? I think Scott mention somewhere having used half, or over half of a bottle of food coloring agent for his wine. I don't know how much that is, but that may be a non-nogligeable amount of diluting the wine, thus altering the taste.
If it sounds like unfalsifiable claims, it's because it is (on second thoughts, I should have read that post on internal state instead of skimming over it), but that's a lot of hypothesis that could make the experiments meaningless.
Thanks for the heads up, this mag looks like a nice project. Seconded or thirded: can you please ask them to add RSS? That's the classic hassle-free way to keep in touch with a web publication.
About the wine thing, not much to say, I hardly ever drink it. But I was surprised the article didn't focus more about the distinction between being able to taste differences between wines, and ranking them. These are two completely different things! These are complex organic juices with plenty of variation in chemicals, and a whole subculture has sprung around learning to recognize and discern all sorts of "notes". Fine, great. But that in itself doesn't say anything about which kind of combination is better than another - there's talk of a basic sense of balance, but once you've got the basics covered, which particular combinations of subtle flavors are favored is basically going to be a cultural mushroom, or as the saying goes, a path dependency. If you want to discuss the extent of arbitrariness in wine tasting culture, I would mainly focus on that.
The why isn't the whole world rich paper sounded familiar to me.
See 2017 St. Louis Fed paper
https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/page1-econ/2017/09/01/why-are-some-countries-rich-and-others-poor/
Having served on the board of a Georgist organization, of course, in many ways it is the same question Henry George asks in Progress and poverty (1879). The first pages are still salient, to paraphrase: why amidst the amazing technological advances is there still poverty.
While education and institutions do matter, I think George got the big issue right: land!
"As St. Ambrose put it: "You are not making a gift of what is yours to the poor man, but you are giving him back what is his. You have been appropriating things that are meant to be for the common use of everyone. The earth belongs to everyone, not to the rich."
— Pope Paul VI, Populorum Progressio (1967) in which the church continues it's longstanding investigation of the development of peoples.
is there a chart that shows correlation between "land use efficiency" and prosperity?
Also, I guess there are tons of natural experiments on various state/county borders when land-use regulations change one one side but on on the other. Are there famous ones?
Regarding replication, this problem can't be fixed without changing the underlying attitude that disfavors disproving published results. In many fields trying to show a published effect doesn't exist is seen as a personal attack or at least resented.
My proposal is this: For every published paper the journal reserves 3 slots that automatically go to the best (given some very minimum quality threshold) rebutal pieces submitted within certain time limits (eg 2,4 and 10 years) and the paper, rebuttals and potentially a response from the original authors (not regarded as a new publication) all are packaged together on the online cite. A rebutal publication need not be given the full weight of a publication seen as correct despite the rebutals in hiring as long as it's given decent weight.
I think that's necessary because we can't avoid the fact that it's more valuable to identify a new and surprising phenomenon. It's a genuine skill to have the foresight to know where to look to find new interesting phenomenon and you neither can nor want to require every study that is registered be carried through to the end.
But you do want to clean up the record so reward the ppl who do that.
Seems like nobody pointed this out (and apologies if I'm slow on the ball), so: Scott, you've misspelled "ginkgo" in the beginning of your article. "Gingko" is probably one of the most common non-typo misspellings in the English language, but it's properly (and unintuitively) spelled ginkgo, G I N K G O.
fun article! i had head of the "can't tell white from red" study and had wondered same thing, great to see you look into the topic
This comment is probably late to the party, but...
Re: "Is Wine Fake" article, I don't know why it's so surprising that we can train our qualia to enhance our perception of the world. Of course, there's a bigger question at play here: how much of our discernment is the result of innate hard-wired biology vs learned abilities? If we divide our qualia into the five senses (which I think is perhaps an overly reductionist way of categorizing our sensorium) we can see lots of evidence that learning plays an important role in our ability to make qualitative judgments about what we're perceiving.
Recently on NPR's Radio Lab. there was a discussion about absolute pitch (aka perfect pitch) which according to Wikipedia: "is a rare ability of a person to identify or re-create a given musical note without the benefit of a reference tone." Radio Lab spoke to some researchers that claimed absolute pitch approached 70% in populations that used tonal languages (Chines), but in populations whose language was not tonal, AP is less than 10%. That suggests that AP is a learned skill—and some other studies suggest that it only can be acquired early in life.
When it comes to vision, cultural anthropologists and linguists have been arguing over whether color categories are inherently programmed into our wetware or whether language and culture have an influence on our categorization of color perception effects. This was in response to the idea that colors were universally delimited by the number of primary color words in a language. For instance, if a language has six basic color words, they were always for black, white, red, green, yellow, and blue. If a language only had four terms, they were for black, white, red, and then either green or yellow. If it had only three, they were always for black, white, and red.
Others countered that this may be true, but just like Inuit have dozens of (agglutinative) terms for snow, and Yiddish has the most terms for unpleasant people, Korean has the most terms for colors—especially shades of yellow. And it's difficult for non-native speakers to learn to distinguish them, but dedicated learners can with some help from native speakers.
Then there's taste. Training and practice will improve one's discernment. I watched a chef friend of mine decode the ingredients in a dish we were served at another friend's restaurant.
Ofc we can increase our discernment but that's missing the real issue. I could probably learn to distinguish a great number of facts about someone's diet by training myself to taste their piss more carefully.
The underlying issue is the implication that it's somehow especially worthwhile or desireable thing to do with wine. It's not even clear that it actually does increase enjoyment and if it does why wine more than smoothies.
I think the suspicion many of us have is that wine is essentially like some forms of high art or architecture. What's really driving the party isn't some simple desire to enjoy their food more. Rather, ppl are deliberately training themselves to like things that are hard for other ppl to appreciate so they can imply they are socially superior to the rabble.
If so, that's both directly harmful (it's basically a kind of bullying/sneering) and not a good way to increase your enjoyment of taste bc, other things being equal, it's probably less fun to learn to better appreciate hard to appreciate things than easy to appreciate ones.
But it's complicated since, as u always find in these situations, there really are some ppl who just do naturally like those kind of tastes and are just enjoying their perfectly reasonable hobby. Then any attempt to attack wine snobbery runs into a motte-bailey where ppl ask you what your problem is with these individuals.
Well, none. Those ppl are great fun to drink with. They get what they love and don't care if you like cheap Moscato as long as you don't drink their good stuff. But other ppl are working very hard to suggest that sophisticated ppl must like wine in a certain way that they do and most ppl only pretend to.
I don't want to come across as a wine snob on a budget, but you have to really give me a reason to try any bottle of pinot under $40. I was talking to a friend who recently moved to Portugal--that's a thing now, I guess--and she told me that their everyday wines are like $3.00 a bottle and some good wines are around $10. I think that the overpriced wine phenomenon is mostly in California, but I could be wrong.
$40. That is ridiculous.
Nice article on wine! One thing I (a French person, not a wine expert) was surprised not to see in the article is a point about price versus ageability. A key point that appears quite consistent among people I know (not wine experts either) is that aged wine tastes good, finer, and better than young wine. But most wines cannot age that long. Some wine can age 3 to 5 years before turning bad, but some can age 20 to 30 years, or even significantly more. A commonly shared opinion in France is that super-expensive wines are also wines that are expected to last really long (when aged in proper conditions, ideally in a cellar). Many French people (owning a cellar) will buy an expensive-ish wine to age it for, say, 15 years, and drink it at a special even. When this happens, it is always a great moment, where the wine really has this well-aged old wine taste which many people love and don't get to taste so often.
So, for me, one of the key distinction between the 2 euros - 15 euros range and the 30 euros - 150 euros range is that the latter is expected to contain wines known to age well for a long time, which is an amazing quality (or even, if you want, a good investment - aged wine can be sold for much higher prices). I don't think I can tell a super expensive wine from a 5 euros wine consistently (France has tons of amazing 5 euros wines), but I'm quite sure (>85%) I will appreciate a 15y old wine that aged well much better than any <5y old red wine more than 80% of the time.
All of the above applies solely to red wine (considerations about aging are not the same for white) and for the price ranges I mentioned, I don't have opinions on the 150 euros range versus the 1000 euros range, having never tried the latter.
I drink a fair amount of wine and catalogue my bottles on cellartracker.com, which is a free web site to keep track of your wines (you can also pay, but it's not required). Many thousands of people use the site and record their own ratings of their wine. When I see a bottle with a high rating from an expert (e.g., wine spectator), I check to see what people on cellartracker.com say about it, a bit like crowdsourcing. It's not foolproof, of course, for some of the same reasons Scott mentions in his article, but if an expert gives a high rating, but the cellartracker ratings are low enough, I'll know it's probably not worth it to buy that wine.
A bit late, but how can experts have blind taste tests between French and Californian wines if they can tell where the wines originate by taste? I don’t understand why experts would agree to this - isn’t even agreeing to do it to acknowledge that they can’t distinguish wines accurately? And if, as Scott concludes, experts can distinguish wines, then why would Californian wines win when blinded but lose when unblinded?
The California wines in question are similar to the French wines in question. Being able to do blind tasting is about being able to distinguish platonic examples. For comparison most people can probably tell the difference between Whiskey, Rum, and Brandy. If you have some experience you can distinguish Whiskey by Region based on knowing what to expect but of course you could be surprised by an unusual example. Regarding why they would be biased when unblinded I think it's helpful to look at the blinded results (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgment_of_Paris_(wine)#The_results). Although a California wine won both categories the results were not as conclusive (although the California wines did better on rematches). If you tasted unblinded then a subtle bias from knowing which is which could easily swing the scores by a few points. Once the first result was announced and California wine became prestigious this bias is reduced.
I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying. Do you think the judges expected ahead of time to not be able to tell if a blinded taste was of a Californian or a French wine? That seems to be the only important consideration here, but either a yes or a no answer seems paradoxical to the whole situation. If yes, then a blinded judging was impossible or even insulting. If no, then the results wouldn’t be surprising.
Yes going in the judges probably expected to be able to tell the French wines from the Californians but realistically they might expect to only have a 80% (I'm making this number up completely) chance of identifying the wines correctly. Distinguishing wine is not a superpower but is instead based on being able to ignore the dominant wine flavor and be able to pick up on more subtle flavors, mouthfeel, and appearance. When judging by region you would provide wines that are most typical of the region rather than the "best" wines from the region so their expected accuracy might be lower (but given I made up the first number we can stick with it). Also one of the characteristics that they previously might have considered characteristic of California wine might have been flaws but these top wines were made without those (e.g. a characteristic I associate with California Chardonnays is too much oak imparting a buttery flavor).
You obviously don't know pinot noir--it's only one of the hardest grapes to grow and French oak ain't cheap either (of course, Ridge uses American oak).
Re: "How far beyond wine you want to apply this is left as an exercise for the reader." (in "Is Wine Fake?")
I don't understand. Can someone explain what else Scott had in mind that this might be applied to?
This might have been said, but the constantly updating scroll bar on the left side of mobile articles is a bit distracting. I like its intention, but perhaps it’d be more appealing (and subtle) on the right margin?
Another note: the homepage is a bit unassuming. Though the typefaces and fonts of titles are loud and to my personal taste, the distinction of links verse regular text is not. Perhaps some indication, a border or button, would increase conversions?
What I was missing a little bit is the question "are prices fake?" especially in the fragment about champagne ranging from 400 to 18 pounds per bottle. Wine lovers certainly know that some hard-working and caring champagne makers can make really really good wine and the very expensive champagnes are also very good, but not necessarily always better. Prices have a lot to do with other things than quality. Of course you know that but it was not reflected enough in the piece, I think.
Great article and fun to read. I am a WSET level 4 wine expert and fellow Substack writer at Wine Wanderings. I have been told I am a super sniffer, but more importantly as a biochemistry/microbiology major I do believe in the science of the aromas of wine as you state in your reference to gas chromatography. Thank you for your thought-provoking article.