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...
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