An analogue would be going to see a really bad art film that everyone says is brilliant. You don't actually enjoy the movie itself, but you do enjoy the fact that you have the good taste to see such a "brilliant" piece of art.

There is a nice bloggingheads with Paul Bloom that is relevant here:
http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/20086

I think that most people would have to commit quite a few mental resources to overcome the reluctance to eat brownies that looked like excrement.

So those brownies are actually less valuable because they require a bigger investment of emotion-control before they can be enjoyed.

"An analogue would be going to see a really bad art film that everyone says is brilliant. You don't actually enjoy the movie itself, but you do enjoy the fact that you have the good taste to see such a "brilliant" piece of art."


Or you endure the looks of your friends when they catch up to you in the lobby because you couldn't stand to sit through the whole thing. Then they try to convince you of the merit of the drivel based on the balance of the film that you missed while in the lobby.


Razib, stop, please, I almost fell out of the chair laughing at "feces shaped brownie." Maybe construct a fun test to see whether thin or heavy folk are more likely to overcome visual aversion and try the little gems.

FWIW, one of the things I had to learn to become a functioning and useful person in the culture-world was that 2/3 of what people think they're getting from art is stuff that they're in fact putting there.

People bring expectations, and they project too. And context affects both these mechanisms.

Which is fun and cool as far as I'm concerned. Those people who reported enjoying the wine more because they'd been told it was more expensive than it really was? Well, their enhanced enjoyment was real. Can't sneeze at that.

One of the things an effective artist or entertainer does is create objects or performances that audiences' emotions, desires, and fantasies can adhere to.

Razib, stop, please, I almost fell out of the chair laughing at "feces shaped brownie." Maybe construct a fun test to see whether thin or heavy folk are more likely to overcome visual aversion and try the little gems.

the example is based on a real experiment.

From one point of view these are called Veblen goods. You enjoy something more because it is expensive, prestigious, and praised by others. If that's all it is it isn't exactly "subjective appreciation", it's social climbing utility added on to and overriding what ever sensual utility there was.

But it isn't always purely that. Sometimes you learn what there is to like about something after several trials, even though you missed it at first. This is famously true of marijuana. A lot of people claim to be unaffected because they don't know what affect it was they were supposed to be getting. Then they realize that they've been looking at the wallpaper pattern for fifteen minutes.

Or so I've been told.

I tend not to enjoy live classical concerts, because they're so heavily impacted by older people showing off their status, many of whom, don't really like music, and some of whom were dragged there by their wives. And in such circumstances there are always people for whom classical music is a deliberate move upward, and others for whom it's what they were born to.

At the same time, I do like classical music a lot, though not all of it. I also like certain kinds of avant-garde jazz that fewer and fewer people listen to any more.

I'm sure there's a technical word for what I'm talking about, but which I labelled subjective hedonism, so feel free to tell me in the comments.

I've seen the term alief used to mean something that people intellectually know might not be true, but they can't help but feel the emotion.

Can we train ourselves not to manifest these cognitive ticks? Consider an extremely tasty brownie shaped like feces vs. one that wasn't.

There is a chain restaurant called Modern Toilet where the food is served in "toilets", and often does look like feces.

I've seen the term alief used to mean something that people intellectually know might not be true, but they can't help but feel the emotion.

i know alief. this is obviously related insofar as an emotional response is at work here. but i'm talking about the modification of utility based on framing and context which has a material reality in your brain.

I think the feces-shaped brownie and pricey wines are totally different cases. The wine cases sound like an example of goods with a network effect -- you derive utility from its intrinsic worth plus some extra from how hyped it is.

Say each of the N people in the group put out, on average, h units of hype for the thing. Then total hype, H, is h*N. Let the utility, U, be a linear function of the thing's intrinsic worth, i, and total hype, H:

U = i + s*H = i + s*h*N

Where s is how sensitive you are to the amount of hype.

So, what it's worth to you is an increasing function of group size, like a piece of network technology such as a cell phone or QWERTY keyboard.

Basically, we're using those others in the group, or the hype they generate, to better inform our taste or response (to learn socially). They might know something we don't, or they might have a more sophisticated palate than we do.

The feces-shaped brownie doesn't have these properties. There is some extra funny business added onto the intrinsic worth to give us utility, but it's not a social observation / learning thing.

The social learning part may be easier to dial down because we know that the group doesn't always know more than we do / can sense more than we can, so we aren't going to be totally gullible. But we will always know that shit is shit, so the sensitivity parameter there presumably shouldn't be very tweakable.

assman, re: hype & network, but it isn't necessarily too direct. consider ordering kobe vs. hot rock beef. could be $20 vs. $200. the price is a signal shaped by other people, but if you actually pay $200 for kobe beef you're going to be more attentive to how the beef tastes to a greater degree than if you spend $20.

Those of us afflicted with low-brow humor would love the feces-shaped brownies and would make them every Halloween. (And probably serve an appropriately colored drink out of something resembling a urinal.)

On the other hand, wine served in fine crystal stemware is more pleasant to drink and will subjectively taste better than the same wine served in a mason jar.

At $200, I'd be so sensitive to the taste, I would not enjoy the experience, whether it be wine or beef.

OK, so we just make s an increasing function of h.

I think we should also make s an upside-down-u function of i -- you're most sensitive to hype when the intrinsic worth is halfway between nothing and its maximum. If its intrinsic worth is nothing (dirt for food), it's hard for hype to exert much influence, and ditto if the intrinsic worth is as high as possible (sex with a 20 y.o. Audrey Hepburn) -- in those cases, it's a no-brainer and the opinions of others add nearly nothing extra.

You're also missing the point. It assumes the blind tests exhaust all the quality dimensions. But what if people can tell the differences in quality but not consistently. Imagine that you can appreciate something special about a fine wine 2 out of 4 times but screw up the rest of the time. This might lead to statistical insignificance but that doesn't mean there isn't really subjective utility.

Or consider the problem of drugs. Imagine a drug that only passed FDA tests at the 80% confidence interval. We would say its difference is not significant statistically. But if the potential benefit is large and there are no side effects then IT IS rational to use such a drug even if medical protocol treats it as "no better" than a placebo (which is strictly speaking not true).

If it's a brand-named Audrey Hepburn, the hype factor can't be sorted out. If it's just a Hepburn-equivalent just as beautiful as Hepburn but not especially resembling her, i.e. not a Hepburn impersonator (which is common enough, there are lot of lovely women out there) your pleasure might still be increased by the feeling of having won a local competition. On top of that, a lot of beautiful women aren't especially sexual.

So anyway, in my opinion the comparative factors are a lot harder to sort out than you think.

Isn't the most expensive coffee made of seeds from the roasted feces of Indonesian civet cats? Apparently it has a wonderful aroma.

so we just make s an increasing function of h

How about saving the math until you actually have something measurable to hang it on? With neither hype nor utility being measurable, math here is a hammer looking for a nail that isn't there.

While context (stemware, turd shapes, knowing that something is expensive, having our friends extol it, etc...) is clearly going to affect our enjoyment in general, I think the question is how malleable our response to these different factors is. I suppose philosophically you might want to either reduce the context effects as much as possible (in pursuit of some quasistoic ideal), or else try to manipulate them to increase your enjoyment where possible (if you're more of a hedonist).

Perhaps we could look at it in booze terms. The active ingrediant in booze, ETOH, can cost well under a dollar a liter, or a few cents per drink. More than that you're paying for taxes and flavor -- purer alcohol with added flavors. There are various cheap things you can add to make ETOH taste good, and nice tasting powerful drink might cost 25 cents.

That's the basic physiological need right there. Anything extra is taxes, subjective satisfactions, Veblen pricing, and ambience (a nice bar). So if you ever buy a $10 drink somewhere, figure that the objective part is about 3-5% of that.

With neither hype nor utility being measurable, math here is a hammer looking for a nail that isn't there.

You don't get what the point of modeling is. And sure you can measure hype, although no one said there's one perfect way. Take a stock that's being hyped -- there is some consensus estimate of the company's earnings, a measure of fundamentals rather than hype. Now look at how much greater the price is being bid up by the speculators and divide by the number of speculators to get the average contribution of each to the overall hype.

The intrinsic merit and utility would also be measured in dollars -- how much would you part with. Measure it however you want, as long as it's sensible.

In any case, you're wrong to say "no math allowed" just because you can't measure one of the quantities involved. Science would be crippled with no models until measurement was precise enough. You might not be able to decide between models until then, but without models, you have no ideas to test.

And it may not even need good measurement to tell if the model is right. Say one model allows for the thing under study to rise and fall over time, while this is impossible in another one. To decide between rival theories, we only need enough precision to see if the thing rises and falls in the real world -- and no more than that.

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