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Luxury wines are a trillion dollar a year industry, yet wine tasters can't distinguish between low and high quality wines in blind tastings, will rank wines higher based on the price or label, and have even been fooled with a bit of food coloring into thinking white wine is red.
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Many people know this and move on, or convince themselves that they're the exception. Yet if you're like me and are incapable of mental compartmentalization, awareness of the extent self-deception in the wine industry has profound practical and epistemological implications.
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Wine seems to just be a well-studied microcosm of how human beliefs and desires work more generally. Namely, that they're socially mediated, easily falsified, unconsciously influenced by cues of status and distinction, and relatively impervious to rational self-reflection.
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If a bottle of aged grape piss can sell for thousands of dollars, what other trillion dollar industries and worldviews are constructed on a foundation of mass preference falsification and status driven self-deception? Almost all of them?
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