We often talk as though we are in direct contact with reality - as though our eyes show us the world, and our minds read off the facts. But between whatever reality fundamentally is and the experience you're having right now, there are a surprising number of layers. At each layer, two types of error happen: information gets left out, and bias creeps in. By the time experience reaches you, there's the potential for a great deal of both to have accumulated.
Put another way, rather than p...
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perception
How good is our sense of taste? Do we even know what we actually like?
I recently conducted an in-person mini-experiment on whether we can tell different beverages apart - and how much we like them (with co-organizer Hannah Vazquez). Different stations were set up, each containing small (<1oz) tasting cups of a single type of beverage (with 5-6 distinct beverages of that type, labeled A, B, C, etc. so that nobody could tell which was which). The stations were:
5 types of water
5 types of cold coffee
5 types of pinot noir red wines (of varying pric...
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