Seth's Blog

The Willat Effect is the hedonic change caused by side-by-side comparison of similar things. Your hedonic response to the things compared (e.g., two or more dark chocolates) expands in both directions. The “better” things become more pleasant and the “worse” things become less pleasant. In my experience, it’s a big change, easy to notice.

I discovered the Willat Effect when my friend Carl Willat offered me five different limoncellos side by side. Knowing that he likes it, his friends had given them to him. Perhaps three were homemade, two store-bought. I’d had plenty of limoncello before that, but always one version at a time. Within seconds of tasting the five versions side by side, I came to like two of them (with more complex flavors) more than the rest. One or two of them I started to dislike. When you put two similar things next to each other, of course you see their differences more clearly. What’s impressive is the hedonic change.

The Willat Effect supports my ideas about human evolution because it pushes people toward connoisseurship. (I predict it won’t occur with animals.) The fact that repeating elements are found in so many decorating schemes and patterns meant to be pretty (e.g., wallpapers, textile patterns, rugs, choreography) suggests that we get pleasure from putting similar things side by side — the very state that produces the Willat Effect. According to my theory of human evolution, connoisseurship evolved because it created demand for hard-to-make goods, which helped the most skilled artisans make a living. Carl’s limoncello tasting made me a mini-connoisseur of limoncello. I started buying it much more often and  bought more expensive brands, thus helping the best limoncello makers make a living. Connoisseurs turn surplus into innovation by giving the most skilled artisans more time and freedom to innovate.

Does the Willat Effect have practical value? Could it improve my life? Recently I decided to see if it could make me a green tea connoisseur. Ever since I discovered the Shangri-La Diet (calories without smell), I’d been drinking tea (smell without calories) almost daily but I was no connoisseur. Nor had I done many side-by-side comparisons. At home, I had always made one cup at a time.

In Beijing, where I am now, I can easily buy many green teas. I got three identical tea pots (SAMA SAG-08) and three cheap green teas. I drink tea every morning. Instead of brewing one pot, I started making two or three pots at the same time and comparing the results. I compared different teas and the same tea brewed different lengths of time (Carl’s idea).

I’ve been doing this about two weeks. The results so far:

1. The cheapest tea became undrinkable. I decided to never buy it again and not to drink the  rest of my purchase. I will use it for kombucha. Two of the three teas cost about twice the cheapest one. After a few side by side comparisons I liked the more expensive ones considerably more than the cheaper one. The two more expensive ones cost about the same but, weirdly, I liked the one that cost (slightly) more a little better than the one that cost less. (Tea is sold in bulk with no packaging or branding so the price I pay is closely related to what the grower was paid. The buyers taste it and decide what it’s worth.)

2. I decided to infuse the tea leaves only once. (Usual practice is to infuse green tea two or more times.)  The quality of later infusions was too low, I decided. Before this, I had found second and later infusions had been acceptable.

The Willat Effect is working, in other words. After a decade of drinking tea, my practices suddenly changed.  I will buy different teas and brew them differently. I will spend a lot more per cup since (a) each cup will require fresh tea, (b) I won’t buy the cheapest tea, and (c) I have become far more interested in green tea, partly because each cup tastes better, partly because I am curious if more expensive varieties taste better. When I bought the three varieties I have now I didn’t bother to learn their names; I identified them by price. In the future I will learn the names.

To get the Willat Effect, the things being compared must be quite similar. For example, comparing green tea with black tea does nothing. I have learned a methodological lesson: That tea is a great medium for studying this not only because it’s cheap but also because you can easily get similar tasting teas by brewing the same tea different lengths of time. I haven’t yet tried different water temperatures but that too might work.

I have done similar things before. I bought several versions of orange marmalade, did side-by-side tastings, and indeed became an orange marmalade connoisseur. After that I bought only expensive versions. After a few side-by-side comparisons of cheese that included expensive cheeses, I stopped buying cheap cheese. You could say I am still an orange marmalade and cheese connoisseur but this has no effect on my current life. Because I avoid sugar, I don’t eat orange marmalade. Because of all the butter I eat, I rarely eat cheese. My budding green tea connoisseurship, however, is making a  difference because I drink tea every day.

My posts about human evolution.

How did air-breathing evolve? In The Nature of Economies (p. 87), Jane Jacobs uses it to illustrate the developmental pattern she calls “bifurcation” (air-breathing isn’t a refinement of water-breathing). She speculates on how it started:

Lungfish had both gills and a primitive lung, suggesting that their habitat was swampland. The earliest to take to dry land may have inhabited swamps subject to severe droughts or perhaps they were escaping fearsomely-jawed predators who couldn’t follow them to dry land.

According to Steve Yegge’s already-famous “psst, Googlers” memo, something much like this was why Amazon started selling web computing services, which wasn’t a refinement of their earlier business (selling books, toys, etc.):

Amazon was a product company too, so it took an out-of-band force to make Bezos understand the need for a platform. That force was their evaporating margins; he was cornered and had to think of a way out. But all he had was a bunch of engineers and all these computers… if only they could be monetized somehow… you can see how he arrived at AWS [Amazon Web Services], in hindsight.

People say necessity is the mother of invention. That isn’t even close to true. Trial and error is the mother of true, profound invention. The Bezos story, and Jacobs’s generalization of it, suggest what is actually true: necessity is the mother of development. Necessity pushes people to use, and thereby develop, inventions they had ignored.

Chapter 1 of The Nature of Economies.

• MMO (massively multiplayer online) game connoisseurship
• Thorstein Veblen lives! (cartoon)
• article about self-tracking in Technology Review with several associated articles. The author, Emily Singer, describes a month of self-tracking, including what went wrong.
  
• triumph of new-age medicine. Emily Blackburn, a Nobel Prize winner, says modern medicine does a good job with infectious disease. What about antibiotic resistance? What about failing to understand how to boost the immune system?
• Medtronic didn’t waste $23 million. Associated article. A surgeon named Thomas Zdeblick, who received $23 million from Medtronic, has drawn attention away from the company by claiming he has no financial interest in a product that generates substantial income for him whenever it is used according to FDA guidelines.

Thanks to Tim Lundeen, J.C. and Ben Casnocha.

About ten years ago, while visiting my friend Carl Willat, he presented me with five versions of limoncello (an Italian lemon liqueur) side by side in shot glasses. Two were store-bought, the rest homemade, if I remember correctly. I tried them one by one. I had had limoncello many times but never different versions side by side. It was easy to notice differences between them. Obviously. What surprised me was an hedonic reaction: I thought two of them (with more complex flavors) were wonderful and one (store-bought) was awful. Both reactions (wonderful and awful) were stronger than usual. In a small way, I’d become a connoisseur. After that, I was happy to buy expensive limoncello (e.g., $26). I no longer bought cheap limoncello ($18). I call the hedonic changes produced by side-by-side comparisons the Willat Effect. Carl became a connoisseur of Italian hand-painted tableware due to side by side comparisons. I believe connoisseurs were important in human evolution because they helped support skilled artisans. Our design preference for repeated elements (e.g., wallpaper, textiles) evolved so that we would put similar things side by side. (more…)

Last night I went to a beer tasting in San Francisco. I didn’t taste all the beers but of the 15-odd I did taste the best were by Uncommon Brewers — especially their Siamese Twin (“the floral notes of lemongrass and sharper bite of kaffir lime blend with the deep malt”) and Baltic Porter (“whole licorice root and star anise”).

Five or six years ago I went to a sake-tasting event in San Francisco called “The Joy of Sake”. About 140 sakes. In a few hours I became such a sake connoisseur that the sake I could afford  — and used to buy regularly — I now despised. The only sake I now liked was so expensive ($80/bottle) that I never bought another bottle of sake.

You have surely heard the phrase economies of scale — meaning that when you make many copies of something each instance costs less than when you make only a few copies. Large companies are said to benefit from “economies of scale” — so there is pressure to become bigger. Every introductory economics textbook says something like this. (more…)

My friend Carl Willat sent me this photo with the comment “noticeably worse” — meaning that the new version (on the right) is noticeably worse than the old version (on the left). 365 is the Whole Foods house brand. Years ago,the label of 365 balsamic vinegar said “aged 5 years”. Then one day it didn’t. The younger vinegar (aged 1 year?) tasted noticeably worse. In a side-by-side comparison, it was obvious.

Side-by-side comparisons, I discovered thanks to Carl, are powerful — and I could use that power to improve my life. A long time ago at his apartment I tasted five versions of limoncello (Italian lemon liqueur) side by side. Of course the differences became clearer–that’s obvious. The surprise was that all of a sudden I cared about the differences. Before that tasting, I had had plenty of limoncello. But only at the side-by-side tasting did I develop a liking for the good stuff (more complex flavor) and a dislike for the cheaper stuff (simpler flavor). I stopped buying cheap limoncello and started buying expensive limoncello. I got a lot of pleasure out of it. I still do this. A few weeks ago I bought some rum to flavor my yogurt. I started with the cheapest brand. A week later, to compare, I got a more expensive brand. Side-by-side tasting showed it was clearly better. Now I sort of relish it — the side-by-side comparison made rum drinking more enjoyable. Soon I will get an even more expensive rum, to see how it stacks up.

I’m pretty sure such side-by-side comparisons are how connoisseurs are made. The evolutionary reason for this effect, I believe, is that connoisseurs will pay more than other people for well-made stuff, thus helping skilled artisans — during the Stone Age, the main source of innovation — make a living.

In Carl’s picture the new vinegar looks much cheaper than the old vinegar. The previous change (from aged 5 years to not aged 5 years) wasn’t accompanied by a cheaper-looking label. Maybe Whole Food headquarters had received complaints from manufacturers of other balsamic vinegars: Your house brand is too good. And they replied: Okay, we’ll cheapen it.

I eat a low-carb diet for reasons that have nothing to do with weight loss: To keep my blood sugar down. I am sure high blood sugar is bad. A few months ago, I noticed that my lips were chapped, which was unusual. I suspected it was due to lack of Vitamin C. About two months before that, I had stopped doing two things that I usually did: taking a multi-vitamin pill (which had Vitamin C) and eating fruit. I don’t know if the Vitamin C in the pill is absorbed but I’m sure the Vitamin C in fruit is. I started eating kumquats — the skins of four kumquats/day. (One kumquat contains about 15% of the recommended daily allowance of Vitamin C). My lips returned to normal.

Paul Jaminet, author of Perfect Health Diet, had a similar experience, which I knew nothing about when I noticed my chapped lips. While eating “a lot of vegetables but no starches and hardly any fruit,” he developed outright scurvy, including wounds that wouldn’t heal.  This happened while he was taking a multi-vitamin pill with 90 mg Vitamin C (my four kumquats contain only 35 mg Vitamin C). “Four grams a day of vitamin C for two months cured all the scurvy symptoms,” he found.

Why do we like sweet foods? The usual answer (so that we will eat more calories) is nonsense (except for children). The striking thing about our liking for sweetness is that it disappears when we are really hungry, which is the opposite of what the calorie-seeking explanation predicts. Desserts are served at the end of a meal because they taste much better then. But our liking for sweetness (when we’re not hungry) is so strong and obvious it must mean something important. I think it is pushing us to eat more fruit so that we will get enough Vitamin C. Fruits are much sweeter than other food groups and they are much higher in Vitamin C. We don’t like sweet things when we are hungry because a high-fruit diet is terrible (it is low in omega-3, other necessary fats, several minerals, and microbes, for example). But a small amount of fruit may be a big help. Paul and my experiences suggest it may be hard to get enough Vitamin C in other ways.

More Paul has a different idea about why we like sweetness.

In a comment on a previous post about lack of convincing evidence for climate models — the ones that predict catastrophe — I wrote:

At any time — right now, 5 years ago, 10 years, 15 years ago –” the people who work with those models and claim we should pay attention to their predictions could make/have made a set of predictions: next year, the year after that, and so on. Then, as time passed, we would have found out if the models predict correctly. The modelers haven’t done that.

From this talk by Richard Muller, a Berkeley physicist, I learned of two instances where the modelers did what I said they haven’t done. (more…)

In this excellent article, Joshua Foer describes how he got really good at competitive memory tests, such as remembering the order of a deck of cards. He competed in the national championships.

Foer writes a lot about using “memory palaces” to remember stuff. You take a familiar building or neighborhood and vividly imagine what you want to remember at different places within it. To retrieve the memories, you mentally visit each place.

This is an ancient and famous method. I knew about it but had not realized until I read the article that it sheds light on my discovery that treadmill walking makes learning Chinese pleasant. (A commenter named Tom also noticed the connection.) Foer gives the obvious evolutionary explanation for why the memory palace method works so well: long ago, we needed to remember where to find important stuff (water, food, special plants, useful materials). So we evolved a memory system well-suited for doing so.

Less obvious is another evolutionary idea: why stop there? It’s a system. When you design a car for a certain sort of driving, you don’t stop with the engine. You adjust the drive train, the tires, and so on. If evolution shaped our brains for a certain sort of data (things in places), surely it also shaped our brains to collect that data. Pointless to design a car no one drives.

Two more changes would help make use of the system:

1. Hedonic. Make it pleasant to fill the system with data. This is what I noticed — dry knowledge (such as the order of cards in a deck) became pleasant to learn. Long ago, the hedonic change I noticed would have pushed people to walk in new places rather than old ones.

2. Efficiency.  Make learning more efficient (= more learning per unit time). Several confounded comparisons point in this direction. For example, I found that 15 minutes studying flashcards while riding the subway was a lot less help than spending 15 minutes while walking on my treadmill. Of course there are many differences between the two situations. Likewise, using Anki is working much better now than in the past, when I used it sitting down. I will try to study this more carefully.

Years ago, evolutionary explanations such as these were mocked as “just so stories” by prominent scientists, such as Stephen Jay Gould, Noam Chomsky, and Richard Lewontin. It’s now clear they were wrong.