Drink to Forget

When I'm trying a beer for the first time (or a film, album, game) I want to know as little as possible about it beforehand, so that I can decide if it's good without being influenced by whatever I've read. Sometimes I look it up on a review site to see if there's a general consensus on its goodness, but I should probably stop doing that. It's important to form my own opinion, and I don't like the notion that my taste is shaped mostly by what others have said. There are at least three things that make this really hard.

• The placebo effect: where outside forces convince you a certain thing will happen, and then when it doesn't you still tell yourself that it did

• Confirmation bias: where you want something specific to happen, so you seek out information that agrees with you and ignore information that contradicts you

• Echo chambers: where a cluster of people all say the same things, constantly reinforcing the belief that those things are true even if they're not

People like to think they have their own opinions, but they're all affected by these three things. If you realize this, you still probably don't know the full extent to which these things shape your opinions. So I like to approach new beers knowing full well that this stuff affects me, and simply seeing a positive review on a beer site is going to skew my opinion. For that matter, having tasted anything at all will skew my opinion... humans can't assign absolute value and can only decide how good something is in relation to something else. Nothing gets an objective, untainted review. 

One question I had when thinking about this: if everyone is susceptible to the bullet points above, and everyone is going to rate a beer (or album, etc) in relation to something else, why try to escape the placebo effect? What is the point of trying to rate something objectively when no one can possibly accomplish that, and when everyone is going to have a past experience that skews their opinion?

The main reason I attempt it is that I want to feel like I have original thoughts. Surely being aware of the existence of the placebo effect, confirmation bias, echo chambers, and the impossibility of being totally objective is some kind of advantage. The Dunning-Kruger effect says that anyone that thinks they may be incompetent, merely by having such a thought, is getting closer to competence. If you know that you're influenced by outside forces to a huge extent, you're less controlled by those forces than someone who has no clue.

Maybe I'm less prone to these issues since I'm aware of them, but isn't it futile to attempt escape? I don't think so, because there's one surefire way to dodge the trap of hearing something about a beer and being affected by that when you try it: being the first person to taste it... being the brewer. Anybody that makes stuff is familiar with the doubt, pessimism, and punishing self-imposed standards that come with submitting your work to public scrutiny. The brewers are probably under a reverse placebo effect where they think everything is worse than it actually is because they expect it not to live up to their vision.

Are there any inherently good beers, since everyone's opinion is the result of everyone else's opinion? Well no, because again, we can't evaluate anything unless it's in relation to something else. But imagining the brewer's first taste made me think the first person to experience something gets the best chance at objectivity. So pretend you're the first person ever tasting it... or give yourself the reverse placebo effect by assuming that no one knows what they're talking about and whatever you heard about the beer is probably wrong. This doubting attitude helps you to decide on your own if an over-hyped product is really any good, or if a low rated one is enduring unfair bias. In the scientific community this is called skepticism. It will improve your beer tasting, with the minor bonus of making you better at critical thinking. Of course that skill will be shot after enough beer.

Mandeville Beer Garden, my favorite joint in Sarasota