6 ms·

It's like believing in the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny, but for adults. What other manufactured fairy tales have huge quantities of humans swallowed hook l

It's like believing in the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny, but for adults. What other manufactured fairy tales have huge quantities of humans swallowed hook line and sinker?

salgernon 14y ago
Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Shintoism etc.
blaireaug 14y ago
Gilette. During WW2, they didn't have anyone to sell their products to, so they started marketing shaving to women. Before this, a woman shaving was akin to claiming yourself to be a prostitute. Now, it's a cultural norm for women to shave...all because of manufactured desire.
- eli 14y ago
  This sounds apocryphal. Women were shaving their armpits in the 1920s.
  - blaireaug 14y ago
    Sorry, WW1. I get those two mixed up all the time. And yeah, actually, it may be apocryphal, but here's why I believe it to be true. [1]http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/625/who-decided-women-should-shave-their-legs-and-underarms http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/625/who-decided-wom... "The gist of the article is that U.S. women were browbeaten into shaving underarm hair by a sustained marketing assault that began in 1915. (Leg hair came later.) The aim of what Hope calls the Great Underarm Campaign was to inform American womanhood of a problem that till then it didn't know it had, namely unsightly underarm hair." [2]http://history.barnard.edu/sites/default/files/inline/kirstenhansenthesis.pdf http://history.barnard.edu/sites/default/files/inline/kirste... "In July of 1915, the first Gillette razor for women came on the market. But where Gillette had responded to a clear void in the men’s hair removal market, he now faced the dilemma of promoting to a market that did not yet exist. Hence Gillette was responsible for introducing to American women the revolutionary concept of shaving." [3]http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1542-734X.1982.0501_93.x/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1542-734X.1982....
    - alexsb92 14y ago
      Though not shaving, women and men had been removing bodily hair with a variety of creams/razors way before WW1.
angersock 14y ago
Ruby on Rails. :) (I kid, I kid... we're actually a Rails shop ourselves)
jaggederest 14y ago
Wine. Wine prices are based mostly on arbitrary criteria, not on actual quality. If you blind taste test wines, it looks like there's nearly no correlation between price and quality above $5-$10 a bottle.
- triplesec 14y ago
  Up to a point. The correlation is not good, and I've had some horredous expensive wines, but for a weak-medium price-quality correlation I'd say the cut off is more like $50 or so, after which it gets a lot weaker! This is because there are better wines, but you can't tell the nuances until you hone your palate... practise a lot! It's just as a professional skier gets more use out of the nuances of his or her skis for greater performance, so does a mindful and interested drinker (aesthete?) of wines, beers, or eater of good cheese for that matter, find more depth in the aesthetics because of the attention to the process over time. Now, there is a lot of bull inovlved in some wine places, but don't commit the baby and bathwater fallacy by saying it's all rubbish!
  - TeMPOraL 14y ago
    > This is because there are better wines, but you can't tell the nuances until you hone your palate... practice a lot! How do you know that after "honing your palate" you you'll calibrate your sense of taste to actual quality of wine, rather than to whatever the difference is between more and less expensive ones? People can learn to see any kind of patterns if they try hard enough, but that doesn't mean those patterns are in any way useful or relevant.
    - triplesec 14y ago
      It happens in a similar way to anything: you see what works, and create sense with symbols and consistent repetition as in any semantic field. Why is one burger better than another, or one steak? I can't say we have the science yet for exact measurement, but it may come. Sometimes it's obvious: cheap industrial plastic supermarket cheddar really is full of less decent chemicals for your senses than pricier artisan ones like Humboldt Fog. That can be demonstrated, and I suspect in the future more will be demonstrable with wine. So far you can realise why that cheap Zin blend from Lodi doesn't really do it for you with the most obvious of measurements: yield! They get even 10 tons per acre there rather than 1-3 tons in a high-quality vineyard. Fewer nutrients and flavours to go around, and more water, sugar and untasty components have to flesh it out (poor overburdened vines, eh!) that's just the first variable: I know some more, but there are good soil scientists who can tell you a lot about all of the other variables too. Feel free to ping me for pointers, as I don't have time to write about it now. I frequently prefer cheaper wines to more expensive ones, and agree price-quality correlation is not good, depending on what your wine source is, but at the same time you're going to have to find good data to demonstrate no correlation: for price is one (flawed but still input-data-rich) indicator! We do fool ourselves with patterns, but also we do not. AFAIK there is not enough research to rove it either way, but qualitative methods can point us to better theories to work with until we have good enough constructs for quantitative analysis for our minds' perceptions.
epsylon 14y ago
"Audiophile" gear.

It's like believing in the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny, but for adults. What other manufactured fairy tales have huge quantities of humans swallowed hook line and sinker?

salgernon 14y ago

Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Shintoism etc.

blaireaug 14y ago

Gilette. During WW2, they didn't have anyone to sell their products to, so they started marketing shaving to women. Before this, a woman shaving was akin to claiming yourself to be a prostitute. Now, it's a cultural norm for women to shave...all because of manufactured desire.

eli 14y ago
This sounds apocryphal. Women were shaving their armpits in the 1920s.
- blaireaug 14y ago
  Sorry, WW1. I get those two mixed up all the time. And yeah, actually, it may be apocryphal, but here's why I believe it to be true. [1]http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/625/who-decided-women-should-shave-their-legs-and-underarms http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/625/who-decided-wom... "The gist of the article is that U.S. women were browbeaten into shaving underarm hair by a sustained marketing assault that began in 1915. (Leg hair came later.) The aim of what Hope calls the Great Underarm Campaign was to inform American womanhood of a problem that till then it didn't know it had, namely unsightly underarm hair." [2]http://history.barnard.edu/sites/default/files/inline/kirstenhansenthesis.pdf http://history.barnard.edu/sites/default/files/inline/kirste... "In July of 1915, the first Gillette razor for women came on the market. But where Gillette had responded to a clear void in the men’s hair removal market, he now faced the dilemma of promoting to a market that did not yet exist. Hence Gillette was responsible for introducing to American women the revolutionary concept of shaving." [3]http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1542-734X.1982.0501_93.x/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1542-734X.1982....
  - alexsb92 14y ago
    Though not shaving, women and men had been removing bodily hair with a variety of creams/razors way before WW1.

angersock 14y ago

Ruby on Rails. :) (I kid, I kid... we're actually a Rails shop ourselves)

jaggederest 14y ago

Wine. Wine prices are based mostly on arbitrary criteria, not on actual quality. If you blind taste test wines, it looks like there's nearly no correlation between price and quality above $5-$10 a bottle.

triplesec 14y ago
Up to a point. The correlation is not good, and I've had some horredous expensive wines, but for a weak-medium price-quality correlation I'd say the cut off is more like $50 or so, after which it gets a lot weaker! This is because there are better wines, but you can't tell the nuances until you hone your palate... practise a lot! It's just as a professional skier gets more use out of the nuances of his or her skis for greater performance, so does a mindful and interested drinker (aesthete?) of wines, beers, or eater of good cheese for that matter, find more depth in the aesthetics because of the attention to the process over time. Now, there is a lot of bull inovlved in some wine places, but don't commit the baby and bathwater fallacy by saying it's all rubbish!
- TeMPOraL 14y ago
  > This is because there are better wines, but you can't tell the nuances until you hone your palate... practice a lot! How do you know that after "honing your palate" you you'll calibrate your sense of taste to actual quality of wine, rather than to whatever the difference is between more and less expensive ones? People can learn to see any kind of patterns if they try hard enough, but that doesn't mean those patterns are in any way useful or relevant.
  - triplesec 14y ago
    It happens in a similar way to anything: you see what works, and create sense with symbols and consistent repetition as in any semantic field. Why is one burger better than another, or one steak? I can't say we have the science yet for exact measurement, but it may come. Sometimes it's obvious: cheap industrial plastic supermarket cheddar really is full of less decent chemicals for your senses than pricier artisan ones like Humboldt Fog. That can be demonstrated, and I suspect in the future more will be demonstrable with wine. So far you can realise why that cheap Zin blend from Lodi doesn't really do it for you with the most obvious of measurements: yield! They get even 10 tons per acre there rather than 1-3 tons in a high-quality vineyard. Fewer nutrients and flavours to go around, and more water, sugar and untasty components have to flesh it out (poor overburdened vines, eh!) that's just the first variable: I know some more, but there are good soil scientists who can tell you a lot about all of the other variables too. Feel free to ping me for pointers, as I don't have time to write about it now. I frequently prefer cheaper wines to more expensive ones, and agree price-quality correlation is not good, depending on what your wine source is, but at the same time you're going to have to find good data to demonstrate no correlation: for price is one (flawed but still input-data-rich) indicator! We do fool ourselves with patterns, but also we do not. AFAIK there is not enough research to rove it either way, but qualitative methods can point us to better theories to work with until we have good enough constructs for quantitative analysis for our minds' perceptions.

epsylon 14y ago

"Audiophile" gear.