4 ms·

Why was Soma so hard to distinguish from Bottled? Article seems to gloss over this point?

by zaroth 10y ago

celticninja 10y ago
It wasn't and I think that's the point. Essentially soma was hard to distinguish from tap water, which OP had said tasted chlorinated, given that soma was supposed to filter and improve tap water it was failing to meet its stated objective.
- casion 10y ago
  He says he can differentiate tap v bottled. He also says he can _not_ differentiate tap v soma. So the difference between soma and bottled should be obvious (or there is some other factor in play), but it's clearly not. Obviously taste is not commutative, but there's something fishy here regardless.
  - mattkrause 10y ago
    For further reading: The Difference Between “Significant” and “Not Significant” is not Itself Statistically Significant (Gelman and Sterns, 2006): http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/signif4.pdf http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/sign...
- vmarsy 10y ago
  gp is right, there was 8/23 wrong classifications of "Bottled vs Soma" vs. 10/23 wrong classifications of "Tap vs Soma" In Figure 6 , the author shows there's no statistically significant difference between "Bottled vs Soma" So like he wrote : > Soma filtered water performed the worst, having a taste statistically indistinguishable from tap water I could write using the same data: Soma filtered water performed the best, having a taste statistically indistinguishable from bottled water
casion 10y ago
This bothered me a lot too. If he can tell the difference between 'tap v bottled' but not 'tap vs soma'... then 'soma vs bottled' would intuitively have a different result if his conclusion is 100% correct. I suspect there's more to it, but the author was focusing on winning an argument so... I guess that killed the curiosity required to dig further for a more thorough conclusion.

4 ms·

Why was Soma so hard to distinguish from Bottled? Article seems to gloss over this point?

by zaroth 10y ago

Why was Soma so hard to distinguish from Bottled? Article seems to gloss over this point?

celticninja 10y ago
It wasn't and I think that's the point. Essentially soma was hard to distinguish from tap water, which OP had said tasted chlorinated, given that soma was supposed to filter and improve tap water it was failing to meet its stated objective.
- casion 10y ago
  He says he can differentiate tap v bottled. He also says he can _not_ differentiate tap v soma. So the difference between soma and bottled should be obvious (or there is some other factor in play), but it's clearly not. Obviously taste is not commutative, but there's something fishy here regardless.
  - mattkrause 10y ago
    For further reading: The Difference Between “Significant” and “Not Significant” is not Itself Statistically Significant (Gelman and Sterns, 2006): http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/signif4.pdf http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/sign...
- vmarsy 10y ago
  gp is right, there was 8/23 wrong classifications of "Bottled vs Soma" vs. 10/23 wrong classifications of "Tap vs Soma" In Figure 6 , the author shows there's no statistically significant difference between "Bottled vs Soma" So like he wrote : > Soma filtered water performed the worst, having a taste statistically indistinguishable from tap water I could write using the same data: Soma filtered water performed the best, having a taste statistically indistinguishable from bottled water
casion 10y ago
This bothered me a lot too. If he can tell the difference between 'tap v bottled' but not 'tap vs soma'... then 'soma vs bottled' would intuitively have a different result if his conclusion is 100% correct. I suspect there's more to it, but the author was focusing on winning an argument so... I guess that killed the curiosity required to dig further for a more thorough conclusion.