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There was at least one similar, and slightly more scientific test done on this. In this version, white wine was dyed red with food coloring. And nobody could

There was at least one similar, and slightly more scientific test done on this. In this version, white wine was dyed red with food coloring. And nobody could tell. https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infamous_study_on_wine_tasting.html https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infam...

mratzloff 8y ago
The differences are substantive. In the test you linked, expectation determines interpretation, similar to how people interpret cheap versus expensive bottles differently. In the latter, removing flavor means people can't judge flavor. In one, additional information yields a different, directed result; in the other, less information yields random results.
cycrutchfield 8y ago
That doesn't prove anything other than intentionally distorting the features that the taster receives causes incorrect classification results. If you hand a sommelier a glass of red wine and say that it's from South Africa but it's actually from Australia, they are going to be way off in their estimations. It's not because there is no discernible difference, it's because the priors are completely shifted when you give the wrong information.
- gbrown 8y ago
  In those studies, however, raters profess great confidence, and positively identify the hallmarks of red wine in white wine. Sure, it shifts their priors, but unlike a Bayesian model there's no obvious deviation between the prior and the professed posterior.
  - cycrutchfield 8y ago
    That may be the case, but if you have ever trained a classifier you know that expecting a model to generalize when given data that it's never seen before is not something you should usually expect. It doesn't mean that there is no discernible difference between the two classes, just that the model has overfit to the narrow subset of data and things that were previously immutable (e.g. the color of the wine) were not actually immutable.
    - gbrown 8y ago
      Point taken, but I really do think that's another way of saying people really aren't all that good at tasting wine.
- SmirkingRevenge 8y ago
  That's exactly it, though. What studies like this indicate, is that the discernible differences in wine are generally overwhelmed by such distorting features. And those features don't have much to do with our tastebuds or features of the wine itself. (And this also extends to food & drink as a whole, to some degree) Romantic vineyard lore... signaling ones status by drinking the expensive stuff... signaling ones refinement by having tastes that align with the experts... these are also all distorting features that overwhelm discernible differences in wine. How well a wine taste to most, tends to be fixed on those types of things, rather than the actual wine.
- SilasX 8y ago
  That doesn't prove anything other than making it popular to admire the Emperor's clothes causes incorrect classification results. If you tell a population that only the best people can see how great the Emperor's clothes are, they're going be way off in noticing that he's naked. Yeah, that's the point. In any real, coherent domain, you can tell when someone's lying because your model is coherent and based on something real. When your model is 99% expectation, then it can be easily fooled. That doesn't means your model was good; it means your domain is a fraud. I think some people take a different lesson from the parable of the Emperor's New Clothes.
  - cycrutchfield 8y ago
    Think of it this way. Our senses of taste and smell are very weak feature extractors. The way that trained sommeliers have been taught to distinguish wine given the presence of these weak features is somewhat like a deep decision tree. They ask a series of questions about what they have sensed from the wine that allow them to narrow in on a small set of possibilities, winnowing out wrong answers at each step. They have trained for hundreds or thousands of hours of tasting wine and building up this decision tree through many observations. If you know how deep decision trees work, you know that they overfit very strongly to the training data. Notably, if you intentionally distort the data that you provide as input, by adding dye to turn white wine red, or by saying that the wine is from South Africa but it's actually from Australia, you cause their decision tree process to go down the entirely wrong path and produce a completely incorrect result. The model does not generalize well. This is not at all how we would train a wine classifier if we were to design one from scratch, but our brains are not really capable of emulating a logistic regression model or an artificial neural network (ironically). They function much better with a discrete process like a decision tree. I hope that helps you understand. I know it's much more satisfying to be contrarian and rail against the presumptuous wine snobs who claim to see the Emperor's clothes, but then again it's always easier to be cynical about anything you don't appreciate or understand.
    - SilasX 8y ago
      I understand the concept of deep decision trees. But if you have to do that much effort even to distinguish them, maybe the distinction is not that important, and the contempt for the snobbery is justified?

mratzloff 8y ago

The differences are substantive. In the test you linked, expectation determines interpretation, similar to how people interpret cheap versus expensive bottles differently. In the latter, removing flavor means people can't judge flavor. In one, additional information yields a different, directed result; in the other, less information yields random results.

cycrutchfield 8y ago

That doesn't prove anything other than intentionally distorting the features that the taster receives causes incorrect classification results. If you hand a sommelier a glass of red wine and say that it's from South Africa but it's actually from Australia, they are going to be way off in their estimations. It's not because there is no discernible difference, it's because the priors are completely shifted when you give the wrong information.

gbrown 8y ago
In those studies, however, raters profess great confidence, and positively identify the hallmarks of red wine in white wine. Sure, it shifts their priors, but unlike a Bayesian model there's no obvious deviation between the prior and the professed posterior.
- cycrutchfield 8y ago
  That may be the case, but if you have ever trained a classifier you know that expecting a model to generalize when given data that it's never seen before is not something you should usually expect. It doesn't mean that there is no discernible difference between the two classes, just that the model has overfit to the narrow subset of data and things that were previously immutable (e.g. the color of the wine) were not actually immutable.
  - gbrown 8y ago
    Point taken, but I really do think that's another way of saying people really aren't all that good at tasting wine.
SmirkingRevenge 8y ago
That's exactly it, though. What studies like this indicate, is that the discernible differences in wine are generally overwhelmed by such distorting features. And those features don't have much to do with our tastebuds or features of the wine itself. (And this also extends to food & drink as a whole, to some degree) Romantic vineyard lore... signaling ones status by drinking the expensive stuff... signaling ones refinement by having tastes that align with the experts... these are also all distorting features that overwhelm discernible differences in wine. How well a wine taste to most, tends to be fixed on those types of things, rather than the actual wine.
SilasX 8y ago
That doesn't prove anything other than making it popular to admire the Emperor's clothes causes incorrect classification results. If you tell a population that only the best people can see how great the Emperor's clothes are, they're going be way off in noticing that he's naked. Yeah, that's the point. In any real, coherent domain, you can tell when someone's lying because your model is coherent and based on something real. When your model is 99% expectation, then it can be easily fooled. That doesn't means your model was good; it means your domain is a fraud. I think some people take a different lesson from the parable of the Emperor's New Clothes.
- cycrutchfield 8y ago
  Think of it this way. Our senses of taste and smell are very weak feature extractors. The way that trained sommeliers have been taught to distinguish wine given the presence of these weak features is somewhat like a deep decision tree. They ask a series of questions about what they have sensed from the wine that allow them to narrow in on a small set of possibilities, winnowing out wrong answers at each step. They have trained for hundreds or thousands of hours of tasting wine and building up this decision tree through many observations. If you know how deep decision trees work, you know that they overfit very strongly to the training data. Notably, if you intentionally distort the data that you provide as input, by adding dye to turn white wine red, or by saying that the wine is from South Africa but it's actually from Australia, you cause their decision tree process to go down the entirely wrong path and produce a completely incorrect result. The model does not generalize well. This is not at all how we would train a wine classifier if we were to design one from scratch, but our brains are not really capable of emulating a logistic regression model or an artificial neural network (ironically). They function much better with a discrete process like a decision tree. I hope that helps you understand. I know it's much more satisfying to be contrarian and rail against the presumptuous wine snobs who claim to see the Emperor's clothes, but then again it's always easier to be cynical about anything you don't appreciate or understand.
  - SilasX 8y ago
    I understand the concept of deep decision trees. But if you have to do that much effort even to distinguish them, maybe the distinction is not that important, and the contempt for the snobbery is justified?