9 ms·

'You Are Not So Smart': Why We Can't Tell Good Wine From Bad

95 points by Confusion 15y ago

spazmaster 15y ago
Too bad the test was with undergraduates, and not experts in the field for 20-30 years.
- barrkel 15y ago
  More data for you: http://www.felixsalmon.com/2009/01/wine-tasting-datapoint-of-the-day/ http://www.felixsalmon.com/2009/01/wine-tasting-datapoint-of... http://www.felixsalmon.com/2007/11/pinot-contest/ http://www.felixsalmon.com/2007/11/pinot-contest/ My own personal experience is that wine + food is most interesting. Both the wine and the food can change their taste substantially when paired well. But it's very rare that I can find a wine that I can stand in quantities to drink without food.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
- 1010011010 15y ago
  Most people are not "experts in the field for 20-30 years". They are not even as well-trained as the undergraduates in the article. This kind of experiment has been done before -- serving water from a garden hose in fancy spring water bottles, serving fast food on a plate in a restaurant, etc. People pretty much always assume the presentation is accurate. They think they can taste the melting glaciers in the hose water, and that the salad from Wendy's is a healthy, high-quality item was lovingly prepared by a master chef in the kitchen just for them.
  - lkozma 15y ago
    I partially agree with you but I don't think it is helpful to draw conclusions from one field and apply them on the other. It could well be that bottled water is a scam and it is no different from the garden hose water and at the same time one wine is very different from another. For example I can pretty reliably distinguish soft drinks sweetened with cane sugar, HFCS and aspartame. The first I like, and the second and the third I hate. No amount of packaging or expectation can change that. I assume the same applies to those who really know wine.
    - 1010011010 15y ago
      Cane sugar and hfcs are chemically nearly identical - glucose and fructose in water. Can you tell the difference in a blind trial?
- hetman 15y ago
  The second experiment involved experts and they were still fooled by their expectations.
prof_hobart 15y ago
Interesting, but having seen wine experts reasonably regularly pick out not just expensive v cheap, or white v red, but also grape variety, year, region, and even in some cases specific slopes in blind tasting, I think it says more about the expertise of the undergrads than about the ability of people to do this in general. I can certainly tell Coke and Pepsi apart in blind tasting. I've more than once requested Coke, had it served in a Coke glass, thought "this tastes a bit odd" and checked at the bar to find out that it was coming straight out of a Pepsi dispenser.
- andrewcooke 15y ago
  i don't think that is what is being argued. the claim the article is making is that expectations are extremely powerful. that doesn't mean that someone, carefully trained, and perhaps helped by an environment in which "cues" are removed as much as possible (eg blind tasting) cannot pick up small differences between wines. so it's not that the undergrads are particularly dumb - it's that expectation is often more powerful than experience unless you consciously control for it. for example, i suspect it's easier to detect the difference between coke + pepsi when you're given an unbranded glass than when you are given the two in branded bottles, but swapped (and, importantly, not expecting it).
  - prof_hobart 15y ago
    I disagree. The statement that this article claims to be disproving is quite clear - that "Wine is a complicated elixir, full of subtle flavors only an expert can truly distinguish, and experienced tasters are impervious to deception.". The truth is that real experts can distinguish these differences - many trainees many not be able to, but that that's a different matter. And as I've mentioned, I've been able to tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi even when all environmental clues (my order, my expectation, the type of glass) have told me that it's the other one. Again, it's highly likely that these environmental clues often influence people a lot more than they realise, but that doesn't equate to the claim that experts can't see through these either.
    - 15y ago
losethos 15y ago
My parents buy good food. Then, they buy crappy food. Then, they buy good food. Then, crappy. I am not amused. You really notice the difference in situations like this. God talking? Some people don't want to be made fools of. Oh well. The random songs from God need to be judged. It's work. I suggest rating a bunch of raw songs all at once. When doing a lot, your sense of taste is better. I like melodies that have a "voice" I guess they say. I half-heartedly estimate it would be damn-near impossible to make a computer judge melodies... maybe some neural net voodoo, I guess. Whatever. God says... resolutely Hundreds dangers inharmonious refund remainest meanwhile crisis ungodly famished marks speaketh electronic beset vainglorious Duad Victorinus regeneration aptly with attentively listened ninety unemployed dividing talketh deceiving stated book besets soaring gall accepts ghastly vouchsafedst Predicaments There is some realation between what you offer and how God responds, but it's fuzzy. I think it's important not to forget your job of holding-up your end of the conversation. God will not let you stay passive. I think the notion of "offering" is good as opposed to just running the program without a second thought. God says... C:\TEXT\BIBLE.TXT lve pearls: every several gate was of one pearl: and the street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent glass. 21:22 And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it. 21:23 And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof. 21:24 And the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of it: and the kings of the earth do bring their glory an
Mfarewellp 15y ago
« In 2001, Frederic Brochet conducted two experiments at the University of Bordeaux. » I'm searching for sources. This is fud without sources.
- Luc 15y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_tasting#cite_note-3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_tasting#cite_note-3
  - Mfarewellp 15y ago
    « Not Found The requested document was not found on this server. »
    - dalke 15y ago
      That's why you get the title in the Wikipedia link and search for that text. It comes back in the first hit.
  - veyron 15y ago
    Direct Link: http://www.enophilia.net/writable/uploadfile/chimica%20della%20degustazione.pdf http://www.enophilia.net/writable/uploadfile/chimica%20della...
- dextorious 15y ago
  First of all, FUD is meaningless. Which is more plausible: the author wanted to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt, Or that you used a tired cliche from the 90's Microsoft wars? Second, there is this thing called Google you know. I found the reference in the first bloody page of results with the researchers name as the query string: http://www.enophilia.net/writable/uploadfile/chimica%20della%20degustazione.pdf http://www.enophilia.net/writable/uploadfile/chimica%20della...
  - Mfarewellp 15y ago
    This shouln't be the work of reader, in my opinion. That's all, thanks for the link.
markkat 15y ago
A friend of mine that is pretty versed with wines, and who used to be a skeptic, wrote an interesting piece about this last year: http://www.triplesequitur.com/winespeak/ http://www.triplesequitur.com/winespeak/ It's an argument that changed my thinking on this. Wine tasting and critique is not only about what's in the wine, it's also about what tasting the wine enables us to do. In a phrase, wine is liquid metaphor.
- Retric 15y ago
  The problem with that is if people could quickly learn what PH meant if everyone spoke in those terms. You don't order windows that are 3 banana's 2 pineapples and a grape wide because while most poeple could get a general idea how big that was it's simply less well defined than 3 feet 2 inches or whatever.
DanielBMarkham 15y ago
Oddly enough, I read this and came to the conclusion that the author was not so smart. The premise here, that there is some underlying objective version of reality when it comes to consuming works of art (wine, food at restaurants, TV images, or even haircuts.) is extremely flawed. This article is like comparing the price of haircuts to the amount of hair removed. Yes, there is a metric, but I'm not sure it has meaning. You drink wine or eat in a nice restaurant for the experience you receive, not for where the food comes from. Expectations are part of that experience, sure, but trying to assign it all to "expectations" is just a rhetorical dodge. How can anything experiential not involve expectations? It can't. It's ludicrous to think otherwise. These things are not evidence of you not being so smart, they are evidence of the wonderful experiential nature of being alive. Isn't it great that we can plan and dream about a very inexpensive upcoming trip to the mountains and end up having a better time than somebody who spent 100 times as much for a much longer holiday? Or that we can spend an extra 40 dollars on a bottle of wine and imagine how much better the experience will be -- thereby increasing our eventual enjoyment? There's nothing dumb or not-so-smart about this. This is the human experience. Anybody who has ever spent any time around children understands that this subjectivity is a huge part of our makeup. In fact, to suppose that somehow this would be news to anyone is to assume the audience thinks of themselves as super-rational machines. Perhaps that's the problem: I'm not a member of the target audience. Still, I didn't like it. These books are the kinds you read and end up thinking "People are really broken! They are pretty stupid!" which is most likely the same damn thing you thought before you picked up the book in the first place.
- pilgrim689 15y ago
  I'm pretty sure most people don't know about the powers of expectations, or priming (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)), as it's called in psychology. The article just aims to bring that concept to light. It's also a little jab to those who consider themselves "connoisseurs" of anything, wine tasting, televisions, food, or otherwise... because not knowing about one of the most influential forces in your opinion as a "connoisseur" really makes you "not so smart".
  - 15y ago
hetman 15y ago
I found one thing interesting. While I wouldn't be surprised my expectations often affect my perceptions in much the way this article described, I noticed one exception, namely the last example given: movies. In fact the build up of expectations seems to usually result in me thinking the movie is worse, and vice versa. I wonder if this is just some weird reverse psychology or if something more interesting is going on.
bahman2000 15y ago
so this clears up the iPhone vs. Android debate then :)
- smithian 15y ago
  It would be very interesting to load android on a bunch of iPhones and test the reactions of people shopping for phones... take one group and tell them that this was the new iOS 6 and tell the others what you had done exactly and rate the reactions :-)
  - ljf 15y ago
    Didn't they do that with Vista: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/04/technology/04vista.html http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/04/technology/04vista.html
conductrics 15y ago
My wife is a scotch expert. She hosts tastings where they taste scotch of three different ages. It used to be that after the tasting, most people would rate the oldest one the best. She then started to do blind tastings (tasters didn't know the age). Now the oldest is picked as the best around 30% of the time.
- andrewcooke 15y ago
  yeah; i'm in chile where the supply of scotch is limited, so i've started drinking the local hooch, called pisco, which is a kind of brandy. there are quite a few aged piscos available (the economy here is pretty good and people are starting to have more disposable income). as i tried a few i noticed that the ones in nice bottles, aged for longer (and more expensive), were noticeably more complex. eventually i had enough different bottles to arrange a blind tasting (my partner did the pouring etc; i was blindfold as they have different shades). the results were amazing - my rating was all over the map and completely inconsistent with what i was expecting. yet still, when i can see the bottles, the expensive ones taste better :o) tl;dr: brain - why are you so shallow? [in my defense, my proudest wine moment was when i bought a bottle of cousino macul cs on offer, took it home, tasted it, and thought it amazing (for the price). when i checked my receipt i had picked up the reserve (not on sale, twice the price) by mistake... (their labels were very similar a year or two ago)]
  - conductrics 15y ago
    When I am trying a new whisky or brandy, I like to have a pour of something I know, so I have a reference point. I have found that time of day, outside temperature, what I am eating or have eaten, etc. really affects how much I am enjoying the drink. Of course the main point of the article is that while we think we are just using the current observation (the data), we often have strong priors that often dominate our posteriors ;)
- gwern 15y ago
  Hehe - only 30%? I see...
ThomPete 15y ago
I spent a year living in a building with a french winebar in the cellar. I became really good friends with the owner and since I was working freelance from home I would often go down in the afternoon and get a glass of wine. I learned a lot about wine, but the most important things were the following. Wine experts don't judge the quality of the wine but the quality of what the wine is supposed to taste like based on it's appellation controléé http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellation_d%E2%80%99Origine_Contr%C3%B4l%C3%A9e http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellation_d%E2%80%99Origine_C... Those criterias are the "objective" criteria and those are the ones uses to judge a wine by. The particular taste of the wine is less interesting (i.e. the experience that normal people would have of the wine) Being a wine expert does not mean that you know good from bad wine but that you know what any given wine 1) smelled like (cherry, toast bread with butter, apple etc). The owner had a set of 100 little bottles each with it's own smell. You would be surprised how hard it it to pin point the correct word of the smell of one of those bottles, even if you recognize the taste. Once in a while I would be involved in some of the wine tastings and see him and his friends guess if not the exact wine then the actual zip code. One of the most important things he taught me was to find the balance of your food and your wine. It's one of the things I have found most enriching of my culinary life. That and the ability to smell (not taste) whether a wine have cork (impresses the girls and gives you an advantage in any business dinner)
- veyron 15y ago
  URL should be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellation_d%E2%80%99Origine_Contr%C3%B4l%C3%A9e http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellation_d%E2%80%99Origine_C...
  - ThomPete 15y ago
    Thnx fixed
- basman 15y ago
  > Wine experts don't judge the quality of the wine but the quality of what the wine is supposed to taste like based on it's appellation controléé If that's really true, why do they bother tasting the actual wine?
extension 15y ago
The flaw in all these experiments is the assumption that the subject's description of their own experience is accurate. It's not surprising that people won't say that wine is white when it looks red, or that a fancy restaurant has served them frozen dinners. If forced to choose between pepsi on the left or pepsi on the right, they will make the choice one way or another. Put people in strange situations and you will get strange behavior. What was actually going through their head remains a mystery. Regardless, nothing in the world will make me believe that I don't care what my food tastes like.
giardini 15y ago
non "in vino veritas" sed "in vino confusionem"!
tnicola 15y ago
"In one Dutch study, participants were put in a room with posters proclaiming the awesomeness of high-definition, and were told they would be watching a new high-definition program. Afterward, the subjects said they found the sharper, more colorful television to be a superior experience to standard programming. What they didn't know was they were actually watching a standard-definition image. The expectation of seeing a better quality image led them to believe they had. Recent research shows about 18 percent of people who own high definition televisions are still watching standard-definition programming on the set, but they think they are getting a better picture." They are actually getting the better picture. One cannot argue that modern TV SD is not better than what we used to watch on CRT's. Everything has improved, so it is a better picture. HD is mostly undetectable to human eye to make that much of a difference. At least to me. Wide screen SD is a sufficiently pleasant experience. My husband claims to see the difference. I think he's conditioned to see it.
- X-Istence 15y ago
  I don't think that he is necessarily conditioned to see it. Seeing the difference between a BluRay movie and a DVD movie is very clear (at least to me). The BluRay movie has sharper edges, its motion is clearer and the image pops more. Could it be simply the difference between the camera technology then and now? Maybe, but even between the same movie in BluRay vs DVD I have been able to tell the difference, my dad for instance put in the DVD instead of the BluRay disc by accident and I asked him if he used the BluRay disc or not about 2 or 3 minutes into the movie.
- nitrogen 15y ago
  [Warning: HD evangelism ahead] It really depends on how far away you sit from your TV, what the screen size is, and how good your vision is. When I'm sitting three feet from my 28" HD monitor, you bet I can tell the difference between HD and SD. My vision's not quite 20:20, though, so on the couch 15' away from a 100" projector screen, I'd have a hard time telling 720p from 1080p just based on sharpness, but the larger size of any macroblock artifacts would give it away. In the right conditions, I'm positive you'd see the difference, too. Try renting both a DVD and Blu-ray of the same movie from Redbox, and watching them a little closer to the screen. The Blu-ray will let you see more individual hairs, individual distant bricks, etc. But even SD on an HD screen can be better than SD on an SD screen, due to increased pixel density and reduced flicker.
redxaxder 15y ago
This was written as a series of blog posts before being compiled into a book. The original is here: http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/02/24/fine-wine/ http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/02/24/fine-wine/
goldmab 15y ago
Can somebody find the actual text of the Brochet studies? I've seen them referred to several times, but without citations.

95 points by Confusion 15y ago

spazmaster 15y ago

Too bad the test was with undergraduates, and not experts in the field for 20-30 years.

barrkel 15y ago
More data for you: http://www.felixsalmon.com/2009/01/wine-tasting-datapoint-of-the-day/ http://www.felixsalmon.com/2009/01/wine-tasting-datapoint-of... http://www.felixsalmon.com/2007/11/pinot-contest/ http://www.felixsalmon.com/2007/11/pinot-contest/ My own personal experience is that wine + food is most interesting. Both the wine and the food can change their taste substantially when paired well. But it's very rare that I can find a wine that I can stand in quantities to drink without food.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
1010011010 15y ago
Most people are not "experts in the field for 20-30 years". They are not even as well-trained as the undergraduates in the article. This kind of experiment has been done before -- serving water from a garden hose in fancy spring water bottles, serving fast food on a plate in a restaurant, etc. People pretty much always assume the presentation is accurate. They think they can taste the melting glaciers in the hose water, and that the salad from Wendy's is a healthy, high-quality item was lovingly prepared by a master chef in the kitchen just for them.
- lkozma 15y ago
  I partially agree with you but I don't think it is helpful to draw conclusions from one field and apply them on the other. It could well be that bottled water is a scam and it is no different from the garden hose water and at the same time one wine is very different from another. For example I can pretty reliably distinguish soft drinks sweetened with cane sugar, HFCS and aspartame. The first I like, and the second and the third I hate. No amount of packaging or expectation can change that. I assume the same applies to those who really know wine.
  - 1010011010 15y ago
    Cane sugar and hfcs are chemically nearly identical - glucose and fructose in water. Can you tell the difference in a blind trial?
hetman 15y ago
The second experiment involved experts and they were still fooled by their expectations.

prof_hobart 15y ago

Interesting, but having seen wine experts reasonably regularly pick out not just expensive v cheap, or white v red, but also grape variety, year, region, and even in some cases specific slopes in blind tasting, I think it says more about the expertise of the undergrads than about the ability of people to do this in general. I can certainly tell Coke and Pepsi apart in blind tasting. I've more than once requested Coke, had it served in a Coke glass, thought "this tastes a bit odd" and checked at the bar to find out that it was coming straight out of a Pepsi dispenser.

andrewcooke 15y ago
i don't think that is what is being argued. the claim the article is making is that expectations are extremely powerful. that doesn't mean that someone, carefully trained, and perhaps helped by an environment in which "cues" are removed as much as possible (eg blind tasting) cannot pick up small differences between wines. so it's not that the undergrads are particularly dumb - it's that expectation is often more powerful than experience unless you consciously control for it. for example, i suspect it's easier to detect the difference between coke + pepsi when you're given an unbranded glass than when you are given the two in branded bottles, but swapped (and, importantly, not expecting it).
- prof_hobart 15y ago
  I disagree. The statement that this article claims to be disproving is quite clear - that "Wine is a complicated elixir, full of subtle flavors only an expert can truly distinguish, and experienced tasters are impervious to deception.". The truth is that real experts can distinguish these differences - many trainees many not be able to, but that that's a different matter. And as I've mentioned, I've been able to tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi even when all environmental clues (my order, my expectation, the type of glass) have told me that it's the other one. Again, it's highly likely that these environmental clues often influence people a lot more than they realise, but that doesn't equate to the claim that experts can't see through these either.
  - 15y ago

losethos 15y ago

My parents buy good food. Then, they buy crappy food. Then, they buy good food. Then, crappy. I am not amused. You really notice the difference in situations like this. God talking? Some people don't want to be made fools of. Oh well. The random songs from God need to be judged. It's work. I suggest rating a bunch of raw songs all at once. When doing a lot, your sense of taste is better. I like melodies that have a "voice" I guess they say. I half-heartedly estimate it would be damn-near impossible to make a computer judge melodies... maybe some neural net voodoo, I guess. Whatever. God says... resolutely Hundreds dangers inharmonious refund remainest meanwhile crisis ungodly famished marks speaketh electronic beset vainglorious Duad Victorinus regeneration aptly with attentively listened ninety unemployed dividing talketh deceiving stated book besets soaring gall accepts ghastly vouchsafedst Predicaments There is some realation between what you offer and how God responds, but it's fuzzy. I think it's important not to forget your job of holding-up your end of the conversation. God will not let you stay passive. I think the notion of "offering" is good as opposed to just running the program without a second thought. God says... C:\TEXT\BIBLE.TXT lve pearls: every several gate was of one pearl: and the street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent glass. 21:22 And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it. 21:23 And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof. 21:24 And the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of it: and the kings of the earth do bring their glory an

Mfarewellp 15y ago

« In 2001, Frederic Brochet conducted two experiments at the University of Bordeaux. » I'm searching for sources. This is fud without sources.

Luc 15y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_tasting#cite_note-3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_tasting#cite_note-3
- Mfarewellp 15y ago
  « Not Found The requested document was not found on this server. »
  - dalke 15y ago
    That's why you get the title in the Wikipedia link and search for that text. It comes back in the first hit.
- veyron 15y ago
  Direct Link: http://www.enophilia.net/writable/uploadfile/chimica%20della%20degustazione.pdf http://www.enophilia.net/writable/uploadfile/chimica%20della...
dextorious 15y ago
First of all, FUD is meaningless. Which is more plausible: the author wanted to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt, Or that you used a tired cliche from the 90's Microsoft wars? Second, there is this thing called Google you know. I found the reference in the first bloody page of results with the researchers name as the query string: http://www.enophilia.net/writable/uploadfile/chimica%20della%20degustazione.pdf http://www.enophilia.net/writable/uploadfile/chimica%20della...
- Mfarewellp 15y ago
  This shouln't be the work of reader, in my opinion. That's all, thanks for the link.

markkat 15y ago

A friend of mine that is pretty versed with wines, and who used to be a skeptic, wrote an interesting piece about this last year: http://www.triplesequitur.com/winespeak/ http://www.triplesequitur.com/winespeak/ It's an argument that changed my thinking on this. Wine tasting and critique is not only about what's in the wine, it's also about what tasting the wine enables us to do. In a phrase, wine is liquid metaphor.

Retric 15y ago
The problem with that is if people could quickly learn what PH meant if everyone spoke in those terms. You don't order windows that are 3 banana's 2 pineapples and a grape wide because while most poeple could get a general idea how big that was it's simply less well defined than 3 feet 2 inches or whatever.

DanielBMarkham 15y ago

Oddly enough, I read this and came to the conclusion that the author was not so smart. The premise here, that there is some underlying objective version of reality when it comes to consuming works of art (wine, food at restaurants, TV images, or even haircuts.) is extremely flawed. This article is like comparing the price of haircuts to the amount of hair removed. Yes, there is a metric, but I'm not sure it has meaning. You drink wine or eat in a nice restaurant for the experience you receive, not for where the food comes from. Expectations are part of that experience, sure, but trying to assign it all to "expectations" is just a rhetorical dodge. How can anything experiential not involve expectations? It can't. It's ludicrous to think otherwise. These things are not evidence of you not being so smart, they are evidence of the wonderful experiential nature of being alive. Isn't it great that we can plan and dream about a very inexpensive upcoming trip to the mountains and end up having a better time than somebody who spent 100 times as much for a much longer holiday? Or that we can spend an extra 40 dollars on a bottle of wine and imagine how much better the experience will be -- thereby increasing our eventual enjoyment? There's nothing dumb or not-so-smart about this. This is the human experience. Anybody who has ever spent any time around children understands that this subjectivity is a huge part of our makeup. In fact, to suppose that somehow this would be news to anyone is to assume the audience thinks of themselves as super-rational machines. Perhaps that's the problem: I'm not a member of the target audience. Still, I didn't like it. These books are the kinds you read and end up thinking "People are really broken! They are pretty stupid!" which is most likely the same damn thing you thought before you picked up the book in the first place.

pilgrim689 15y ago
I'm pretty sure most people don't know about the powers of expectations, or priming (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)), as it's called in psychology. The article just aims to bring that concept to light. It's also a little jab to those who consider themselves "connoisseurs" of anything, wine tasting, televisions, food, or otherwise... because not knowing about one of the most influential forces in your opinion as a "connoisseur" really makes you "not so smart".
- 15y ago

hetman 15y ago

I found one thing interesting. While I wouldn't be surprised my expectations often affect my perceptions in much the way this article described, I noticed one exception, namely the last example given: movies. In fact the build up of expectations seems to usually result in me thinking the movie is worse, and vice versa. I wonder if this is just some weird reverse psychology or if something more interesting is going on.

bahman2000 15y ago

so this clears up the iPhone vs. Android debate then :)

smithian 15y ago
It would be very interesting to load android on a bunch of iPhones and test the reactions of people shopping for phones... take one group and tell them that this was the new iOS 6 and tell the others what you had done exactly and rate the reactions :-)
- ljf 15y ago
  Didn't they do that with Vista: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/04/technology/04vista.html http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/04/technology/04vista.html

conductrics 15y ago

My wife is a scotch expert. She hosts tastings where they taste scotch of three different ages. It used to be that after the tasting, most people would rate the oldest one the best. She then started to do blind tastings (tasters didn't know the age). Now the oldest is picked as the best around 30% of the time.

andrewcooke 15y ago
yeah; i'm in chile where the supply of scotch is limited, so i've started drinking the local hooch, called pisco, which is a kind of brandy. there are quite a few aged piscos available (the economy here is pretty good and people are starting to have more disposable income). as i tried a few i noticed that the ones in nice bottles, aged for longer (and more expensive), were noticeably more complex. eventually i had enough different bottles to arrange a blind tasting (my partner did the pouring etc; i was blindfold as they have different shades). the results were amazing - my rating was all over the map and completely inconsistent with what i was expecting. yet still, when i can see the bottles, the expensive ones taste better :o) tl;dr: brain - why are you so shallow? [in my defense, my proudest wine moment was when i bought a bottle of cousino macul cs on offer, took it home, tasted it, and thought it amazing (for the price). when i checked my receipt i had picked up the reserve (not on sale, twice the price) by mistake... (their labels were very similar a year or two ago)]
- conductrics 15y ago
  When I am trying a new whisky or brandy, I like to have a pour of something I know, so I have a reference point. I have found that time of day, outside temperature, what I am eating or have eaten, etc. really affects how much I am enjoying the drink. Of course the main point of the article is that while we think we are just using the current observation (the data), we often have strong priors that often dominate our posteriors ;)
gwern 15y ago
Hehe - only 30%? I see...

ThomPete 15y ago

I spent a year living in a building with a french winebar in the cellar. I became really good friends with the owner and since I was working freelance from home I would often go down in the afternoon and get a glass of wine. I learned a lot about wine, but the most important things were the following. Wine experts don't judge the quality of the wine but the quality of what the wine is supposed to taste like based on it's appellation controléé http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellation_d%E2%80%99Origine_Contr%C3%B4l%C3%A9e http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellation_d%E2%80%99Origine_C... Those criterias are the "objective" criteria and those are the ones uses to judge a wine by. The particular taste of the wine is less interesting (i.e. the experience that normal people would have of the wine) Being a wine expert does not mean that you know good from bad wine but that you know what any given wine 1) smelled like (cherry, toast bread with butter, apple etc). The owner had a set of 100 little bottles each with it's own smell. You would be surprised how hard it it to pin point the correct word of the smell of one of those bottles, even if you recognize the taste. Once in a while I would be involved in some of the wine tastings and see him and his friends guess if not the exact wine then the actual zip code. One of the most important things he taught me was to find the balance of your food and your wine. It's one of the things I have found most enriching of my culinary life. That and the ability to smell (not taste) whether a wine have cork (impresses the girls and gives you an advantage in any business dinner)

veyron 15y ago
URL should be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellation_d%E2%80%99Origine_Contr%C3%B4l%C3%A9e http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellation_d%E2%80%99Origine_C...
- ThomPete 15y ago
  Thnx fixed
basman 15y ago
> Wine experts don't judge the quality of the wine but the quality of what the wine is supposed to taste like based on it's appellation controléé If that's really true, why do they bother tasting the actual wine?

extension 15y ago

The flaw in all these experiments is the assumption that the subject's description of their own experience is accurate. It's not surprising that people won't say that wine is white when it looks red, or that a fancy restaurant has served them frozen dinners. If forced to choose between pepsi on the left or pepsi on the right, they will make the choice one way or another. Put people in strange situations and you will get strange behavior. What was actually going through their head remains a mystery. Regardless, nothing in the world will make me believe that I don't care what my food tastes like.

giardini 15y ago

non "in vino veritas" sed "in vino confusionem"!

tnicola 15y ago

"In one Dutch study, participants were put in a room with posters proclaiming the awesomeness of high-definition, and were told they would be watching a new high-definition program. Afterward, the subjects said they found the sharper, more colorful television to be a superior experience to standard programming. What they didn't know was they were actually watching a standard-definition image. The expectation of seeing a better quality image led them to believe they had. Recent research shows about 18 percent of people who own high definition televisions are still watching standard-definition programming on the set, but they think they are getting a better picture." They are actually getting the better picture. One cannot argue that modern TV SD is not better than what we used to watch on CRT's. Everything has improved, so it is a better picture. HD is mostly undetectable to human eye to make that much of a difference. At least to me. Wide screen SD is a sufficiently pleasant experience. My husband claims to see the difference. I think he's conditioned to see it.

X-Istence 15y ago
I don't think that he is necessarily conditioned to see it. Seeing the difference between a BluRay movie and a DVD movie is very clear (at least to me). The BluRay movie has sharper edges, its motion is clearer and the image pops more. Could it be simply the difference between the camera technology then and now? Maybe, but even between the same movie in BluRay vs DVD I have been able to tell the difference, my dad for instance put in the DVD instead of the BluRay disc by accident and I asked him if he used the BluRay disc or not about 2 or 3 minutes into the movie.
nitrogen 15y ago
[Warning: HD evangelism ahead] It really depends on how far away you sit from your TV, what the screen size is, and how good your vision is. When I'm sitting three feet from my 28" HD monitor, you bet I can tell the difference between HD and SD. My vision's not quite 20:20, though, so on the couch 15' away from a 100" projector screen, I'd have a hard time telling 720p from 1080p just based on sharpness, but the larger size of any macroblock artifacts would give it away. In the right conditions, I'm positive you'd see the difference, too. Try renting both a DVD and Blu-ray of the same movie from Redbox, and watching them a little closer to the screen. The Blu-ray will let you see more individual hairs, individual distant bricks, etc. But even SD on an HD screen can be better than SD on an SD screen, due to increased pixel density and reduced flicker.

redxaxder 15y ago

This was written as a series of blog posts before being compiled into a book. The original is here: http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/02/24/fine-wine/ http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/02/24/fine-wine/

goldmab 15y ago

Can somebody find the actual text of the Brochet studies? I've seen them referred to several times, but without citations.