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.
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).
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.
Or to be more precise, the article claims that "experts" (meaning undergrads, ie above average but by no means expert tasters) can be deceived, and then acts as if that also means "Wine is a complicated elixir, full of subtle flavors only an expert can truly distinguish" is false. It's a complete non sequitur.
I agree with you 100% on the Coke versus Pepsi thing. Anyone who has spent much time drinking wine has wines they like better than other wines; there really are taste differences. (Note that I'm not saying more expensive is better; rather, that there are $15 wines I love, and $15 wines I don't like.)
In your experiments, you know, at least subconsciously, that the possibility exists that you will be served Pepsi. In proper experiments the subjects don't know what they are tasting. You merely ask them for a preference. You also make it clear that both glasses may contain the same liquid (and preferably the experiment leader doesn't know which is which). In such cases, the result holds: M is preferred.
Secondly, it's a statistical result. It doesn't mean there aren't people that can't taste the difference.
As for the wine:
Many experiments are flawed. I don't know what experiments you saw, but if you ask experts to distinguish between a glass of red and a glass of white wine, of course they will succeed. The expectations have been set properly. One white, one red. In all cases where people are asked to distinguish between two different things and they are also presented two different things, they will succeed.
That does not mean they won't fail to note something is white wine when you give them a glass of seemingly red wine and ask them to rate this red wine.
The point is not that there isn't any difference between wines. There is and oenologists will be able to tell you the difference... as long as you told them upfront that there is a difference (and there is indeed that difference).
The problem with talking about the detail - that it was a statistical result - is that this doesn't match up with the headline abstract (that experts can't tell the difference).
As for the the statement about my Coke v Pepsi - first time it happened, I had as much idea that it might be Pepsi as the people in this experiment had that they might have been served white wine masquerading as red. I wasn't particularly thinking about it. I'd ordered a Coke, the drink came in a Coke glass and I was fully expecting to drink Coke. My first thought wasn't "Oh, this is Pepsi". It was "There's something funny about this Coke".
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.
Well, that is odd, considering the fact that I think you are in complete agreement with the author :).
Oenologists would have you believe that there are such things as 'good wines' and 'bad wines'. Wines with all kinds of complexities and wines that are 'flat'. They, experts on consuming these specific works of art, are the ones suggesting there is an underlying objective version of reality.
The author, on the other hand, points out, with experimental evidence, that your expectations trip you up. You say:
How can anything experiential not involve expectations? It
can't. It's ludicrous to think otherwise.
but the point of the article is not "it involves expectations at all". The point is: the expectations can be decisive. That's a prime argument for the irrelevance of an underlying objective version of reality.
Perhaps that's the problem: I'm not a member of the target
audience.
I don't think you are, because what is 'ludicrous' to you, is something most people would deny being an important influence in some professional or hobbyist interest of theirs.
People are already commenting to explain they can taste the difference between X and Y. People don't understand, or can't imagine, that there are circumstances in which they can't distinguish between a glass of red wine and a glass of white wine. If you'd have asked these oenologists upfront, they would've been insulted you would even ask.
But seriously, this is a good example of how meta-contarianism goes wrong. An example would be the lottery. Contrarian position: 'the lottery exploits human biases and rips them off, ruining lives.' Meta-contrarian: 'ah, but the lottery lets you buy hope, and is cheap at the price! You simply don't appreciate what it does and expose your own intellectual shallowness by being against it!' But really, the lottery just sucks, because if you want to buy hope, there's a lot of better ways to buy hope and engineer superior lotteries http://lesswrong.com/lw/hl/lotteries_a_waste_of_hope/ eg. by running long-drawn-out lotteries where you could win at any time over years! (Hey, if people can enjoy a 1 in a millions chance of winning, then they can enjoy a 1 in a millions chance of winning.)
We can run the same analysis with fine wine. Contrarian: 'expensive wine does not taste better as proved by blind-testing per OP, so it is simply a waste of money and expensive positional signaling which makes us all worse off.' Meta-contrarian: 'this is evidence of the wonderful experiential nature of being alive, isn't it grehttp://lesswrong.com/lw/hl/lotteries_a_waste_of_hope/at how framing can make us happier?'
Well if that is so, why don't you engineer better framing? For example, if you couldn't buy a particular fine wine but instead buy a 90% chance of the fine wine and a 10% chance of an equally-good tasting wine (as measured by blind testing), would peoples' enjoyment fall by more than 10%? Probably not, in which case there's a clear utility gain here to make people happier at less cost! Or, does their enjoyment fall by more than 10%? Then here's another chance to win, by making the gamble the other way. (There's always a way to exploit a bias, after all, that's kind of the point.) But the status quo is not the best status.
Well if that is so, why don't you engineer better framing?
Yes, I'd agree with that, and that's why the article rubbed me the wrong way. I don't think the facts here are in contention at all, it's the tone and slant of the piece.
And yes, the status quo is not always best. In fact, on HN we talk about this issue of framing all the time, just in different, productive contexts: sales pipelines, product positioning, social validation, etc. The list of productive ways to discuss this issue are legion, and it's an awesome and useful thing to talk about. In fact there's only one way to discuss this is a non-productive manner: the way it was discussed in this article, as some sort of failing of the human mind. (It's not a bug, it's a feature!)
I'm also a bit of an existentialist, and this plague of over-rationalization and assuming that everything can somehow be tied to a scientific metric is getting a bit old by now. Huge parts of life are experiential, and that's the way they should be. The geek guy inside us all who thinks that it's all logic and science can become his own caricature if given too much room to run. We are not all little Mr. Spocks, able to get a "true" vision of reality by ditching our emotional, subjective experience of life for some sort of scientifically-valid viewpoint. That was the real emotional roots of my disagreement, not social posturing or any desire to be a contrarian.
I'm going to say this a little differently in hopes the point will sink in: yes, many experiences you have -- probably most experiences you have -- are affected by the vagaries of the human mind. As startup founders, lots of us would like to help you have an even better time of things without spending as much of your resources. The entire purpose of an early-stage startup is to create and shape a narrative that begins with you hearing about something and ends with you being a little happier. Sometimes a lot happier. If you're thinking of the human brain and human experience as something that's broken about us and something that you can hack by making people do things they wouldn't? This is the kind of thinking that gets you Farmville. I don't like where that kind of clinical thinking ends up. It's wrong. It pisses me off.
In fact, your entire line of questioning around why wine has to cost so much or lotteries charge for the dream of winning is exactly the reason I think the startup and entrepreneurial communities rock. We're always asking that question too. Many times we find answers that most people don't want to accept, but that's okay. Most importantly we're doing something positive about it. You're on the right track with your critique of my post. You just need to keep going down this path to its logical conclusion.
Wait a minute, aren't the expensive wines a mechanism of "hack[ing] by making people do things they wouldn't?" The wineries engineering this are the ones taking advantage of human nature -- the same position Farmville's in.
The "clinical thinking" is just a tool for you and I to use if we want to be happier in cheaper and easier ways than drinking $100 wine and playing Farmville all day. It's my experience that by looking at my life with slightly more Mr-Spock-ish eyes, I can understand something about where my desires and instincts come from, and do a better job fulfilling them.
I think we're in danger of getting into either-or thinking here, and it's not like that at all.
Of course you should be introspective to understand yourself better, but at some point life is about being alive. It is both impossible and fruitless to spend all your time in analysis. We call this "analysis paralysis" in the computer world. There are a lot of reasons why this is bad -- the one that comes to mind first is the idea that it's really possible to ever completely understand yourself, that somehow you could sit outside your own head and understand everything that's going on. At some point you just accept that yes, the 100-dollar bottle of wine isn't as good, but yes, it's also really cool to enjoy the fallacy that it'll be a better wine.
At the end of the day, the question about whether the folks charging $100 for the wine have are exploiting folks or not is measured in two ways: as an individual, are they happy making the trade? As a society, is this something that we would be happy for everybody doing?
Farmville passes the first test but not the second. The expensive wine works for both tests.
This is getting quite off-topic, but I agree; I think passing the second test means that there are big industries and a great deal of labor devoted to trying to brand and distinguish slightly different wines, which strikes me as negative.
But very few activities would pass a "what if everyone in the world did this" test :-)
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".
That puts them ahead of audiophiles, then, many of whom believe that blind testing is inherently flawed, and it's sighted testing that reveals the true sound of the amplifier.
I can't speak for wine, but beer has similar licensing that involves a thorough blind tasting test. The tasting is not to judge good or bad, but to identify variety classifications and various properties of each beer. The results are repeatable since it's a test that can be passed with enough preparation.
The reason I harass my dinner guests is that our stories have consequences, that our beliefs often matter more than the grapes. The question is what those stories are. If the only story we can tell about wine is its price, then our pleasure will always linked to cost, even though this link doesn’t exist in most taste tests. A much better (and more cost-effective) idea is to find some other narrative, to focus on aspects of wine that don’t require a big expense account. Knowledge is free.
Well, then I have some wine you might want to buy. Best wine ever. Pay no attention to the cheap-looking labels; I disguise it to keep people from stealing it. Just close your eyes and savour the experiential experience. A bargain at any price!
Oh, and you'll need to wear one of my special energy-flow-enhancing crystals around your neck. Also expensive, but surely able to increase your eventual enjoyment. And I'll enjoy the money.
I don't think that all expectations are equal. It's possible that I'm in the minority, but I try to be mindful of my expectations and control for them.
When my brain is trying to anticipate what will be the best experience for dinner on Friday night I am aware of a mixture of expectations for each option I consider.
Some of the expectations are rational: The semi-expensive restaurant I like is extremely consistent in quality and I know that the food will be cooked with precision using expensive tools and modern techniques, resulting in a higher quality entree (and better experience).
At the same time, some of my expectations about the restaurant are irrational. For example, I can identify feelings that they food quality will be much better than at similarly rated restaurants that I have not visited. Having visited the restaurant several times I'm now afflicted by mere exposure effect, among other cognitive biases.
I don't think of myself as being a super-rational machine, but I know that just following my intuition alone when it comes to expectations is not going to yield the best future experiences.
"""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."""
Your premise is also flawed. Even if wine, food etc is like "consuming works of art", their is an underlying tangible artifact in front of you (the food, the wine). Wine experts are paid and consulted because they can supposedly judge this underlying quality.
The "interpretation as art" comes into play, and is expected (different wine critics are expected to have differing opinions).
You wouldn't call someone an art critic if you could pass an Archie comic to him signed "Picasso" and he would believe it and judge it as a work of Picasso.
The same holds for the described experiments: changing your opinion on the same wine based on a more expensive label or a taste-less red dye is way more off than "artistic interpretation". It's cluelessness.
(Also, TV image quality is not a "work of art", it's something technical that can be analyzed).
what you say is true, but i think your haircut example just glides over the more important question of what we can actually compare objectively and what we can't.
it's true that taste varies and is culture-dependent, some people hate punk rock, others love country music, etc. but i think we tend to over-exaggerate this. after all, nobody drinks vinegar by the glass, eats rocks, or likes earing really strident sound.
there is an objective basis to taste, rooted in evolution: eg sugar is energy, we need that to live, so we like it - a lot.
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.
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)
Absolutely not. The appellation d'origine contrôlée is not an indicator of quality, but a sort of family (both in taste and location of production, and named after the regional location, because it has a critical influence on flavor) which gets assessed by professionals so you can identify wines without actually opening the bottle. If I'm at the store and I see a Haut-Médoc, I have some high probability of liking it more compared to a Médoc, because I like tannic wines, and Haut-Médoc show more of a bias towards tannin. That does not mean that one is of higher standard (and there are some Haut-Médoc which actually taste like crap).
What might create a link with quality is that some flavors are quite strong and can take time to get used to, combined with subtle tones, and may require some technique to appreciate. You start with very raw, basic wines, then you grow up an ability to appreciate the more subtle ones, like you would go from appreciating child paintings and grow on to like Matisse.
Then there is each one's unique taste: there are some very tasteful Sauterne wines, but I absolutely loathe sweet wines, so I can't for the life of me come anywhere near drinking them.
Well, actually it determines that it comes precisely from where it's supposed to. There are more to this, like the late 19th century classification of Bordeaux' wines through the "crus classés" system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bordeaux_Wine_Official_Classifi...
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.
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)]
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 ;)
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/
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
Vision clarity definitely plays the part. And so does how far you are from your TV. I am about 2.5 screen lengths away from the screen and the point is, it isn't that much better that it warrants all the inconveniences that come with watching an HD.
It requires another player. (In case of BluRay)
It's harder to stream through the internet. (In case of digital formats)
For those people, like me, who in 95% of practical uses do not see the difference, the above disadvantages make it a no brainer.
I guess I am asking, is it really worth it all the trouble?
If you consume HD content the "legitimate" way by inserting a disc into a Blu-ray player, then no, I don't think it is. You have to put up with 7 minutes of unskippable previews in some cases, player updates that take two hours to download and install, two minute load times on two-year-old players, etc.
If you front-load the inconvenience by buying the discs, ripping them all to a hard drive, and using something like XBMC or Plex on an HTPC, then for any serious watching where you sit down for the whole show, yes, it absolutely is worth it. I wish more people had access to the convenience a media server gives; it's what content should be like in the digital age.
Edit: I'm usually about 1.5 screen lengths away, so that probably makes a difference.
I would be careful with this comparison. Many BluRay disks of older movies are just upscaled from the DVD (I'm guessing here - not actually sure how it's mastered) and aren't significantly different than what you would get with an upscaling DVD player.
You would have to get a "recent" movie mastered specifically for BluRay to see the difference. I've done this several times myself (specifically "The Princess Bride" - which appears to be an upscale, and "How to Train your Dragon" which is significantly clearer).
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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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.
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.
FUD about what? What those experiments show is that by deviously setting up certain expectations, you can manipulate people into being deceived by their senses. Even if they are experts in the use of their senses.
The experiments do not show that there is no difference between wines; let alone no difference between red and white wines.
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:
Don't use "FUD" as a synonym for "I'm too lazy." I suppose the author shouldn't use any words you don't understand either?
Highlight the author's names, right click, select "Search with Google", pick any of a number of hits. The second hit for me is the referenced PhD work.
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.