Ben Healey

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  Ben 11:04 on Monday, April 5, 2010 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Human Biases ( 9 ), Myths, Perception, Wine Glasses   

  Does that Wine Glass Really Enhance your Wine? 

  My partner loves fancy wine glasses.  Unfortunately for her we don’t have much room at home, or have people over very often, so it is hard to justify buying different sets for different wines and occasions.  Of course, this doesn’t stop either of us from gazing upon the various options in whatever home store we happen upon.

  Were we to buy some nice glasses, I suspect we’d draw upon a number of excuses to rationalise our decision, the key two being:

  1. They look and feel really nice, and
  2. Experts say the right glasses enhance the flavour of the wine.

  I have no problem at all with the first excuse.  It’s the second one that sets off my bullshit meter, because ‘experts’ are often wrong and I’ve not actually seen any evidence that the assertion is true.

  To test whether wine glasses enhance the taste of a wine, you’d have to do some blind testing.  That is, the wine tasters would have to be blind to which glass they were quaffing or sniffing from when they gave their judgements.  Pretty much all of the tests I managed to find in my trawl of the web were unblinded (see here for a recent NZHerald ‘test’), so the participants may have been influenced by the look of the glass itself rather than any true structural effects of the vessel.

  I did manage to find one reference to research using blind tests, in a section of Wine Science from 2005 by Dr Ron Jackson:

  …shape does affect the intensity of the wine’s fragrance – those possessing a wide base and narrow neck enhance the perception of the wine’s aroma.  However, the differences detected from a variation of shapes on the wide–narrow theme were marginal.  Published evidence does not support the view that particular shapes uniquely enhance the character of specific wines.

  However, the reference also states…

  That particular shapes are not uniquely suited for tasting particular wines does not mean that they do not affect perception or, indeed, aesthetic pleasure.  Science has amply confirmed that visual and psychological influences often have a greater effect on what we perceive than the more subtle sensory data provided by taste and smell.

  That’s right, the effect of the wine glass shape is very real in a sense, but that sense is pretty much all in our heads.  If you take away the visual cues of the glass from the drinker, you also take away the differences in taste experienced. Knowing this is likely to have a couple of implications:

  1. You’ll be better prepared to argue with the next wine glass snob you encounter, and
  2. Different glasses are now likely to have less of an effect on your perception of wine taste.

  I guess another implication is that the glass that most enhances the flavour of a wine will vary from person to person; the more aesthetically pleasing the glass is for you, the more it is likely to enhance your experience of the wine you are drinking.  So don’t let people tell you what glasses you should use.  Use the ones you like best.

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  Ben 16:31 on Saturday, January 9, 2010 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Critical Thought, Data Quality ( 4 ), Myths   

  How ‘Information’ is made out of Thin Air 

  Have you heard that a weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in 17th century England?

  If so, did you also know that this statement probably has no basis in fact?

  I’ve come across the tidbit more than once over the last couple of months, in conversations and online.  It struck me as being in the same general vein as another popular myth: that we only use 10% of our brains, so I did a little digging.  Here’s what I found:

  • This viral YouTube video contains the snippet (at 3:20) and may be the key source of its popularity at the moment.  No sources are cited for any of the information presented.  Not even in fine print.   The video is one of a number of versions of this particular montage of ‘facts’ which, together, have been seen over 10 million times.
  • The snippet has popped up in a number of places around the web, some more reputable than others.  It also appears in numerous books.  Like the YouTube vid, most don’t make any effort to verify the assertion.  The context also changes from repeat to repeat; sometimes it is the Sunday edition and 19th century citizens, sometimes it is exposure to information in a day and ‘our ancestors’.  So, that lesson you learnt playing Chinese whispers as a kid still holds; people are prone to error when retelling a story.  It’s worth being wary of this when retelling something yourself or hearing a startling ’truth’ from someone else.
  • Where sources are cited, they generally lead to a statement made by Richard Saul Wurman in his 1989 book titled Information Anxiety (page 32).  Unfortunately, I don’t have access to the book, so I can’t see whether he presents any evidence to support the claim.  Thankfully, Geoffrey Nunberg at UC Berkeley managed to find a copy and took a look for himself… apparently the book  ”asserts the fact without offering a source or explanation” (p9 of a pdf by Nunberg that in part examines the likely veracity and lack of meaning of the snippet).

  So, after making a reasonable effort aimed at finding evidence to support the claim, I’ve come up empty handed.  Others have had the same experience.  My conclusion is that it is probably nothing more than an statement without foundation that has made its way into popular consciousness by virtue of it being superficially plausible and sufficiently repeated without critical thought.  Fascinating stuff.

  This particular example is innocuous, but sometimes these ‘facts from thin air’ can make their way into places where they might have more impact on policy or business decisions.  For instance, in Damn Lies and Statistics, Joel Best recounts that a published Journal article he once read contained the statement “Every year since 1950, the number of American children gunned down has doubled”.  Go here if you are interested to see why the statement is so absurd, along with the history of how this ‘mutant statistic’ came to be.

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