Happy Fun-with-Evidence Friday. The folks at Cracked.com are at it again with a hilarious, and impressively evidence-based, post: This one is The 6 Most Statistically Full of Shit Professions. Sure, it would be easy to come up with more than six, but they've limited their picks to these: Stock market analysts, wine tasters, art critics, criminal profilers, weather forecasters, and sportswriters. [BTW, I haven't posted in awhile (and some Evidence Soup readers even noticed!). I was sick for a few weeks - many thanks to those who wrote in with well wishes.]
Christina H. at Cracked.com doesn't just take shots at people who make dubious predictions and pronouncements for a living: She provides evidence to back up her claims, and does it with tremendous humor. For example, in a discussion of wine tasting, she says:
"Sure, Joe Consumer actually likes cheaper wines better, but that's because Joe Consumer is a stupid Philistine. The experts can tell the difference between a 2006 and 2007 Stag's Leap Cabernet Sauvignon in their sleep because everyone knows 2006 was a pedestrian year for Napa Valley reds. Hell, they are so good they can tell the difference between two bottles of the same wine. In one experiment, wine experts were given two bottles of the same wine, only one was labeled a 'vin de table' (France's version of 'Night Train') and one was labeled a 'grand cru' (top-rated vineyard since 1855)."
As you've probably guessed, the experts rated the grand cru much more favorably. "Not only were their tasting skills put to shame, it didn't even occur to them that nobody buys a $40-plus bottle of wine for a university experiment." The story references hands-on evidence provided in the book The Wine Trials: 100 Everyday Wines Under $15 that Beat $50 to $150 Wines in Brown-Bag Blind Tastings. And to her credit, Christina H also links to authoritative evidence and research findings, in this case results cited in the New Yorker:
"Studies suggest that the experience of smelling and tasting wine is extremely susceptible to interference from the cognitive parts of the brain. Several years ago, Frédéric Brochet, a Ph.D. student in oenology at the University of Bordeaux, did a study in which he served fifty-seven participants a midrange red Bordeaux from a bottle with a label indicating that it was a modest vin de table. A week later, he served the same wine to the same subjects but this time poured from a bottle indicating that the wine was a grand cru. Whereas the tasters found the wine from the first bottle 'simple,' 'unbalanced,' and 'weak,' they found the wine from the second 'complex,' 'balanced,' and 'full.' Brochet argues that our 'perceptive expectation' arising from the label often governs our experience of a wine, overriding our actual sensory response to whatever is in the bottle."
On that happy note, I'm going to enjoy a glass of the $12 Spanish vino tinto I bought the other day.
