Lone Gunman

Most psy­chol­ogy stud­ies focus­ing on my good friend, wine, rely on apply­ing the sci­en­tific method to the tast­ing of dif­fer­ent wines, and this is done in one, rel­a­tively sim­ple way: blind tasting.

Finance blog­ger at Reuters, Felix Salmon, isn’t a fan of blind tast­ing, and after read­ing his eminently-quotable piece on the sub­ject I tend to agree. The prob­lem, accord­ing to Salmon? We know that wine has a lot to do with con­text and, in tast­ing wine, objec­tiv­ity is over­val­ued.

This from Bob Millman:

It should be obvi­ous to any think­ing per­son that blind tast­ings nec­es­sar­ily favor–on a group vote basis–wines which offer imme­di­ate plea­sure and grat­i­fi­ca­tion. Left to their undi­rected devices, the senses will almost always grav­i­tate to the obvi­ous and miss the subtle

and this from Salmon:

If you know exactly what it is that you’re tast­ing — a young first-growth wine, for exam­ple — then you can taste it in that light. Sim­i­larly, if you know that you’re look­ing at an Ad Rein­hardt paint­ing, you’ll be will­ing to spend a few min­utes with it so that you can appre­ci­ate its sub­tleties. If you didn’t know it was a Rein­hardt, then you’d prob­a­bly just read it as a black mono­chrome and move on.

In that arti­cle it is noted that pro­fes­sional wine taster Robert Parker does not taste wine blind because of these issues, and in a later arti­cle Salmon dis­cusses how at one event, when Parker was per­suaded to taste blind a selec­tion of wines he had pre­vi­ously rated, he scored a once-reviled Bor­deaux as his favourite of the evening. The fol­low­ing quote from the piece looks at the futil­ity of (inher­ently sub­jec­tive) wine rat­ings:

Wine is not a fun­gi­ble com­mod­ity, where one bot­tle is always the same as the next — quite the oppo­site. But the fact that wine changes, from bot­tle to bot­tle and from month to month, rather defeats the pur­pose of [rank­ings and] mag­a­zines such as Wine Spec­ta­tor.

The Frontal Cor­tex con­tin­ues by say­ing that “our sen­sa­tions require inter­pre­ta­tion” and that “we parse their sug­ges­tions based upon what­ever other knowl­edge we can sum­mon to the surface”.

This point was brought home when, in 2004, Gourmet looked at the grow­ing craze of Riedel wine glasses not­ing that what recep­ta­cle is used to drink wine from really does have a mas­sive influ­ence on how we per­ceive its taste and smell. This is mainly because,

Riedel and other high-end glasses can make wine taste bet­ter. Because they’re pretty. Because they’re del­i­cate. Because they’re expen­sive. Because you expect them to make the wine taste better.

Researchers are now start­ing to look at this directly by run­ning exper­i­ments on how the hap­tic qual­i­ties (feel) of a drink­ing ves­sel affects our per­cep­tion of its con­tents.

Those who like to touch [high autotelics] are least influ­enced by touch in taste eval­u­a­tions. Indeed, in a taste test of the same min­eral water from both a flimsy and a firm cup, it was low autotelics [those who don’t like to touch] who gave the most neg­a­tive eval­u­a­tions of the taste of the water in the flimsy cup.

The results were sim­i­lar when par­tic­i­pants were just told about the con­tain­ers in a writ­ten descrip­tion and did not actu­ally feel them: Low autotelics expressed a will­ing­ness to pay more for a firm bot­tle of water, while high autotelics did not.

So keep all this in mind if you’re a red wine fan when you next order fish: it’s now been shown that low-iron red wines are a per­fect com­ple­ment to some types of fish, so don’t let your pesky sub­con­scious get to the wine first.

As Lawrence Rosen­blum of Sen­sory Super­pow­ers says, “you drink what you think”.

For his next col­lec­tion of short sto­ries to be pub­lished, titled With a Lit­tle Help, author and blogger-extraordinaire Cory Doc­torow will be run­ning an exper­i­ment so that he can see whether his strat­egy of offer­ing his work for free is work­ing.

With prices to range from $0.00 to $10,000 for var­i­ous pack­ages, Doc­torow is to track his finan­cial progress and the progress of the exper­i­ment as a whole on his new col­umn at Pub­lish­ers Weekly.

This first col­umn looks at how he will be mak­ing money (his mar­ket­ing and pub­lic­ity strat­egy will be cov­ered soon, too):

• E-book: free, in a wide vari­ety of formats
• Audio­book: free, in a wide vari­ety of formats
• Dona­tions: what­ever happens
• Print-on-Demand trade paper­back: $16 (approx­i­mately; price TBD)
• Pre­mium hard­cover edi­tion: $250, lim­ited run of 250 copies
• Com­mis­sion a new story: $10,000 (one only)
• Adver­tise­ments: TBD
• Dona­tions of books: TBD

That’s how the money is going to come in. To be hon­est, I have no idea how much money that will be ($10,000 has already come in, of course). But I do know what I’ll do about it. I’m going to dis­close it, all of it, every month, in a run­ning tally in a monthly col­umn here in Pub­lish­ers Weekly. And inci­den­tally, this arti­cle is gross­ing me all of $900, less my agent’s 15% com­mis­sion, and the columns $400 here­after. I will then put this into an appen­dix, which will be added to new edi­tions of the book and com­pared to the rev­enues from Over­clocked. That’s as close to an apples-to-apples com­par­i­son as I can come up with, but I think it will speak well to the ques­tion: what’s the best a writer like me can do on his own, ver­sus with a tra­di­tional pub­lisher for whom he does every­thing he can to aid in book sales?

via Mar­ginal Revolution

The costs of inno­va­tion have exceeded the ben­e­fits, says Umair Haque, and it’s time to move away from this “relic of the indus­trial era” towards some­thing specif­i­cally “built for the 21st century”. Haque has dubbed this the almost too hip Awe­some­ness Man­i­festo.

The three prob­lems with inno­va­tion as it stands, accord­ing to Haque:

• Inno­va­tion relies on obsolescence.
• Inno­va­tion dries up our seedcorn.
• Inno­va­tion often isn’t.

The four pil­lars of new-innovation, or awe­some­ness:

• Eth­i­cal production.
• Insanely great stuff (creativity).
• Love.
• Thick value (mak­ing peo­ple authen­ti­cally bet­ter off — not merely by adding more bells and whistles).

Let’s sum­ma­rize. What is awe­some­ness? Awe­some­ness hap­pens when thick — real, mean­ing­ful — value is cre­ated by peo­ple who love what they do, added to insanely great stuff, and mul­ti­plied by com­mu­ni­ties who are delighted and inspired because they are authen­ti­cally bet­ter off.

The for­mer Simonyi Pro­fes­sor for the Pub­lic Under­stand­ing of Sci­ence and founder of the Foun­da­tion for Rea­son and Sci­ence, Richard Dawkins, was recently invited to appear on The Hugh Hewitt Show where the two dis­cussed reli­gion, Rome, evo­lu­tion and much more.

One par­tic­u­lar exchange (the Okay, do you believe Jesus turned water into wine? inci­dent) has been quoted widely, but what fol­lows is my favourite exchange from the interview.

Richard Dawkins (RD): […]You can never be absolutely cer­tain that any­thing doesn’t exist. But you can show that it’s unlikely. That’s a pretty good, not exactly a final con­clu­sion, but it’s cer­tainly worth say­ing.
Hugh Hewitt (HH): Isn’t the uni­verse itself unlikely, though?
RD: Well, but it’s there, isn’t it? And we’re in it, so we can see what we see. We find our­selves in a uni­verse. So how­ever unlikely, it clearly did hap­pen.
HH: And so that’s what [David Berlinski’s] argu­ment is, is that you can’t say yes, we have to accept the uni­verse as unlikely, but we can accept that God is unlikely, just because the one unlikely event is vis­i­ble to us, and the other unlikely event isn’t.
RD: I think there is a dif­fer­ence there. I mean, for the uni­verse to come into exis­tence, physi­cists are work­ing on under­stand­ing that. And the begin­ning of the uni­verse, as physi­cists would now under­stand, it would be a supremely sim­ple event. And admit­tedly, it’s still some­thing that requires a lot of under­stand­ing. It’s a very dif­fi­cult thing to under­stand. But for God to exist, a God capa­ble of devel­op­ing the laws of physics, a God capa­ble of answer­ing prayers and for­giv­ing sins, and read­ing our thoughts, and all that kind of thing, that requires, that’s an immensely com­pli­cated entity. That’s the kind of entity which we now explain by evo­lu­tion, that’s the kind of entity that comes into being as a result of a long, slow, grad­ual process, long after the begin­ning of the uni­verse.
HH: But the uni­verse is itself awfully com­pli­cated, Pro­fes­sor Dawkins. Where did it come from?
RD: Well, the uni­verse is not awfully com­pli­cated at the begin­ning. It has become very com­pli­cated through such processes as evo­lu­tion by nat­ural selec­tion.
HH: No, I’m talk­ing about the whole cos­mos. Where did that come from, 13 bil­lion years ago?
RD: It came from the big bang, which is not a com­plex process. It’s a sim­ple process.
HH: And what pre­ceded the big bang?
RD: Well, physi­cists won’t answer that ques­tion. They will say that time itself began in the big bang, and so the ques­tion what pre­ceded it is ille­git­i­mate.
HH: What do you think?
RD: I’m not enough of a physi­cist to under­stand what I’m say­ing, but I have to say that that’s what physi­cists say.
HH: So when you con­sider before the big bang, what does Richard Dawkins think was there?
RD: I don’t con­sider the ques­tion, because I rec­og­nize that it’s an intu­itively appeal­ing ques­tion. I rec­og­nize that I, along with every­body else, wants to ask that ques­tion. Then I talk to physi­cists who say you can no more ask what came before the big bang than you can ask what’s north of the North Pole.

via Pharyn­gula

I haven’t read (m)any of Mal­colm Glad­well’s arti­cles in the past 6 months as they’re all, well, a bit homo­ge­neous. Plus, if there are any fas­ci­nat­ing rev­e­la­tions that I really should hear about I’ll undoubt­edly dis­cover them (in a much-condensed form) in many other places rehash­ing his content.

This inter­view with Mal­colm Gladwell—where he dis­cusses edu­ca­tion, hir­ing and jour­nal­ism—is typ­i­cally Glad­wellian and worth your time, however.

On edu­ca­tion:

If I were [the United States Sec­re­tary of Edu­ca­tion], I’d think of myself as a ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist, fund as many wacky and inven­tive ideas as I could, and closely mon­i­tor them to see how they worked.

I’ve always been fas­ci­nated by the idea that in inner-city schools, the thing they do best is sports. […] It’s not cor­rect to say these schools are dys­func­tional; they’re highly func­tional in cer­tain areas. So I’ve always won­dered about using the prin­ci­ples of sports in the class­room. Go same sex; do every­thing in teams; have teams com­pete with each other.

On teach­ing and hir­ing practises:

Cer­tain kinds of pre­dic­tions are impos­si­ble. If you want to find out if some­one can do the job, you have to let them do the job. We should be exper­i­ment­ing with peo­ple too. I feel very strongly about the notion that if you want to find the best teach­ers, you let every­body into the pro­fes­sion, mon­i­tor them for two years, and then pick the 10% that are the best. That’s how you do it, and that’s com­pletely the oppo­site of the way we do it now. Right now we’re act­ing out a fic­tion, which is that we can tell whether someone’s good at this enor­mously com­plex thing called teach­ing before they’ve ever taught.

And the sin­gle piece of advice he would offer to young journalists?

The issue is not writ­ing. It’s what you write about. […] Aspir­ing jour­nal­ists should stop going to jour­nal­ism pro­grams and go to some other kind of grad school. If I was study­ing today, I would go get a master’s in sta­tis­tics, and maybe do a bunch of account­ing courses and then write from that per­spec­tive. I think that’s the way to sur­vive. The role of the gen­er­al­ist is dimin­ish­ing. Jour­nal­ism has to get smarter.

I par­tic­u­larly like that penul­ti­mate sen­tence: The role of the gen­er­al­ist is dimin­ish­ing. It puts me in mind of this pre­vi­ous post on the end of the poly­math and the down­side of sci­en­tific progress (that I’ve just updated to include a link to the quoted post).

via @sgourley