Funniest snake oil theories

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No, not according to this....
A wine rated 91 on one tasting would often be rated an 87 or 95 on the next. Some of the judges did much worse, and only about one in 10 regularly rated the same wine within a range of ±2 points.

Mr. Hodgson also found that the judges whose ratings were most consistent in any given year landed in the middle of the pack in other years, suggesting that their consistent performance that year had simply been due to chance.

Dan.
 
There is often talk around here about the invalidity of subjective findings.
Wine among other subjects is one seemingly wholly based on subjective findings, and in the standard press there are absolutely no objective measurements to back up professional wine judge's opinions.....opinions that are hopelessly unrepeatable and at the mercy of all kinds of external factors.

Again, that's because you assume we know all we need to know and will ever know, that all we taste can be measured, that all that we measure can be tasted.

That's what intuition, insight, wisdom and experience are there for. They fill in what is lacking from what is measured.

Animals can tell, feel, when they are being watched and hunted. This keeps them from being attacked or eaten. There is no possible way to rationally explain how an animal can tell that it is being watched from behind when it cannot see the predator, but this happens all the time so that they are not eaten. I have felt this, friends who have been DEVGRU report similar.

Pure Objectivists please explain intuition about being hunted.
 
Its a bit off topic..

However "what is being hunted"<<<its the intent in the mind..
The intent to kill or attack or be attacked..

A bit like I'm not walking down that alley it feels dangerous..

Now you would have to ask yourself if you were in a trench in a war would you ignore your feelings?? If not then you have some belief that what you feel is true..
Do you think that you can feel someones intent?

Regards
M. Gregg
 
Its a bit off topic..

WAY off topic!

"A bit like I'm not walking down that alley it feels dangerous."

The alley doesn't feel anything. 😉

Your brain is making lots of links to everything you have read, seen and experienced in your past and quickly concluded that is not a smart move.

"Now you would have to ask yourself if you were in a trench in a war would you ignore your feelings??"

Not a question of feelings! In that situation I would be in REAL danger and justified in feeling scared. 🙄

"If not then you have some belief that what you feel is true.."

Belief is accepting something that is not demonstrated to be true. No belief required here. The danger is real and present.

"Do you think that you can feel someones intent?"

No. Do you? How does that work?

I can certainly analyse verbal and body language and the situation in the context of my whole human experience.
 
So,

How does this impact on snake oil?
You think you should hear a difference so you do?
If it looks different it should sound different..

Then there is....is something different that you can't hear but you can detect in some other way??? Perhaps like the ticking of a clock that you don't notice until it stops?
ie the mind blocks it out...something is different but you don't know why.. 😀

Regards
M. Gregg
 
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Those are all involved, sometimes significantly.

And analogies are not needed. I cannot imagine how anyone can resist presuming that a gold plated hunk of metal with superb attention to cosmetic detail cannot sound better than some cheap plastic Chinese junk.

It is boring, but only blind testing (which means not knowing which one is active) can eliminate these effects.

If you think you can beat this, you are a unique human being and fame, glory and $1M awaits you. But you won't go for it, will you?
 
It is boring, but only blind testing (which means not knowing which one is active) can eliminate these effects.
story.
yesterday and the day before I participated in some listening tests.
first day there was some random listening. we played my DAC and an expensive vintage CD player. there was no A/B involved but I was sure that the CD player was much better in highs reproduction. one of the guys present said "wait till tomorrow and we'll do level matched A/B tests". I could bet my whole audio system on the fact that the A/B test would reveal those 'huge' differences I heard.
well, until the next day when we actually did it. 4 people (including me) agreed that the difference was not night and day like I initially thought. I do believe that there was a difference which may prove significant on the long run but nowhere near what I thought I heard the first day.
now I wouldn't bet one meter of zip cord on my ability to tell which is which with significant probability.


You and your friends cannot just HEAR SOMETHING and have it valid
well, as long as these 2 ears and this brain manage to tell a real piano/guitar/etc from a reproduced one, I think I have all the working tools to hear everything that needs to be heard 🙂 so far they are doing what the label says.
 
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There is often talk around here about the invalidity of subjective findings.
Wine among other subjects is one seemingly wholly based on subjective findings, and in the standard press there are absolutely no objective measurements to back up professional wine judge's opinions.....opinions that are hopelessly unrepeatable and at the mercy of all kinds of external factors, so the conclusion is that wine judges are full of BS. Link here - wine-tasting-is-bs-here's-why

Dan.

How do you think all the single malt scotches get to taste almost indistinguishable year to year? There are hack tasters/reviewers and there are trained professionals that can do all the things this blog calls BS.
 
Well, sorta. There's certainly an inconsistency in even the best wine reviewers, but ANY professional can distinguish in blind tasting between two wines of the same type or spot winemaking defects (e.g., VA, brett, TCA) and techniques (e.g., type of oak, yeast strains) reliably and repeatably. The notion that preference and ranking, along with correlation to price, is consistent among tasters (or even the same taster on different occasions) is certainly questionable.

The analogy to fashion audio is ridiculous, since the audio "reviewers" get dithyrambic about differences that they can't seem to hear when they only use their ears.
 
If someone tried to sell you a lucky charm would you buy it? Would you even think "Hey! This guy may be onto something here. He says it has made a night-and-day transformation to his good fortune, and I can have it for only a thousand bucks". What if it was a company that had refined and optimised the design of lucky charms, and even had a dedicated lucky charm testing department and could provide scientific- looking graphs? If the proprietor of the company had the equivalent of a degree obtained when working for a top secret military group and noticed that carrying a bag of XSG3200 dust (patented) had brought good luck to him immediately? So now every lucky charm from his company Pisstaki contains 37.3 milligrams of XSG3200 - which has been found through extensive research to be the optimal amount. What if other users of the device swore it had brought them good luck?

Even around here, no one would fall for it, because everyone knows that such a claim could have no scientific, or actual, basis. However, when it comes to audio snakeoil, it's not quite as obvious to everyone. To people like me, it is obvious, and I admit that I also enjoy reading the verbal and literary diahorrea that the proprietors of these little companies emit. They're richer than me, but at least I have some pride and integrity.

I don't go along with the idea that the man behind the product isn't important, and that we should investigate every 'interesting' avenue, because (a) anyone with a modicum of scientific nous and/or intuition about the ways of con men (even if they're not wicked but just delusional) can tell what's rubbish at twenty paces, and (b) without being selective, the number of tweaks you would be 'testing' would be enormous. And all the while, ignoring real engineering that actually does affect the sound.
 
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There is often talk around here about the invalidity of subjective findings.
Wine among other subjects is one seemingly wholly based on subjective findings, and in the standard press there are absolutely no objective measurements to back up professional wine judge's opinions.....opinions that are hopelessly unrepeatable and at the mercy of all kinds of external factors, so the conclusion is that wine judges are full of BS. Link here - wine-tasting-is-bs-here's-why

Dan.
it´s no secret, that in spain were adding antifreeze to make their wine taste better.:gnasher:
similar chemical exists in wine, but in very small %
 
There was a wine from the south of France that had a reputation of being a bit... weird. Super rich and powerful, high alcohol, pornographically fruity, flabby and oddly sweet. The top wine critic in the world (at that time) gave it 100 points and called it one of the greatest wines he had ever tasted. Not surprising, since this critic has a reputation for only liking wines that hit him between the eyes with a 2x4- subtlety and elegance were lost on him.

I visited the winery, whose owner/winemaker/vineyardist was well-known to be a "character," and could spend hours rambling on about the horrors of the AOC system, the fraud police, and the inferior produce of his neighbors. While he was occupied haranguing my female companion, I wandered around the fermentation area. Tucked away behind one of the large vats was a pile of empty cases of... grenadine.
 
it´s no secret, that in spain were adding antifreeze to make their wine taste better.:gnasher:
similar chemical exists in wine, but in very small %

I remember only one serious case in which anti-freeze was added to wine.
It happened in Austria in '85.
Austria uses the same ancient wine-grading system as Germany which is based on the sugar content (actually the specific density measured on the Oechsle scale) of the grape juice. The higher, the better and since adding sugar has always been illegal the only way to increase the sugar content is to let the grapes partially dehydrate on the vine. This requires expensive hand selecting while picking and effectively reduces the yield.
The 'easy' way around this was to use generic grape juice and add anti-freeze which is very sweet... and poisonous.
The top rating is Eiswein which means the grapes got one night of frost and when picked the grapes look like plump raisins or wine made from grapes affected by 'noble rot' (botrytis) when it is called Trockenbeerenauslese. The resulting wine is usually quite sweet, very full-bodied and very expensive.


German wine classification - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
Well, sorta. There's certainly an inconsistency in even the best wine reviewers, but ANY professional can distinguish in blind tasting between two wines of the same type or spot winemaking defects (e.g., VA, brett, TCA) and techniques (e.g., type of oak, yeast strains) reliably and repeatably. The notion that preference and ranking, along with correlation to price, is consistent among tasters (or even the same taster on different occasions) is certainly questionable.

The analogy to fashion audio is ridiculous, since the audio "reviewers" get dithyrambic about differences that they can't seem to hear when they only use their ears.

I was refering to a select few folks like the head blender at a distillery. We both know by and large the vanity publishing critics are a crap shoot. I don't buy highly classified burgundy anymore but when I did I found no one that was better than 50/50 (I might as well have bought randomly).
 
Not just them.

As a greenhorn visitor to the Napa Valley in about 1970, I took issue with a vineyard tour guide at the end of the tour in the tasting room. I forget where it was, exactly. Probably Paul Masson.

To my question about "Best Years" came the confident New-World reply that " ... our weather being so good and consistent and our process being so repeatable (Stainless Steel tanks!) that all the years tasted the same" !

I was too shy to argue, but coming from living in France I felt hackles raised!

I have just Google mapped the Valley - dozens more names than I remember, including many established European ones!
 
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