Rationally speaking, is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry and science education. For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptic's Doug. Welcome to, rationally speaking, the podcast, where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense. I am your host, Massimo Pelikan. With me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Gillard. Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

Masimo, today, we are going to delve into the wonderful world of connoisseurship or snobbery, depending on your perspective.

Are you talking about snobbery, accusing me of being a snob? Not well, not yet anyway. Yeah, OK, good.

So you mean the particular kind of connoisseurship snobbery that we're going to be talking about today are fields like wine expertise in Ophelia, if you will, enology people who have strong preferences about which audio system sounds best and which particular compression style or cables is the best sound?

Audio files, audio files.

There you go. Audiology, perhaps.

And then, you know, various and sundry other kinds of connoisseurship that have sprung up, like people having very strong preferences about which kind of bottled water tastes best.

So this is an episode that potentially could piss off a lot of people. Oh, goody.

Bring it on. Bring it on. All right. We've been uncontroversial for too long. So let's start with wine. As it turns out, you know, I like wine.

Yeah, I, I was I'm curious about I realised I beyond knowing that you like wine, I don't I don't actually know what your sort of take is on.

So I like wine better than the beer. I drink beer but but only when absolutely necessary. And, and, and actually I'm one of those wine drinkers or seasonal. That is during the summer season. During the warm season I drink only whites and during the winter only reds.

Is that a thing? It's a thing. A pantry. A lot of people actually do that. And and then, of course, I try to be somewhat sort of cognizant about what kind of wine I drink with whatever I eat, but not too much. I mean, you know, there is this famous thing that you should only be drinking white wines with chicken and fish.

Exactly. As it turns out, even wine people that actually know a lot more about about wine or perhaps they think they know a lot more about wine as well, you know, minutes than I do.

Actually, they also agree that that's not quite the pairing is not quite that straightforward because there is a difference between full bodied and light bodied wines. So a full bodied, you know, very heavy white wine, like a Chardonnay, you could actually use it, you know, with meat and a very light bodied red can go with fish. That's the thing.

Now, the question is, you know, is there any reason, rhyme or reason behind that other than somebody just got up in the morning and said so? Right.

Yeah, I used to worry a lot more about what kind of wine to bring to a dinner party or what kind of wine to serve at my own dinner parties. And now I just sort of like, you know, spend 30 seconds, pick something and then figure I'll make up a story to people about why it goes well with the foods that are being served with.

And whatever story I make up will be convincing enough when we're done with this particular sub portion of this episode. I'll tell you my fail proof recipe for choosing a wine. Excellent.

But so so it turns out there is some evidence about this this sort of stuff. And, you know, first of all, it's as you know, it's a huge industry. You know, wine bottles can go for, you know, hundreds or thousands of dollars. And that wine industry in the United States has been exploding over the last several years. You know, wine didn't used to be a particularly popular in the United States until, you know, maybe a couple of decades ago, unlike, let's say, in Europe.

But now it is. And you find it everywhere. There's major producers of wine in the United States, of course, are major importers and wine. So we're talking about a fairly large industry.

And we're talking about, as you pointed out in the beginning, it's sort of an industry that is characterised by a certain amount of snobbery. There is these there are people who claim that they can tell the difference between, let's say, a 91 and 94 or 89 rating on Wine Spectator or something like that. And those ratings make a difference, because my understanding is that if you're wine gets an 89, let's say, as opposed to a 91 or 92, that can make a major difference in terms of the business for the producer of that of their wine, because, you know, people are going to buy it or not buy compare, you know, depending on the reviews.

Yeah, I remember poring over the reviews and Wine Spectator because years ago I, I dated a guy who's really, really into wines like the point where he would get a big, like, temperature controlled wine cellar and he would buy wines that weren't going to peak until, you know, 15 years from then. And he was he was, you know, not in a crushing kind of way, but sort of an excited way, trying to get me to, like, develop my palate for wine.

And I really I really tried.

I swear, I I, like, kept reading the ratings and try and descriptions and trying to distinguish between the different kinds of wine and and see if I could. Well, that one was like a 90 instead of a 80 or whatever, and all that ended up happening was that this process refined my ability to do cold readings.

I would taste the wine would be good in a relationship, you know, and it wasn't a terrible it was not a waste of time, I'll say that actually felt like I would taste the wine and he would sort of look at me expectantly and say, well, what do you think?

And then I'd start off very tentatively. Well, you know, so, you know, my my first impression was I was, you know, this sort of like light like spring feeling and watching his face either he would like looks to be a slight consternation or they'd be like, you'd be excited. And so I would either continue on, say, you know, which then, you know, was amplified as like the wine, like, really burst onto my palate.

Or I would say, you know, but that was like clearly misleading because really, like, when the wine comes into its own, you know, you start to taste this other thing. And by the way, something great will happen to you later this week.

OK, so as it turns out, there is research into these kind of things.

And it turns out that wine experts were talking about actual wine experts, not people just claim, you know, during the weekend that they learned about wine.

They actually make mistakes quite often. They're they're not consistent in in in the way they read things.

So, for instance, one study showed that once you blindfold wine wine experts, you get a variation of typically about plus or minus four points on a scale, on the scale, on the standard scale that goes from zero to 100. So from 80 to 100.

So you get a variation of four point four point three plus or minus.

So so that means if you if you get a you give a rating to a wine of, let's say, 85, and then the following reading can go as high as 89 on the same wine by the same person or as low as 81.

And on that scale, that's a huge difference. I said that that makes a difference actually, in terms of sales for the wine.

And it turns out that that some some people, actually some judges actually had a narrower or significantly narrower error, like, you know, plus or minus maybe two points instead of four.

But the thing is that if you repeat that the the test year after year, the judges that are very good, a very consistent one year become less consistent the following year and so on and so forth. So it looks like it's fairly random.

But wouldn't it be sort of surprising if one judge was very consistent on all the wines that he tasted in one year and then was not consistent on the next?

But like, isn't isn't the fact that he was consistent on the first batch still a surprising thing that, like, we can't just talk about?

Well, first of all, it wasn't consistent. As I said, everybody made mistakes. It's just that the range of the mistakes was larger or smaller.

And the idea is that I think the data showed that even the judges with the smallest range, the ones that were more consistent or less inconsistent than others, depending on how you want to put it, they themselves then eventually, you know, repeated the task. The following year, they actually had a larger amount of variation than they did before, which which seems to indicate their average changes.

Exactly right.

That that their their accuracy, if that's what what you're measuring is actually changing from year to year. So on average, this seems to be quite a bit of variation. So that tells you that even wine experts are not exactly consistent. Now, that doesn't mean they're completely random, obviously, but it does mean that the famous differences of two or three points on The Wine Spectator may actually not be nothing because they're not consistent.

But there was like a general like moderate correlation between what this one expert thought was a really good wine and what one expert thought was a really good wine.

Yeah, I think there is there is a general, although the thing is wine.

The other thing to keep in mind is that actually the range of of quality of the ones that are typically tested in actual testing, you know, in actual competitions, it's theoretically fairly narrow because there are also already very good wines we're not going to test.

So but the point is that actually a significant amount of inconsistency.

The other thing and that that's the one that really struck me is as fantastic is that wine experts in a blind test cannot tell the difference between a white wine and the red wine.

OK, now that that requires some clarifying. Yes, I love that. I love that sound bite as much as you do.

But it does require some clarifying because it wasn't that they were the the wine tasters were given two wines, you know, blindfold and told one of these is right. One of these is red, a white, you know, can you figure out which is which? It was that they were told that they were drinking red wine and asked to rate and describe the red wine when in fact, one of the ones they were drinking was actually white wine dyed red.

Correct. Which is still bad, but it's pretty bad.

You're right. Yeah.

It's not as as spectacular as it sounds at first.

Yeah. I actually tried to replicate that experiment to my friend and I threw a can you tell the difference between red and white wine tasting party. And so we had like 15 of our friends sample a bunch of different wines blindfolded. We had maybe seven reds and seven whites. And we would like randomize which wine we. People taste and people could tell the difference, but again, in this case, we were asking them to guess as opposed to like trying to trick them by priming them to think that they were drinking.

And of course, in theory, at least, you know, there's supposed to be a really, really big difference between white wines and red wine, between most reds and most white.

But aren't there some whites that taste a little more like reds and some a little more like white?

Yeah, I suppose that goes back to what I was saying, the beginning. The difference between light bodied, full body, medium between bodied wines. Yes, I suppose that there is some overlap, but, you know.

We're not talking I mean, not being able to make the difference, the distinction between red and white, even under those conditions, seems pretty bad for an expert, for, you know, for a normal person, I suppose. It's not that not it's not quite as bad, but for an expert, it's pretty.

But people in the red and white experiment, I think we're not quite experts. They were like students of enology or something.

OK, not an expert in training and training. Now, apparently, another interesting thing that that turns out if you do readings on these things, is that apparently at least some critics, some wine critics know that a lot of what they say, it's not exactly that self-consistent mean.

There's this quote here for from a person named Joe Power, who is the editor of another wine blog, which is apparently very popular.

And here's a quotation from you know, from from from his writing.

He says, Well, today we apologise to Mr Penn and Teller. I am going to stand up and shout Vine wine reviews are bullshit. And if you're wondering if this is going to be some justification of why our reviews are just spiffy and everyone else is full of shit, you can stop wondering. Ours is bullshit, too. It is just the nature of the beast.

And his last day, as I not think so, but that his argument actually was interesting because and it does go with other similar kinds of issues, not just with wine, but also with food in general. His argument was that, look, this is not a science. This is really much more of an art.

And and the way you test taste of wine, you know how you taste the wine actually depends a lot, not just on the wine and not just, by the way, and on the on the taste, of course, but the smell, the the look of the wine and so on and so forth. And, you know, it's all the senses are involved, but also on the environment, as it turns out, you know, if you taste the same stuff, the same food, for instance, you know, at a McDonald's, it tastes different.

And then if you taste it at a fancy restaurant because your brain reacts to the full experience and it's much more difficult to isolate these sort of neutral bits and pieces that make up for this for this experience.

And which doesn't mean that perhaps you phrase a little too strongly to bullshit, but but it means that there's much more of an art. You know, it's much more similar to art criticism than or literary criticism than then to something like a science. Not the terminology with with the with the Latin root seems to indicate that there is a science there as opposed to an art.

You're very protective of your own country's language. You use in cases where it's not justified.

You know that there is something to that.

Yeah, I think this this research, it doesn't completely discredit people's claims about the experiences that they're having. No, like, so so, you know, it's sorry.

I guess the net conclusion from the studies in which people can't tell the difference between expensive and cheap wines are between red and white wine and also the neuroscience showing that people actually are having a different experience when they're taking the expensive versus the cheap wine. The net conclusion there is it's not that people are sort of pretending to the world or to themselves.

They're having a different experience, a better experience from the expensive wine. They actually are having a better experience. It's just that that's the result of cues in the environment and their expectations as opposed to.

That's right. The features of the wine itself. That's right.

And I want also to quote another another interesting little bit. This is from an article that we will post them on on the podcasts website analysing, you know, going through all this evidence.

And one of the interesting things here is that wine descriptions, as you were saying a little earlier, tend to be this is really based on these really florid language that has to do with. Well, let me let me read you something, because this example is pretty interesting. So let's see. The principle flavours of a particular wine were described as red roses, lavender geranium, dried I, Becka's flowers, cranberry reasons, currant, jelly, mango with skins.

But do you tell really making the cherry red plum cobbler, cinnamon star anise, blackberry bowl and whole black peppercorn.

This is amazing, this amazing amount of information in there. And it turns out actually that that studies in the Journal of Experimental Psychology showed that actually wine tasters can only taste only, you know, three or four components of a particular flavor and not that many, not a dozen or 15.

Are they at least consistent across each other in the you know, like if this wine taster says this wind has like currants and geraniums and, you know, Bach or whatever, then is another one. Tastes are going to say, that's a good question.

I don't I don't know. We could we could probably crowdsource that. I just another tip from you, if you happen to be hanging around with or dating wine lovers, I was actually briefly in a Scotch tasting club.

This is during my, like, thinking I was an older gentleman trapped in a young woman's body.

Is which all? Yeah, yeah, I remember that right now.

But anyway, in the Scotch Club, someone I like could not tell the difference between the fancier scotches and the less fancy scotches. And someone like always had a very sort of eloquent way of describing the Scotches confided in me that the method that he uses, we're trying to generate a description of the Scotch is that he thinks of a weird person that he knows and just described that.

So you say like, you know, it like it sort of comes on really strong and like surprises you and it's kind of unsettling and like, you sort of like wish that it would go away. But then you can't you find that like you keep thinking about it and like it leaves this sort of like disturbing aftertaste in your mouth and, you know, but then you find yourself wanting more.

And I'm not I'm not doing it justice, but which sounds much more interesting than say something like this. This Scotch tastes like Jack.

There was there was actually a famous New Yorker cartoon sort of applying a version of the strategy to Wines by James Thurber. So this collection of upper class people are sitting around the fancy dining table and the host of the dinner party is serving a wine.

And she's telling her guests it's a naive domestic burgundy without any breeding.

But I think you'll be amused by its presumption, not to mention the perception of the hosts. Indeed, one more thing. So so this some studies actually show this, again, a blunt blind tasting studies.

They actually do show a positive correlation between price and enjoyment of the wine in experts.

That is, it turns out, you know, experts and in fact, I mean, it's a mild correlation.

It's not exactly very strong, but it's a correlation. There's significant correlation. But here's the kicker.

When you do the same study on a layperson, the correlation becomes negative mildly.

But still, yes, it's negative, which in other words, most people actually enjoy better, slightly cheaper wines. When you put the two together, it means that actually you should do the opposite of what the experts tell you.

Oh, because you favor you know, they favor the expensive wines, but you actually would prefer the least expensive ones, as it turns out, you enjoyed those. And so you should actually do exactly the opposite of what you just had a negative sign in front of. Exactly.

So what I do basically at this point, after years and years and years of going to the wine store and picking wines is the following. First of all, I pick a reasonable price range within which I'm willing to stay. I stay away from very, very cheap wines, but I don't go above certain depending on the occasion, of course, also. But I don't go above a certain range. And then within that range, I start by tasting, you know, week after week things that sound interesting on the basis of previous experience.

And once I find not only a particular type of wine, but a particular producer, for instance, I have a favorite, a couple of favorite zinfandels red red wines. There are two producers that make Zinfandels that I like consistently. Like any time every time that I open those bottles, I like them. I have a good enjoyment and good experience. And often when I open up the bottles of Zinfandel, I don't have that experience.

And you know what?

I don't care if it is now objective or scientifically repeatable or whatever it is. I'm having a good experience. It's worth my money. And therefore, I think that's the best thing one can do. It just just try a few things. And once you find things that are that are good enough for you that that work for you, stick with them.

And, of course, know try something new just for the hell of it, because you never know.

Occasionally I have discovered, for instance, in a new type of right. Wine, red wine that I was not aware of recently. It's an Italian produced northern Italian wine, unfortunately, happens to be very expensive. So it's it's it's not the kind of thing that I'm going to drink on a regular basis.

So maybe you can get a friend of yours who at some point in the future or maybe I can get a friend of yours to slip the label of that wine onto the bottle. Cheaper stuff for your benefit.

It also occurs to me before we leave the topic of wine behind entirely, the fact that the experts could tell the difference between the expensive and the cheap wines and that they preferred the expensive ones could be due to the fact that they, um. Well, sorry, I can't explain away the fact that they can tell the difference being expensive and cheap wines, but the fact that they prefer the expensive wines could be from the fact that they can recognize features of expensive ones.

And they like know on some level that they're supposed to prefer the expensive ones, like the price.

No, no. These are these are. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Yes.

And so. Right. So from the studies where the experts prefer wines that turned out to be expensive ones, we can conclude that they can tell the difference between expensive and cheap, but we can conclude that they wouldn't prefer expensive wines if they didn't know that expensive wines taste this way, right? That's right. So should we talk about water from wine to water?

Wine? We should have gone the other direction. Probably, yes.

But so the water thing is as to do, of course, with bottled water in particular.

And there is a couple of nice, you know, exposures of these things out. One was done by John Stossel back in 2005, I think. And there's a famous episode.

Well, I don't know if it's famous, but one that I remember very well. Famous, exactly.

Famous to me of Penn and Teller is bullshit about about bottled water. And that one was very amusing because they what they did, one of the things that they did was to get permission from a restaurant, fairly expensive restaurant in California to serve a bottled water menu to to the patterns and, you know, explaining the differences between these and then and the other. And of course, they were all pricey. And then they filmed these people, you know, picking the water and reacted, reacts accordingly, of course, the taste.

And then they showed that in the back, all of the waiters were actually simply tap water coming out of the back of the restaurant.

That was good for the restaurant thereafter or I'm not I'm not sure.

But the thing is, there are, in fact, all these things that you see, all these types of water out there, a couple of those that really stuck on my mind from the Stossel article where water for Venus, water for women, which is kidding, seriously.

And my favorite and apparently also Stossel favorite. Trump ice as in the Donald.

Oh, my God. Yes. As he pointed out, they will have to pay me or buy that sort of stuff, but to drink that sort of stuff.

But sorry, just very briefly, I have to share the story. My friend, my male friend went into a, you know, convenience store or whatever, 7-Eleven, and he bought I remember it being like energy drink for women. I don't think it was water for women. I don't think that had reached the 7-Eleven. Or maybe it was an energy bar for women.

Regardless, there are energy. I know that there are energy, but there definitely yes, there definitely are those Luna bars and anybody at the counter. And the clerk sort of looked at him, said, you know, that's for women. Right. And my friend was like, I don't care. It's an energy bar.

Like, I'm sure it's fine. And the clerk was like, you really want to eat something that's for women? And he wasn't kidding. He was like there was like disgust, like, what's wrong with you, man? You know, in his voice. And he almost refused to sell this thing to my friend, and he finally rang it up and gave it to the buyer, to my friend, but he was like shaking his head, like, disdainfully the entire time.

You definitely don't want food. That is just specifically for women. It's not a horrible idea.

So the idea is, first of all, that you find a lot of people who are actually environmentally conscious or at least they think that they're environmentally conscious, that they drink bottled water. And usually they give you a number of reasons for it, one of which is, in fact, that it's safer and healthier or whatever it is.

Now, first of all, one of the major environmental disasters being caused by such a large usage of bottled water because these these plastic bottle bottles are not recyclable. And when even when they are recyclable, waste of energy.

Oh, it's actually it's actually not worth it to recycle them. I, I don't know the actual date on this, but somewhat dependent depending on the company. Actually some of them are difficult to recycle. They're not worth it.

But even the ones that are we're still talking about a continuous production of plastic material, which is something that if you are in an environmental rally, for instance, you probably should be against it just as a matter as a matter of principle.

It's a lot of waste at the very least, you know, bring your own container and refill it. But of course, there are no it because then when you have to use tap water and that seems to be the problem. Right.

The evidence seems to show pretty clearly that there is no difference in taste or no consistent difference in taste between the different brands. And in fact, often in these, whenever people do the test, turns out the tap water actually ranks toward the top depending on where you actually get the tap water. For instance, in New York, tap water is pretty good and it's and it's also very, very healthy, meaning that it has bacteriological analysis are very clean.

Why is that? Is that the clean the absence of bacteria, the reason why New York tap water is supposed to be good?

I've definitely heard this and I know that into my brain of well knows whether it's true.

Yeah. And you know, New York water is good for two reasons. One is it is in fact better really clean.

And that that is because of the filtering system that the city uses.

The other one is that it actually tastes pretty good because it has actually a large amount of minerals. Typically, for instance, I come from Roman Roman work. Water is also very good. And that's because it's got a lot of calcium. It tastes it has a it's a hard water.

And you can tell that actually, because when you boil pasta with Roman water, you have a lot of calcification in that in the Empire.

Yeah, but the fact that that New York tap water tastes so good, that's what it is. But I mean, have we actually confirmed this?

Because it's one of the many things I know I did this, this, this. I know for a fact I looked into it.

But the fact is that that's not all good, because if it is calcium, I'm not sure about New York water. But in the case of Rome, it is calcium. And if it's calcium, that's going to cause your kidney stones.

So it tastes good, but no long term.

Yeah, there's the problem is that the point is that these the tap water usually ranks either in the middle or even at the top when when you have a blind test of of competing waters. So which, of course, right there to the taste is not entirely different.

And when people actually done the bacteriological analysis, a lot of tap water is in fact very good from bacteriological perspective.

Not only that, but some of the bottled water actually are tap water.

Go from there. Yes. The article in Stoessel actually specifies a couple of these. For instance, Aquafina, which is one of the major brands, is actually, you know, that's that comes from the Detroit River. And I don't know anything specifically a chemical about the Detroit River, but, you know, it's not exactly the glacier in Iceland or, you know, the mountain tops of all.

Why?

And so people might want to be clear about, you know, careful about these things. You know, Everest water does not come from Mt. Everest.

You know, mountains on their logo. Masimo. I know it's amazing. But apparently Everest water comes from Corpus Christi, Texas, where I'm sure they also have mountains. But, you know, it's kind of different sort of mountains. You know, glacier water does not come from Alaska and so on. It actually is from Greensville, Tennessee, and so on and so forth. So now there are some areas that actually are from what they say they are.

Isolette Spring is really from Iceland, as it turns out.

Now, they are frustrated that they can't distinguish themselves from all the other waters that aren't really from ice.

Like, no, really this time, guys, for serious.

But again, if you are environmentally conscious, you know, the next question is, why would you want your water to be flown from from Iceland, which is obviously a pretty expensive and high carbon footprint way of transporting water, where, in fact, you could probably just open your faucet in the kitchen and get your water in a recyclable container.

Yeah. I wonder, what have you ever had any success trying to create that feeling of enjoyment that you would have gotten from believing that the water was from, you know, a glacier or believing that the wine was super expensive? Like you think that it's possible to recreate that feeling if you know it's not true. But you like. I don't know. Can you just imagine it in a really vivid way?

Would that produce the same question that's sort of similar like, you know, the placebo effect work once, you know, that is actually.

Yes, right. And they do a study on that. That's right. So but but does it work at the same level? I think the evidence is that it does work, but less so. So once you get skepticism into it, unfortunately, you know, people are right. Skepticism really does ruin the enjoyment, unfortunately.

Well, maybe we can make up some of that the difference back by instead of imagining, you know, like, OK, so let's say originally I believe the wine was like three hundred dollars and tasted really good, but that wasn't true. And then I found out it wasn't true. It was only like a ten dollar wine. So then I imagined if I had just imagine the wine was three hundred dollars, it won't be as good as if I thought it really was right.

But I could imagine it was three thousand dollars and maybe like I still only get like, you know, 10 percent of that benefit, but I still end up at the same point of enjoyment as I would have been.

This is hairbrained.

Or you can or you can give me three hundred dollars and look at my happy face and enjoy the day.

Go on. Well, I think that's that's pretty much the thing with with with the water.

I mean, you know, there's a number of studies and essentially if anybody tells you that they know that such and such water is better for them or tastes better, they're probably not saying the right thing, although we want to be delicate in how we express that to them, because ultimately, skeptics don't need to tarnish their reputation of being sweet, polite, friendly dinner party guests.

Oh, is that the reputation we have? I did not know that. Now we want to move to the next topic. Yes. Audio files. Audio files.

So what's the big deal with the audio file? So there's been a controversy about these really very, very expensive. Let's with audio cables actually first and then we'll go through to the audio files.

So there's been this controversy which is actually involved, the James Randi and and his foundation about about all your cables in particular, a type of audio cables that are produced by Speyer Corporation, apair corporation, PR..

Andrew Speaker cables. Now, these cables are, you know, you seen in these in audio stories, these monster cables that are, you know, eighty dollars or ninety dollars or something like that.

And I have ever seen and then I never really OK, maybe I can't think of you find them also in your Best Buy or something like that or even a RadioShack.

And typically you have, you know, the regular audio cable and there is the monster stuff and the regular one is twenty dollars. The monster is eighty dollars and I usually get four for the twenty dollar because I don't believe that the monster cable is actually that much better.

Well. Pair Andrew Speaker cables actually cost seven thousand two hundred and fifty dollars, I'm sorry I misheard you. I thought you said seven thousand two hundred fifty dollars.

You heard me correctly. But that's a lot of good wine, by the way. Not to mention a lot of good water. And yes.

So the question is, well, are they actually worth it? You know, so this is, what, a 12 foot cable? So it's it's a several hundred dollars per foot of the cable.

And, well, it turns out that James or indeed the James Randi Foundation sort of the challenge to the PR people and say, OK, if you're so sure about your your cable, here's a million dollars, if you can prove it under control conditions and the fact that their cables produced better sound right.

Sound that could reliably be detected as being better by a blind observer. Correct.

Now, of course, there's a different question there, whether the cables are actually capable of producing a sound that is of a higher quality as perceived by a human ear. And then there's the further question of yes, but even if they are they worth seven thousand dollars?

Well, now we're not getting into the latter question, obviously, because that, you know, if you have seven thousand dollars to just burn, fine, go ahead. You can do in a variety of ways.

But the question the real question is, you know, presumably what justifies in the mind of the company and the mind of the consumer, the seven thousand dollars, is that these things are really significantly better than than the regular stuff.

So James Randi did his usual thing, you know, sort of challenging that these people. And it turns out that they backed out of the challenge.

Apparently not. Not surprisingly, despite these kinds of things, happens a lot with the GAO reformation.

Occasionally there are people actually did they give a reason for backing out?

Well, that's where things get really complicated. There's been there is a lot of correspondence back and forth. There's a lot of posts on the giraffe discussion boards about this by including by James Rendi himself. And there is, you know, links to email exchanges and things like that. So it's hard to tell exactly what happened.

Actually, at least I did not have enough time to dig deeply into these things. One of the things that, however, I found that was interesting is that James Randi is also criticized. Another person who was involved in this in these test, Michael Flamer and Michael Fromer, is right in his analogy of a self-described audio file and writes for a publication that has to do with these things, Stereophile.

And apparently he was involved in the original challenge that he was supposed to be doing the past actually or being involved somehow in the past.

And there is a little bit of a controversy there, because Randi claims that both peer and and this guy and frame frame are actually pulled out and claims that he did not that it was all pear's doing and that he actually was still up for the for the for the challenge.

Not only that, but there is further complication, because apparently Firmat had insisted on using his own reference cable and Randi had not initially agreed, but not even not necessarily disagreed on doing it.

There is an issue of, you know, it becomes more complicated to actually test do the test if one uses his own reference cable, although it's perfectly possible because you can add additional controls and that sort of stuff.

So, quite honestly, at that point, once I started reading that FAQ, I got confused about what exactly was happening.

Yeah, it really seems like there's so many ways for. Well, there's definitely a ton of ways for audio files. You don't want it to be shown that they can't distinguish between different, you know, expense. And she sounds different ways for them to, you know, protest that a test couldn't reveal the actual difference because, well, for example, you know, you like played short clips of sounds, but the difference only really emerges over, like, long periods of time or something.

There's so many ways, but there's also a bunch of ways for the tests to actually be really designed.

So it really is a pretty complicated issue when you're talking about something that subtle and subjective and personal. Right.

So the issue actually that the only thing that concerned me about that about that exchange was really the way in which I guess both parties went about it.

I cannot possibly adjudicate this thing from a distance. You know, we don't have access to all the emails and went back and forth and all that.

But it struck me like. I had this feeling from reading the posts and counter posts that the while the Bayer Corporation did not really seem to have a particularly good reason to back out, the Defamer issue is much more more up in the air. It's more complicated. And one things that that I think we need to be careful about our skeptics is, in fact, as you, I think were mentioning a few minutes ago, in a different context, not coming across as hard as it is and not coming across as well.

I know that you you're lying or you're bullshitting and so on.

And you just and I want to put you on the spot in the position, embarrassing that sort of stuff, because there may be people who actually are generally convinced of a certain notion and they're not trying to defraud anybody or and they may be right.

Because we don't know. I mean, this was not done. So we we don't know whether whether in this case, the test would actually been know, positive or not. Yeah.

And so this is an objection brought up sometimes by by the audio files, which I can't really dismiss that. Maybe.

So if you if you test a group of people to see if they can tell the difference between the high quality cables and the low quality cables and the group cat, you know, the group doesn't have a statistically significant rate of guessing the, you know, correct guesses.

That doesn't actually rule out the chance that there are like individuals whose hearing is really good and that they can actually reliably tell the difference. That's right. And and so it's at least possible that, you know, some individuals discovered this difference and were like, whoa, I can totally tell the difference is so good.

You guys have to hear this. And then other people just through the power of suggestion. Really?

Yeah, that's so good. Even though they couldn't really tell the difference and they didn't know it.

And so this is like large tests aren't like just because the test can't show a difference in the group, the group's perception doesn't mean that's correct individual.

Not only that, but it could be very well be. The one becomes an audio file precisely because one can tell those kind of differences. I mean, just like you become a musician, if you can actually tell certain differences in tone or, you know, in music that other people cannot, there's a there's a variety of responses.

So you're right.

I mean, this is one of those areas where, you know, unlike, say, things like claims of astrology.

So, for instance, at one point many years ago, I was involved in one of the preliminary stages of the of a test for the James Randi Foundation. And this was when I was doing Tennessee. And there was this guy who was claiming that he was able to do dowsing, you know, finding water with with a with a rod.

And so the James Randi Foundation asked the local group, the rationalists of East Tennessee, to conduct a preliminary test to see if, you know, if there was enough there, basically two to go and send him to the next stage.

And there wasn't.

And, you know, it was very easy to figure out. And we went in a field, we had a bunch of buckets of water. We showed the buckets with the guy. Some of the half of the markets were empty. Half were full of water.

When you could see the rod was actually was responding. So we tested that, you know, yes, everything was working fine. Then we randomising covered the buckets. And sure enough, we got about 50 percent of them. Right.

So now that's that kind of test. It's easy to perform. And you can tell ahead of time pretty much if you have experience about these kind of things. Yeah.

He's going to feel, you know, there's no such thing as water that he's going to fail. But in the case of things like complicated, like consumer, a lot of consumer related stuff, it may not be that easy. The water thing is testing, I think, is much easier to carry out than things like, you know, the quality of audio cables or audio audio files.

In the case of the audio files, for instance, one of the major discussions, from what I understand, concerns of different formats. You can now get, of course, music in a variety of different formats from a resurgence, albeit small, of vinyl records to CDs clearly, and then to a variety of digital files.

Now, the question there is, you know, how much is is anything lost between one format than another? And if so, how much?

And there are two major types of compression files. One is none loss in the other one is as loss.

So the MP three, which is the most used know, is losses. So it doesn't it does actually demonstrably, reliably lose certain parts of of the, you know, the information that went into it. And that's, of course, relevant because it's the one that is used the most often. It's on all the MP three players, including the most popular one used on iTunes and so on and so forth.

There are losses there. There are compression files that don't have losses demonstrably.

So there is you can compare the spectrum of these things in music, the sound aspect of these things with the CD from which they were ripped. And you can see that there is no loss.

So those things you can do, the problem there, of course, as well. Is the loss enough when it occurs that it actually makes a difference is detectable. That's right.

Detectable by Umina, because you can easily show that there is a difference, just like, you know, I'm sure something similar can be done when winds. I mean, I'm sure the winds do have. Different chemical properties. The question is, are those chemical properties sufficiently discernible by human taste that you can it can make a difference in the way you enjoy your wine, similar with the with the audio files? You know, they certainly are differences between the lossless and the and the and the ones that actually have laws.

But are those losses, in fact, sufficient, as it turns out?

My understanding is that the people that come up with the algorithms that produce things like the military compression systems actually look at, of course, what it is that they're losing and they try to minimize the loss in the areas of, you know, the information that the part of the information that is actually more to which the universe is more sensitive. So they claim that they may be a loss, but the loss is very small. And there are apparently a few studies haven't looked and details in this.

But there are a couple of studies at least that seem to show that most people cannot tell the difference between even a loss, like a less compression system, loss compression system, like an arbitrary and a lossless compression system. So it turns out that regardless of what some audio files might claim, that doesn't seem to be a consistent, reliable, you know, repeatable difference.

But that doesn't mean that there are no good reasons to go to prefer the the lossless compression systems, because, for instance, one of the articles that I looked at in Computerworld pointed out that one of the people interviewed in the article pointed out that.

Yes, but there are other reasons why you might want to have the lossless file.

And that is because when the algorithms change, when the machine change, when the hardware changes, you can always translate the file, the lossless file into another lossless file type of file without loss business. If you lost something already, there's no way you can back going back unless you go back to the original source. Right, right. Right.

So there may be reasons to do it. Of course, that the the the counterweight to that one is that.

Yes, but lossless files do actually occupy a significant amount of space, much more storage space than the computer files and things like that. And that's why they're less popular among, you know, people that listen to music more casually because they actually you know, typically I think I think the idea is that you can only fit something like about 20 CDs on a typical Demitri player.

If you do it in lossless, if you use a lossless compression system as opposed to the thousands of songs, you know, if you take one of those tests to see if you can tell the difference between the loss losses and the loss, the formats, you should actually be pleased if it turns out that your ears are not that finely tuned because it means you can store.

That's right. Before we wrap up the topic of of audio, Iliya, I just want to say that although I am sympathetic to the idea that there are valid criticisms to make of testing procedures in general and, you know, including in the case of testing a sound quality, people's ability to detect sound quality, there are also less valid objections. And as I was reading some of the articles from the debates in Stereophile, which is one of the audio file magazines online, I encountered some of some objections that just reminded me so much of the objections raised by like phenomena, proponents or other proponents of paranormal phenomena.

And when those tests fail to to show a real effect. And so I just want to read you a quote from from an article by Essence Rinus five years ago. He says the crazy thing about this ongoing debate is that listening to music is not a rational scientific phenomenon.

Who knows where the music that a composer puts on paper actually comes from, let alone the source of the inspiration with which musicians bring those notes to life?

Can you explain why one interpretation of a classical song moves you to tears and another leaves you cold? Can you scientifically explain what makes your heart skip a beat? Of course not.

And since audio components and cables are nothing more than electrical conduit for that which lies beyond words and reason. How can we expect charts, graphs and short bursts of preselected tones to tell us everything about how important will affect which of course, is like both a straw man and a straw Vulcan? In one paragraph, because the question is not about why, or at least the question under discussion in this article. And, you know, in general in the audio file community is not about why some people are moved by the song versus that song.

It's about whether people are correct, that they can reliably tell the difference between certain formats compared to other formats. And even though music is not I don't know, you could make the case that composing music is not like a scientific process and that the experience of listening to music is not a scientific process, although sort of fuzzy what that even means. Yes. That doesn't mean that they can't be that aspects of that process can be studied scientifically.

This is something I hear again and again.

And you mentioned since you mentioned that there is an interesting little sort of irony there that I notice in reading some of these things about the audio files, apparently at least some subset of section of the audio file community feels under attack because people these people are criticizing them for making claims about what they can and cannot discern that they're not true and so forth.

And they said, well, why are we on their attack and not the the people that claim that they can taste a 500 dollar bottle of wine as well?

As it turns out, that's not a particularly good defense because those people also apparently don't have much of an idea what they're doing, S.E..

All right. We are over time. So I'm going to wrap up the section of the podcast and move on to the rationally speaking.

Welcome back. Every episode, Julie and I pick a couple of our favorite books, movies, websites or whatever tickles our rational fancy. Let's start as usual with Julia Spik.

Thinks about the room I pick is a book that just came out called Decisive How to make Better Choices in Life and Work In spite of Ethan.

Dan, the brothers who I thought was by George W. Bush, was the decider. No, sorry, but this is a different kind of decision anyway.

Chip and Dan Heath were the brothers who wrote the book Switch How to Change Things When Change Is Hard and also made to stick. Why some ideas survive and others die. They have a very like, catchy conversational tone. It's very easy to read book and decisive is funny. Someone emailed me about decisive and and they're like, wow, this could have been a Cifas. But if I was my organization, the Center for Applied Rationality, things like this could have been a sci fi book.

And I read it like, oh my God, they're right.

It's all about like how to take what cognitive scientists have learned over the last few decades of research about the kinds of mistakes the human brain tends to make. When we reason or make decisions and end each chapter is about how to turn that research into like a practical sort of rule for yourself to follow when you're making decisions. And it's like very down to earth, very practical. They have case studies. And because the Heath brothers are the ones who made the stick, which was all about like how to make ideas really catchy, like how to make memes stick all of their techniques, have nice catchy names like the ute and the zoom in, zoom out.

And so it's fun to read. It sounds good.

Well, mine is a book too that I just finished reading recently. It's not it's pretty recent. I mean, think it came out last year. It's by Corey Robin, who is a political scientist at City University in New York. So he's a colleague, although I don't know him personally. And the title of the book is The Reactionary Mind The Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. And it's an interesting take on you know, there's been a number of books recently.

In fact, we had a guest talking about the Republican brain.

Right, Chris Mooney. And there's been a number of books recently like Chris's on, you know, using sort of science and neurobiology and especially neurobiology and to some extent genetics and in evolutionary biology to sort of understand political differences, in particular, the conservative mind. This one is a completely different take on it. It's really it's political science and political philosophy and in history of politics.

And I have to say, you know, with all due respect to Chris, I actually think I learned a lot more about the conservative mind from the first, you know, couple of chapters of this book than from anything else I've read previously. And the reason for that is because it's a different level of analysis.

I don't I'm not claiming that that sort of a neurobiological or in my opinion, much less so a genetic or evolutionary biological approach. Don't tell you anything interesting about, you know, why people have different ideologies. Certainly they do.

I do think, however, in fact, we talked about this even during the episode with with Chris, that actually a better level of analysis is the psychological one or the sociological one then, rather than the sort of neural, biological and genetic this one here than in the reactionary mind by Corey.

Robin gives you the historical, philosophical and political perspective.

And it really does make a lot of sense through the study of a number of different people, different major exponents of the conservative movement throughout a long period of time. Corey defines Robin. Robin defines the what he calls the reactionary mindset as essentially originating with in modern times with the French Revolution. And so then he follows, you know, events after the French Revolution, Muslims in more modern times.

And he comes up with, you know, evidence based because this is this is scholarship. This is the guy is not just giving his own opinions. I mean, they are his opinions, but not just his opinions. The scholarship, however, is based on textual analysis on what these people actually say and what these people actually do. And these the insights I think that one gets from this at the very least, complementary to the ones you might get from, you know, more neurobiological or psychological analysis of this phenomena.

So I highly recommend the book. The only drawback to the book is that he actually is a collection of essays published previously. So it doesn't have quite that sort of nice flow and structure then.

Yeah. You know, cohesiveness that that it would otherwise have, but it's not very enjoyable.

Excellent. Well, listeners, you now have some summer reading to tide you over, which is a good thing because Masimo and I are going on hiatus.

We are taking the first summer break we've taken since the beginning of our podcast, Colea vacation. But yes.

So we're going to be back in September and this will be the last episode you'll get. Then we'll come up with new episodes, new guests, and hopefully refreshed with new ideas. Yeah, so. This concludes another episode of rationally speaking. Join us in September for more explorations on the borderlands between reason and not. The rationally speaking podcast is presented by New York City skeptics for program notes, links, and to get involved in an online conversation about this and other episodes, please visit rationally speaking podcast Dog.

This podcast is produced by Benny Pollack and recorded in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York. Our theme, Truth by Todd Rundgren, is used by permission. Thank you for listening.