[HN Gopher] Lady tasting tea
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Lady tasting tea
Author : momonga
Score : 96 points
Date : 2024-08-30 21:00 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| m463 wrote:
| > in the actual experiment the lady succeeded in identifying all
| eight cups correctly.
|
| :)
| jitl wrote:
| Men: inventing new statistics methods to prove a lady wrong
|
| Lady: is right
| teddyh wrote:
| Nobody brought gender into this.
| playingalong wrote:
| Berry. I hate tea with milk.
| mmh0000 wrote:
| Of course, any article mentioning tea, must include a reference
| to ISO 3103 -- A Standardized Method for Brewing Tea[1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3103
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| producing "a cupful of liquid that is almost, but not quite,
| entirely unlike tea" - h2g2
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Wasn't this demonstrated by the Royal Chemical Society that
| pouring the milk into the tea creates a detectable trace of
| caramelization of the milk sugar or protein denaturation due to
| the momentary high temperature on the milk while the tea:milk
| ratio was very high at the initial pour?
|
| https://www.vahdam.com/blogs/tea-us/milk-first-or-last-the-s...
| BinRoo wrote:
| That wouldn't undermine or deter from the point:
|
| > The null hypothesis is that the subject has no ability to
| distinguish the teas
|
| Since the hypothesis was invalidated, we can begin
| investigating _how_ she's able to distinguish it, which is what
| you're getting at.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| I've always preferred the taste of milk-first, and it never
| crossed my mind that the difference wasn't noticeable.
|
| I didn't realise it was a class marker until someone described
| it as "a bit MBT" (milk before tea.)
|
| Apparently where they were from this subtle social shading
| really mattered.
| nicbou wrote:
| Apparently milk before tea is lower class because poor people
| would want to avoid cracking low quality porcelain with hot
| tea. Fascinating!
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Was that a genuine concern? Boiling water has a fixed
| maximum temperature. Not sure that room temp->90C is all
| that different from room temp to 100C for ceramic.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| With a very thick glass, you definitely can crack it with
| boiling water. I didn't know if earthenware is similarly
| susceptible, but anything that is both brittle, and has a
| high enough rate of thermal expansion would be.
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| And low enough rate of thermal conductivity.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Milk before tea cannot still be a class marker, though. To do
| milk before tea necessitates the use of a teapot but I would
| say using a teapot makes one seem more posh than poor.
|
| However, I do wonder whether some people are confused and
| think milk first means the teabag goes into the milk. This
| would explain why some people seem inexplicably horrified by
| it.
| nmeofthestate wrote:
| This is all from pre tea bags, when everyone used teapots,
| I'd assume.
| lisper wrote:
| Why wouldn't the same thing happen when the milk first hits the
| tea?
|
| Id anything I would think there should be more caramelization
| in the TBM case because there should be more heat in the larger
| volume of tea and so the milk should get hotter at the point of
| initial contact.
| dpassens wrote:
| That's exactly what was found and what GP said.
| lisper wrote:
| Ah, right, sorry. Polarity error.
| zug_zug wrote:
| > Thus, if and only if the lady properly categorized all 8 cups
| was Fisher willing to reject the null hypothesis - effectively
| acknowledging the lady's ability at a 1.4% significance level
| (but without quantifying her ability).
|
| Important to realize though, that failure to categorize all 8
| doesn't prove anything either. It just means this one experiment
| isn't conclusive in itself (at 95% confidence).
|
| It's good to be aware of how easy it can be to get a false result
| by chance, but it's imo a worse statistical sin to propose that
| not proving something is proving the opposite (a mistake I see
| quite often).
| sjmcmahon wrote:
| This is generally good advice, but isn't it inappropriate in
| this specific instance?
|
| The lady's claim was (allegedly) that she has a perfect ability
| to distinguish between the tea-milk orders, so in that case
| even a single failure is indeed enough to reject her claim.
|
| We can't rule out her success rate being significantly greater
| than 50-50, but even a single failure puts some bounds on her
| maximum success rate.
| zug_zug wrote:
| >> The lady's claim was (allegedly) that she has a perfect
| ability to distinguish between the tea-milk orders
|
| I believe you added the word "perfect" which makes a
| substantive difference. I think this highlights the
| complications that get involved when trying to turn a simple
| proposition into an meaningful claim:
|
| - Can we prove that person X can observe taste of tea with >
| 50% reliability with 95% confidence (what Fischer did)
|
| - Can we prove that person X can observe taste of tea with
| 100% reliability with 95% confidence (not statistically
| possible)
|
| - Can we prove that person X cannot observe taste of tea with
| > 50% reliability with 95% confidence (only possible if this
| person guesses wrong more often than randomly)
|
| - Can we prove that person X cannot observe taste of tea with
| 100% reliability with 95% confidence (just need one example)
| af3d wrote:
| The probability of guessing all eight correctly is 0.5^8 (or
| roughly 0.39%). The chances of such a thing happening by mere
| fluke are quite slim. Now personally, I would have preferred a
| few more glasses to be even _more_ certain, but hey, for all
| practical purposes those results do seem fairly credible.
| yavgcnk wrote:
| Minor, but no it's 1/(8 choose 4) = 1/70 because there are 4
| tea-first, 4 milk-first, and the lady tasting tea knows this.
|
| Once the locations of the four tea-first cups are decided,
| the locations of the remaining milk-first cups are completely
| determined. (And there are 8 slots for those first 4 cups,
| hence 8 choose 4).
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Also, you need to consider your prior probabilities. If you
| performed an experiment that showed, 0.001<p<.05 that the sun
| has spontaneously stopped undergoing fusion, I wouldn't be very
| worried.
| zug_zug wrote:
| To me when I first came across this in college it was
| fascinating. I think any stem field should be taught about these
| statistical methods.
|
| The power of being able to put an objective answer on any
| personal claim (e.g. mint gives me a headache) with statistics &
| a blind design is a very powerful tool to approach fields where
| our science just isn't good yet (psychology, health, etc).
| YZF wrote:
| I'm pretty sure they are taught this. There's a different
| between taught and having an in-depth understanding of what
| makes a good experiment.
| zug_zug wrote:
| Maybe they are, I don't know what's taught in a CS major, but
| a shocking number of my coworkers don't seem to understand
| the basics of statistical sampling which makes me wonder if
| they even had 2 courses on it.
| jibbit wrote:
| > upper classes pour first the tea, while the lower classes
| poured the milk first
|
| this is because of the fear that boiling water will crack your
| best tea cups?
| throwaway984393 wrote:
| Good tea cups would never crack from boiling water, unless they
| were frozen first. Tea first is probably due to the fact that
| everybody wants tea, but not everybody wants milk, and some
| people want to pour their own amount of milk. You offer tea,
| they accept, you pour tea, you offer milk.
| bikenaga wrote:
| And "The Lady Tasting Tea" by David Salsburg is a nice history of
| statistics; 29 chapters, a little over 320 pages. [New York:
| Henry Holt and Company, 2001; ISBN 0-8050-7134-2 (PB)]
| nabaraz wrote:
| Very interesting. What are some other hypothesis, provoking
| random articles?
| codeulike wrote:
| George Orwell has entered the chat
|
| https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
|
| _... one should pour tea into the cup first. This is one of the
| most controversial points of all; indeed in every family in
| Britain there are probably two schools of thought on the subject.
| The milk-first school can bring forward some fairly strong
| arguments, but I maintain that my own argument is unanswerable.
| This is that, by putting the tea in first and stirring as one
| pours, one can exactly regulate the amount of milk whereas one is
| liable to put in too much milk if one does it the other way
| round._
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Right, because it's much harder to measure a specific amount of
| milk in isolation than to eyeball how much of it you've just
| added to something else.
|
| If you were concerned about regulating the amount of milk you
| were adding, tea first wouldn't even be a possibility.
| teddyh wrote:
| The 1967 British TV series _The Prisoner_ , episode _A Change Of
| Mind_ , prescribes the milk-first method, as part of a general
| instruction in how to make tea.
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