Many years ago, I had an argument kind of like this with my mom about the difference between decaf Diet Coke and plain Diet Coke. Since she was the Mathemetician in the family, I let her design the double-blind taste test.
When I could conclusively tell the difference every time, she was flabbergasted. But she did finally believe me that there actually was a taste difference between them, at least there was for me. So, she stopped trying to get me to drink decaf.
I performed a reasonably rigorous experiment for my AP statistics class in high school - I tested a ton of different sodas and their diet equivalents across my classmates, and of the 8 sodas tested almost all had a statistically significant bias in favor of the non-diet version. For coca cola, I also tested the non-caffeinated versions - the non caffeinated regular Coke was the top performer.
The only exception to this was diet SunKist - it handily beat regular SunKist, by a large margin.
This shouldn't be too surprising, as caffeine itself has a flavor. It is somewhat bitter, which is one reason why it's particularly common in root beer.
Did you mean that it's not common in root beer? Wiki says that root beer has little to no caffeine.
Root beer is so sweet that I would think it could mask the bitterness. I wonder if the plants that originally were brewed into it just didn't have any caffeine.
Do the ingredients to coke naturally have caffeine, or was that a substitute for the original alkaloid? I.e., is decaf coke because the removed the caffeine, or is caffeinated coke that way because it was added?
That reminds me of my mom, always calling it decaf. There is a difference between decaffinated and caffeine free or non-caffeinated. Coke can be non-caffeinated, meaning that it can be made without adding caffeine. Decaffinated implies that there was caffeine present at some time, but was taken out (like coffee).
I don't (usually) drink cola for the caffeine, as far as I'm concerned that's just there as a legal way of getting customers chemically addicted to their product. I didn't think many people (consciously) bought it specifically for the caffeine at all.
As for diet - I also don't drink it because I want to ingest sugar. I have plenty of food energy available to me as a first world person living in 2017 and if anything, too much of it. The sugar is there purely to make the drink taste good. I didn't think anyone else really drank it for the purposes of ingesting sugar either. In some drinks (No for Dr. Pepper, but yes for Pepsi), I find the artificial sweetener tastes perfectly acceptable.
I drink cola because it tastes good and satisfies thirst. Not because I want caffeine or sugar. Those two things are bad for me.
Since I don't want the caffeine, and I'm satisfied with the taste of artificial sweetener, I drink caffeine-free diet cola. It still satisfies the goal of quenching thirst and tasting good.
It can be a really handy diet tool, depending on your situation. I lost 35% of my bodyweight and part of my reward system was a diet soda. Mostly caffeinated, but when I've had too much caffeine, like maybe I took a Jetalert or something, it's nice to have the no caffeine decaf option. Zero calories + sweet is very nice on the system when you're aiming to get the most out of the calories you are eating.
I'm one of those who prefer decaf diet sodas. I have sleep issues so I don't like taking any amount of caffeine after a certain time, and once you get used to diet sodas, regular ones don't taste as good (on top of the ridiculous amounts of sugar that each one has).
I agree, one of the reasons I drink coke is for the sugar and caffeine hit that it provides. Take that away and I may as well be drinking fizzy water. Coke was an energy drink for me before red bull ever existed. For the record however I don't drink energy drinks, I used to mix my vodka with redbull when I was clubbing but the stomach cramps it gave me got old quick.
Maybe I didn't do a good job scanning the comments, but I'm surprised nobody (not even the article) mentions the NSF certification body.
Taste is important but very subjective.
I don't buy a water filter unless it shows up as certified by NSF[1].
A few years ago I almost fell for a "water purification system" on Amazon, with stellar reviews that was supposed to filter out everything. With a baby on the way I figured it was worth the price tag. Good thing I did my research. The water filtration system was not certified or verified by anybody.
edit:
Same thing applies to humidifiers, air cleaners, air conditioners, etc. Don't buy unless it has been certified[2].
Well, maybe it's a bit more complicated than that.
It's certainly true that if you're using a water filter to remove something dangerous rather than remove "hardness" or "chlorination", then you're going to want a certification (and regularly test to see if the RO filter is still working). I'd put ship, cistern, and catchment on that list of critical filters.
However, if your decision is primarily based on flavor (as the article's is) or mineral build-up, then it's not clear that it's so important since you're drinking the water anyway!
I'd note that one brand you may be referring to (although it's true for others) has both "residential" and "professional" series. The latter are WQA Certified (NSF/ANSI 58 & 53)... although you won't find them listed on the NSF website, they are both ANSI and SCC (Canada) certified.
Apparently the author is married to a water filter, but at least she's stylish.
> This experiment was inspired by an argument with my wife, a stylish but atrocious water filter, and the explosion of start-ups attempting to turn everything you purchase into a subscription service.
Very nice setup, but he didn't show he couldn’t tell the difference between tap and the Soma water.
A biased subject who can pick out both untreated water and Soma-filtered water from the other variants could lie about that, and claim that untreated water and Soma water taste the same.
As a thought experiment, assume the variants are plain water, orange juice, and beer. A biased subject could easily claim orange juice and water taste the same and look the same, and are easily distinguished from beer.
Also, but minor: this is about taste. Such experiments typically are done in the dark, to rule out an effect of how the water looks on taste judgments.
I agree about the risk of bias. If he cheated, even subconsiously, on the tap vs Soma test, the results are consistent with bottled and Soma being indistinguishable. Which is the opposite conclusion.
The suspicious inability to distinguish bottled water from Soma agrees with this. He wouldn't be able to cheat on that test if he actually couldn't tell the difference, but could cheat on tap vs Soma like you said about water and orange juice.
If he didn't even know which two types he was comparing, that would protect from that kind of bias. However, from the setup, it looks like he does know.
You don't need biased subjects to have ambiguous results. Suppose for instance all people from group A can taste chlorine at 20ppm, and below that threshold, those individuals have no perceived chlorine taste. Individuals from group B can taste chlorine only at 80ppm and above. If the tap water has chlorine starting at 100ppm and the filter removed half (as stated in the article) then we would have water at 100ppm and 50ppm. Some observers would perceive a difference and some would not. If the Pur filter removed 90% of chlorine, then individuals in both groups would perceive a difference in taste.
To point, this experiment depends on your taste preferences, as the author has stated that there is a physical difference in the makeup of the water samples after filtration.
He would have to convince his wife who participated in it, so he can't lie about everything. To her, he can pretend two water types taste the same when really they don't, but he can't pretend the opposite.
He can also lie to himself with subconscious bias. The point of blinding is that you can suffer from this even if you're trying to be honest.
If he can tell the difference between 'tap v bottled' but not 'tap vs soma'... then 'soma vs bottled' would intuitively have a different result if his conclusion is 100% correct.
I suspect there's more to it, but the author was focusing on winning an argument so... I guess that killed the curiosity required to dig further for a more thorough conclusion.
It wasn't and I think that's the point. Essentially soma was hard to distinguish from tap water, which OP had said tasted chlorinated, given that soma was supposed to filter and improve tap water it was failing to meet its stated objective.
I used a lazy susan to implement randomization/blinding, and an interesting Bayesian variant on best-arm finding to try to optimize sample selection. I found my tap water is weakly in the middle and perhaps 1 or 2 mineral waters were better, but not strongly so.
The results are not quite comparable to OP because I designed it in terms of deciding which in a pair tasted better, not whether I could guess which was which correctly.
Eh, I get the author is being sarcastic, but for someone who buys water filters for their looks, his Soma jug looks just like a slightly plump version of Brita. (What's wrong with Brita, anyway?)
If there are two and only two roommates and they disagree, and they settle an argument with evidence-based results, what do you call that?
If there are two and only two roommates and they disagree, and they fuck but are not married, and they settle an argument with evidence-based results, what do you call that?
If there are two and only two roommates and they disagree, and they fuck but are not married, and they differ in gender, and they settle an argument with evidence-based results, what do you call that?
But if you have a married couple, and while adhering to traditional gender roles, they happen to disagree about anything, uh oh! Everybody sulks about the patriarchy.
It may be worth noting that if your water is only chlorinated with chlorine (and not chloramine, which is quite common now as well), leaving it in the fridge overnight can allow some of the chlorine to evaporate, making your water taste better even without a filter.
In this case he allowed both his tap water and filtered water to cool overnight, which would tend to understate the taste difference between freshly pulled tap water and freshly filtered water (if that filter effectively removes chlorine).
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When I could conclusively tell the difference every time, she was flabbergasted. But she did finally believe me that there actually was a taste difference between them, at least there was for me. So, she stopped trying to get me to drink decaf.
The only exception to this was diet SunKist - it handily beat regular SunKist, by a large margin.
Root beer is so sweet that I would think it could mask the bitterness. I wonder if the plants that originally were brewed into it just didn't have any caffeine.
Do the ingredients to coke naturally have caffeine, or was that a substitute for the original alkaloid? I.e., is decaf coke because the removed the caffeine, or is caffeinated coke that way because it was added?
That reminds me of my mom, always calling it decaf. There is a difference between decaffinated and caffeine free or non-caffeinated. Coke can be non-caffeinated, meaning that it can be made without adding caffeine. Decaffinated implies that there was caffeine present at some time, but was taken out (like coffee).
The human taste is incredibly good at discerning two different flavors. Not so good at identifying them.
Why not drink carbonated water at that point? Or just water, you know.
Or drink real soda in moderation.
People might want some or all of the above.
For eg. I sometimes drink decaf Starbucks blended drinks at night because I don't want to mess with my sleep cycle but I like their taste.
I don't (usually) drink cola for the caffeine, as far as I'm concerned that's just there as a legal way of getting customers chemically addicted to their product. I didn't think many people (consciously) bought it specifically for the caffeine at all.
As for diet - I also don't drink it because I want to ingest sugar. I have plenty of food energy available to me as a first world person living in 2017 and if anything, too much of it. The sugar is there purely to make the drink taste good. I didn't think anyone else really drank it for the purposes of ingesting sugar either. In some drinks (No for Dr. Pepper, but yes for Pepsi), I find the artificial sweetener tastes perfectly acceptable.
I drink cola because it tastes good and satisfies thirst. Not because I want caffeine or sugar. Those two things are bad for me.
Since I don't want the caffeine, and I'm satisfied with the taste of artificial sweetener, I drink caffeine-free diet cola. It still satisfies the goal of quenching thirst and tasting good.
What's your argument?
But then if that's the case, you can also ask why everyone doesn't just drink water and take a caffeine pill.
Taste is important but very subjective. I don't buy a water filter unless it shows up as certified by NSF[1].
A few years ago I almost fell for a "water purification system" on Amazon, with stellar reviews that was supposed to filter out everything. With a baby on the way I figured it was worth the price tag. Good thing I did my research. The water filtration system was not certified or verified by anybody.
edit:
Same thing applies to humidifiers, air cleaners, air conditioners, etc. Don't buy unless it has been certified[2].
[1] http://info.nsf.org/Certified/DWTU/
[2] http://ahamverifide.org/
However, if your decision is primarily based on flavor (as the article's is) or mineral build-up, then it's not clear that it's so important since you're drinking the water anyway!
I'd note that one brand you may be referring to (although it's true for others) has both "residential" and "professional" series. The latter are WQA Certified (NSF/ANSI 58 & 53)... although you won't find them listed on the NSF website, they are both ANSI and SCC (Canada) certified.
http://yourwaterfilterguide.com/difference-apec-water-reside...
https://www.wqa.org/learn-about-water/faqs
> This experiment was inspired by an argument with my wife, a stylish but atrocious water filter, and the explosion of start-ups attempting to turn everything you purchase into a subscription service.
Deleted Comment
A biased subject who can pick out both untreated water and Soma-filtered water from the other variants could lie about that, and claim that untreated water and Soma water taste the same.
As a thought experiment, assume the variants are plain water, orange juice, and beer. A biased subject could easily claim orange juice and water taste the same and look the same, and are easily distinguished from beer.
Also, but minor: this is about taste. Such experiments typically are done in the dark, to rule out an effect of how the water looks on taste judgments.
The suspicious inability to distinguish bottled water from Soma agrees with this. He wouldn't be able to cheat on that test if he actually couldn't tell the difference, but could cheat on tap vs Soma like you said about water and orange juice.
If he didn't even know which two types he was comparing, that would protect from that kind of bias. However, from the setup, it looks like he does know.
But more seriously, how would you suggest designing an experiment that worked even with liars determined to thwart it?
To point, this experiment depends on your taste preferences, as the author has stated that there is a physical difference in the makeup of the water samples after filtration.
He can also lie to himself with subconscious bias. The point of blinding is that you can suffer from this even if you're trying to be honest.
If he can tell the difference between 'tap v bottled' but not 'tap vs soma'... then 'soma vs bottled' would intuitively have a different result if his conclusion is 100% correct.
I suspect there's more to it, but the author was focusing on winning an argument so... I guess that killed the curiosity required to dig further for a more thorough conclusion.
there was 8/23 wrong classifications of "Bottled vs Soma" vs. 10/23 wrong classifications of "Tap vs Soma"
In Figure 6 , the author shows there's no statistically significant difference between "Bottled vs Soma"
So like he wrote :
> Soma filtered water performed the worst, having a taste statistically indistinguishable from tap water
I could write using the same data:
Soma filtered water performed the best, having a taste statistically indistinguishable from bottled water
He also says he can _not_ differentiate tap v soma.
So the difference between soma and bottled should be obvious (or there is some other factor in play), but it's clearly not.
Obviously taste is not commutative, but there's something fishy here regardless.
I used a lazy susan to implement randomization/blinding, and an interesting Bayesian variant on best-arm finding to try to optimize sample selection. I found my tap water is weakly in the middle and perhaps 1 or 2 mineral waters were better, but not strongly so.
The results are not quite comparable to OP because I designed it in terms of deciding which in a pair tasted better, not whether I could guess which was which correctly.
also filters are overly expensive and useless. issues that the fancy filter only aggravates, so...
If there are two and only two roommates and they disagree, and they fuck but are not married, and they settle an argument with evidence-based results, what do you call that?
If there are two and only two roommates and they disagree, and they fuck but are not married, and they differ in gender, and they settle an argument with evidence-based results, what do you call that?
But if you have a married couple, and while adhering to traditional gender roles, they happen to disagree about anything, uh oh! Everybody sulks about the patriarchy.
In this case he allowed both his tap water and filtered water to cool overnight, which would tend to understate the taste difference between freshly pulled tap water and freshly filtered water (if that filter effectively removes chlorine).