Agylen

Vinography: a wine blog: Terroir Doesn't Exist and Parker Is Pricey: “This will be dismissed, perhaps rightly, as highly contentious and flawed research. Anyone who has drunk enough wine, and in particular, tasted barrel samples from different regions of a vineyard will know that different soils and microclimates, even within a vineyard, will produce wines that can taste wildly different, even given identical winemaking techniques.”

Just like everybody knows that children raised in the same environment will have wildly different personalities, according to their birth sign, right? Well, wrong!

To be clear, I'm not saying that terroir does not exist. I'm not competent enough to tell. What I'm saying is that assertions like the above look very much like a case of communal reinforcement:

Communal reinforcement is the process by which a claim becomes a strong belief through repeated assertion by members of a community. The process is independent of whether the claim has been properly researched or is supported by empirical data significant enough to warrant belief by reasonable people. Often, the mass media contribute to the process by uncritically supporting the claims. More often, however, the mass media provide tacit support for untested and unsupported claims by saying nothing skeptical about even the most outlandish of claims.

Communal reinforcement explains how entire nations can pass on ineffable gibberish from generation to generation. It also explains how testimonials reinforced by other testimonials within the community of therapists, sociologists, psychologists, theologians, politicians, talk show hosts, etc., can supplant and be more powerful than scientific studies or accurate gathering of data by disinterested parties.

So, I'd advise more caution before dismissing the results of a scientific study. It takes more than “anyone will know”.

Just found this great skeptic blog: Skeptico. One of the posts there talks about debunking Feng Shui:

Skeptico: Featured DVD – Penn & Teller: “They certainly get their message across. For example, in the segment on feng shui, they call in three feng shui experts to rearrange furniture in the same Californian house. No one who sees this program will forget how each of the three feng shui experts comes up with completely different arrangements of furniture - each expert supposedly using the same feng shui ‘science’. Especially telling was how the first feng shui expert said that the red sofa was bad for the family – she mentioned several health problems that would result. Then the second one said the red color was ‘absolutely perfect’. What a hoot. Does this prove that feng shui is bullshit? Well no, of course not. To do that you would need a much bigger experiment. But it’s not the job of Penn & Teller or anyone else to prove that feng shui is nonsense; if feng shui experts want us to believe in it, it is up to them to provide evidence that it does work. What P&T do is demonstrate the general idea of how things should be tested. And they make it pretty clear that they think feng shui failed the test.”

Sigh, I was starting to convince myself that an iMac G5 in my office room would have raised its Feng Shui quotient … I'll have to think again

(Via Seth.)