{"id":17303,"date":"2009-07-29T10:00:01","date_gmt":"2009-07-29T10:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2009\/07\/29\/the-advantage-of-knowing-your-limits-of-discrimination\/"},"modified":"2009-07-29T10:00:01","modified_gmt":"2009-07-29T10:00:01","slug":"the-advantage-of-knowing-your-limits-of-discrimination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20090729-01\/?p=17303","title":{"rendered":"The advantage of knowing your limits of discrimination"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A story a while back about <a href=\"http:\/\/gizmodo.com\/gadgets\/calling-bullshit\/james-randi-offers-1-million-if-audiophiles-can-prove-7250-speaker-cables-are-better-305549.php\"> ridiculously expensive speaker cables<\/a> and  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.randi.org\/jr\/2007-09\/092807reply.html#i4\"> James Randi&#8217;s challenge<\/a> to tell the difference between them and modestly-priced cables reminded me of a conversation I had with a wine-loving friend of mine.\n He went on a wine tasting tour and sampled wines of varying quality and price. His conclusion was that he could detect the correlation between price and quality up until about $75\/bottle. Beyond that point, the wines all tasted roughly equally great.\n Conclusion: There&#8217;s no point in my friend spending more than about $75 on a bottle of wine. Once you know the limit of your discrimination, you can use it to avoid wasting money. (One might argue that this is one advantage of having a coarse palate: You can get away with cheaper wine!)<\/p>\n<p> <b>Related<\/b>: Commenter Eff Five <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2009\/06\/25\/9802454.aspx#9808916\"> notes that<\/a> researchers have determined that people perceive the same wine as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.neurosciencemarketing.com\/blog\/articles\/why-expensive-wine-tastes-better.htm\"> tasting better<\/a> if they are told that it is more expensive. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A story a while back about ridiculously expensive speaker cables and James Randi&#8217;s challenge to tell the difference between them and modestly-priced cables reminded me of a conversation I had with a wine-loving friend of mine. He went on a wine tasting tour and sampled wines of varying quality and price. His conclusion was that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-17303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>A story a while back about ridiculously expensive speaker cables and James Randi&#8217;s challenge to tell the difference between them and modestly-priced cables reminded me of a conversation I had with a wine-loving friend of mine. He went on a wine tasting tour and sampled wines of varying quality and price. His conclusion was that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17303\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}