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Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's exactly what was found and what GP said.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apparently milk before tea is lower class because poor people would want to avoid cracking low quality porcelain with hot tea. Fascinating!
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.
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).
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.
> 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 a…
> 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 a…
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.
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)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
> 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 a…
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.
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).