Posts Tagged: sample survey


11
Dec 12

“We didn’t even bother to get the $7 coffee”

A couple weeks ago I highlighted the recommendation that researchers test their models (and the processes which generated them!) against random noise. This is an important “reality check” of their methods, to see how susceptible they are to detecting something in nothing. In the video above, Jimmy Kimmel gives a nice illustration of how this idea could be extended to a taste test, or any survey where participants are asked to differentiate between samples. Kimmel’s experiment also gives a nice illustration of how humans can be primed to find what we expect to find, even if it’s not there.