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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

I'm reading "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell, and he discusses something that seems relevant here. The sip test with the challenge of distinguishing two colas isn't a very effective test of flavour discrimination. The test that really distinguishes flavor experts from non-experts is the "triangle test": three glasses, two of which contain the same cola. The challenge is drink them in sequence (presumably with a palate cleanser in between) and then pick the odd one out. Research shows that the general population can't do much better than chance at this test -- you really need to be an expert to perform well.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Cognition,There was a problem from a math club that a guy brought into work and all the math people where working on it for days. He and one other person got it and he got it first. There where some smart people working there. Also one day I was working on a math problem, probably not difficult for a math person but for a regular programmer like me it was not something that I knew and I was having trouble finding how to do it. I asked him and off the top of his head he wrote to ways to do it on white board. It also was not in his area having to do with finance rather than science which was more in his area. I was impressed but maybe just because I am a dolt.

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