Let's talk about statistics

At my day job as a neuroscientist I work with statistics and what we in the business call "significance" on a daily basis. (If you like, I can start throwing my weight around with terms such as ANOVA, Gaussian distribution, Tukey post-tests and degrees of freedom, but I think I just heard you fall asleep so I won't. Don't worry).
Anyway. Good research is what we call statistically significant - that is, one has done one's test enough times to know that the result is not a random event. I'll illustrate: say you have a pair of dice that you suspect are weighted to the even numbers. How many times do you think you need to roll the dice to find out if the dice have been tampered with? Once is hardly enough. Twice? Probably not. If you rolled the dice ten times and got even numbers all the way through, then that would be statistically significant.
There's also something we call "bias". That is when the experiment is not designed in an objective manner, so that the results might be wrong (or more likely to turn out in one way rather than another).

So restaurangvarlden.se is reporting on some bloke who has interviewed ten restaurant critics and based upon their answers has drawn up a general image of what a restaurant critic is like. Well, I say the whole article is basically bullshit. Not having read this guy's actual thesis, I can't trash that just yet. But I'm going to tell you why I think that one can't deduce anything from asking ten anonymous people employed to do a job whether they do it properly or not. It's what I would call a biased experiment, with no statistical significance.

The ten interviewed restaurant critics say that they're very experienced diners and that they spend around nine hours writing (or not, apparently these nine hours included the actual dining experience itself) the review. I'm a bit confused as to how this group of ten was selected, as the article states that the broadsheets employ between 2-6 persons to do the actual dining - are these all "critics"? Or is it the person who does the actual writing that's the critic? Because if it isn't, then he might have spoken to the staff of a total of two newspapers - not quite what I call a good demographic spread. Also, he says there was only one critic interviewed from the local press - aren't there many more local papers in Sweden than nationwide counterparts?

I could go on and on. What surprises me the most is that the author claims to be surprised that his interviewees state that they are very experienced diners with lots of food and wine knowledge. I'd have been more surprised if someone crawled out of the closet and admitted they knew fuck-all. The hilarity reaches it's peak at the end of the article were we learn that the poor sod who works in the local press has to bring someone employed in a school kitchen as a "professional taster". As long as a saucepan is involved, I suppose...

I have said this countless times: drinking a lot or eating a lot does not make one a connoisseur. One is not a chef just because one can fry bacon. A cook, perhaps, but a chef: no. And one is not a good restaurant critic because one says so.
I'm not saying that there aren't good critics out there, because there are and I respect them for it. They are objective, experienced, knowledgable, educated, open-minded and, perhaps most importantly, fair. We love a good restaurant critic. We welcome their feedback. However, our most important critics are our customers who are paying for their experience out of their own pocket. Bad critics - well, we've had our fair share of those. Drunk? Check. Wrote about us without ever being to Bloom? Check. Couldn't remember what they ate? Check. Introduced themselves with camera, voicecorder and laptop? Check. In the end, the restaurant provides a living for lots of people, and having nonsense printed about your business is bad. We don't stick it. I wish more people did the same - Ramsay vs. A.A Gill style.

I'm not going to go into the anonymity issue because I've written about it before, and to be frank, the issue is quite tired. I will say this though: Good restaurant staff know who the food critics are, regardless of presence of byline.

Sorry about this long, rambling post. It's just that the tone of the article annoyed me. Self-justification if I ever heard it, and I'm just tired of the precious princesses that spout it.