One is a weakening question. We're being asked to undermine the conclusion drawn above.

So, there's an argument, we have to figure out what the premises are, what the conclusion is.

Let's take a look.

Okay, so, the first thing that comes to mind is 10 people is not a lot of people when you're running an experiment.

And 5 of the people were given chocolate with the coffee, and the other 5 tasted coffee only.

Okay, so I know I skipped over the results, but I just wanted to get clear.

5 of them were given chocolate with the coffee, the other 5 just coffee alone.

And the 5 that were given chocolate with the coffee, this group subsequently reported that all coffee samples tasted pretty much the same as one another.

So, this is the group that said, hmm, I guess they taste the same.

Right, whereas this one, they were able to detect differences, so they were able to, I suppose, rank them.

Right, so what's the conclusion?

Now, 5 are in this group, 5 are in this group.

What's the conclusion?

Well, the conclusion is that clearly chocolate interferes with one's ability to taste coffee.

Well, I mean, that's one plausible hypothesis to tell from the observation of these phenomenon.

Right, the other is just like, how about, like, a competing hypothesis would just be we can't tell anything because, you know what, you should have more than 10 people running in your experiment.

Right, this could have just been purely coincidental.

Who knows?

I mean, it might even be like the presentation of chocolate, right, that interferes.

It's not actually the chocolate itself, it's that you gave them anything else in addition to coffee.

It could be total, you know, like I said, totally coincidental.

These 5 people could have no taste buds.

Right, I mean, it could be just a lot of things.

Right, so let's take a look.

So, the 10 people were randomly assigned to either group.

So, you know, if you say they're randomly assigned, that's something we didn't know before.

So, that's a plus, that's a positive.

Right, I mean, you want to make sure you're, it's 10 people, but still, you know, you want to make sure it's randomly assigned.

So, it's either group that tasted only coffee or the group that was also given chocolates.

And then although some people asked to be in a group that received chocolates.

Right, okay, but like we're trying to weaken the argument.

I mean, this first bit, however weakly, I suppose it helps argument a little bit, but definitely doesn't weaken.

And also, I'm not really sure what this last bit does.

So, see, right, like this also kind of helps a little bit.

If you got the same results, but you got larger, let's say this time instead of 10 people, we sampled 100 people, right, randomly split into two groups.

Then that would actually be, start to look like a real experiment.

Wow, well, thank you. I had no idea.

The five people who were originally given chocolate were asked a week later.

So that's this group, right, the five people who were originally given chocolate, or asked a week later to taste this coffee samples without chocolate.

So a week later, they became this group, and they still detected no difference.

Right, yeah, there you go.

Well, that definitely weakens it.

You see, if this phenomenon, this additional fact were true, then it's possible that maybe they have no taste buds, right?

Like maybe, I mean, I'm being, they probably have taste buds.

It's just maybe they're insensitive to coffee or something, right?

That's what accounts for the difference.

That's what accounts for them reporting, oh, it's the same back when they first had the coffee with the chocolates.

Right, so that's a very inconvenient piece of evidence for our original hypothesis.

So E localizes its discussion to the five who had just coffee.

They're saying, oh, for the five that just had coffee, some of them thought the variance between bad and good was this big, and others thought it was, I don't know, like this big.

Right, so who cares?