clearthink,
If you could reformulate what amounts to your "complaints" into an actual coherent argument against what I’ve actually argued here, then we could have a discussion. If you could actually point to anything I’ve written - not something you imagined I wrote but that I actually wrote - as untrue, or unreasonable, then your complaints may have some footing. But until then....you are just complaining when someone voices skepticism. boo-hoo.
geoffkait,
Look, professor, you can’t have it both ways. Either fuses make a difference and are audible or they’re not. Make up your mind.
Again, you’ve confused yourself. The only way you could imagine I’m trying to "have it both ways" and can’t "make up my mind" is that
you’ve confused a real dichotomy with a false dichotomy.
Real dichotomy: Fuses make an audible difference or they do not.
False Dichotomy: You have to either BELIEVE fuses make an audible difference or BELIEVE they do not.
See the rather important difference there?
Something may be true, or not true, but that OBVIOUSLY doesn’t entail you must accept one or the other, before having good reason you know which is true! If a new medical treatment for high blood pressure is proposed, well it’s either efficacious or it isn’t. But how does a rational people decide this? "Let’s take a vote! Who believes it works, who doesn’t? Ok, that’s 45 for the proposition it works, 20 for the proposition it doesn’t work. It’s settled then, our new blood pressure medicine works!"
Of course not, right? You withhold your conclusion UNTIL the good evidence comes in. (Though, given your website, which until recently I thought was entirely a lark, I’m starting to infer maybe you don’t actually understand these basic principles?)
Your argument is absurd. Humans easily distinguish types of car engines, types of aircraft engines, types of bird calls. Why not fuses. Is everyone lying?
Another false dichotomy from you, geoff. If the sonic difference between fuses are not audible, the choice isn’t between people "lying" or "telling the truth." They can simply be "mistaken" and that is the variable some of us skeptics are raising. (And it’s amazing the resistance people here have to just considering they may actually...gasp!...be mistaken! And ironically it’s the skeptics that they imply are arrogant.)
I wasn’t "lying" when I thought certain cables sounded completely and obviously different from others in my system. But my subsequent testing suggested I WAS mistaken. (When tested "blind" and I didn’t know which cable was being used, there were no such obvious differences allowing me to identify any difference).
The sonic differences between cars, people’s voices, bird calls etc are large and understood to be well into the threshhold of audibility. And you can measure those differences. (In fact, just now I’m going through various jet sounds for a show I’m doing sound for, and the waveform output and frequency profiles are obviously different).
But the claim of sonic differences between audiophile boutique fuses and regular (competently employed) fuses in a component is not so well established, and is in fact an area of controversy. And if the type of measurements pointed to earlier in the thread are the best we’ve got in support of the claim, then they still leave plenty of room for doubt (the inadequacies have already been pointed out, and they amount to the fact that even the attempts of the author to explain their effects were highly speculative, and did not even demonstrate the *audible* difference in either case).
And then if all we have beyond that are audiophiles saying "I heard a difference" then, as I say, this doesn’t rise above the level of "evidence" discerning from perceptual error/bias effects, that plague so many other tweak-claims.
Are 70,000 people under hypnosis?
Are a hundred million people believing the claims of homeopathy under hypnosis?
^^^^ Please recognize the reductio ad absurdum this time, geoff ;)
That is, presuming you understand homeopathy is bunk....which I admit it may not be so wise to presume...;-)
Geoff, do you really not understand at all why there is the scientific method in the first place?
If researchers want to get confirmation (strong evidential support) that a medical treatment is efficacious - whether it’s homeopathy, or an allergy treatment or whatever - do you think they just give it to people and ask "Well? You’ve received treatment for your problem, how do you feel?"
No. They set up blind and double blind studies, control groups on placebos, etc.
Do you know why they do this? Why simply taking the subjective report of people, without reducing the variables of our well documented forms of bias....isn't a good method? And do you not know our perceptual biases extend everywhere, including to audio?
Do you know why, for instance, when you go for a hearing test it’s a blind test? (You aren’t given any other visual cue as to when a tone is being played)?
And...again...yet again!...do you understand that none of the cautions I raise in support of my skepticism amounts to my claiming fuses "don’t make a difference?"
Is nuance that hard to grasp?
