Talk but not walk?

Imagine my embarrassment, I just looked down at my Grado headphones and what did I see? SR 80. Wow! No wonder they sound so good! 

@ geoff- Oh, I read it just fine. But, just in case you feel my reading comprehension isn’t up to snuff, be so kind as to direct me to where in the above post did the prof offer up his credentials if MG did the same. You must have read it in there, because that’s the entire premise of your response to it. But, then you explain that the point of your remark is that credentials are irrelevant. The ability and experience that make someone suitable for a particular job is irrelevant??! Wow. Care to explain, or mock, or insult, that one away?

CD318.
Just one very recent example of a "tweak" as you call it in my system.

Used Wireworld eclipse 6 xlr interconnects from my phono stage to my integrated and it sounded awful, just thin, grating and lifeless compared to the single ended RCA interconnect of Nordost Red Dawn I had been using, and Nordost have a rep for being thin sounding so go figure.
It was that bad I was convinced the cables were faulty or the xlr inputs/outputs were.
Nope it was just the timbre of that cable did not match my system. Swapped the Wireworld for a cheap pair of Audioquest and the sq was worlds apart even though the RCA Nordost still sound a little better to my ears.
But according to some this should never have happened?
Interconnects are inconsequential tweaks?
I KNOW that is not the case!

thecarpathian
@ geoff- Oh, I read it just fine. But, just in case you feel my reading comprehension isn’t up to snuff, be so kind as to direct me to where in the above post did the prof offer up his credentials if MG did the same. You must have read it in there, because that’s the entire premise of your response to it.

>>>>No, actually that wasn’t my premise. My presume was that credentials don’t matter. My comment I’ll show you mine if you show me yours was a joke. Obviously I already realize prof doesn’t have the (engineering) credentials he insuinuating Michael doesn’t have. Follow?

thecarpathian
But, then you explain that the point of your remark is that credentials are irrelevant. The ability and experience that make someone suitable for a particular job is irrelevant??! Wow. Care to explain, or mock, or insult, that one away?

>>>>>Credentials are irrelevant because someone with credentials doesn’t automatically win the argument. Also, someone with better credentials than someone else doesn’t automatically win the argument. Even a PhD in blah blah blah cannot claim he wins all the arguments even when the subject is his specialty, blah blah blah. Capish?

Experience does NOT equal credentials, at least how prof was using the term credentials. In terms of experience obviously Michael has a boatload. That’s why one often sees engineering job listings with the caveat, “x years of experience can be substituted for y degree” Experience -or the lack thereof - is kind of what actually what Michael was deriding when he used the word fake. Follow?

So geoff’s hand was finally forced to show his"pseudo skeptic" card that he kept threatening me and others with - throwing around that label as if it suited, or showed any problem with, my arguments.

Of course, if anyone reads the "definition" of pseudo skeptic he can see that my arguments actually fit right in with the definition of a "True" skeptic:

In science, the burden of proof falls upon the claimant; and the more extraordinary a claim, the heavier is the burden of proof demanded. The true skeptic takes an agnostic position, one that says the claim is not proved rather than disproved. He asserts that the claimant has not borne the burden of proof and that science must continue to build its cognitive map of reality without incorporating the extraordinary claim as a new "fact." Since the true skeptic does not assert a claim, he has no burden to prove anything. He just goes on using the established theories of "conventional science" as usual.

And that’s what I’ve done: refrained from making any absolute claims that a tweak doesn’t work, but instead have asked for the evidence.

My reply to glupson summarizing my position, on this very page, falls right in line with the above concept of "True skepticism." You can see the caution and tentative nature of what I myself would claim, and how I apply that same caution and "provisional" conclusions to other people’s claims - scaling my confidence with the nature of the claim and the quality of the evidence.

And everything I’ve written has been careful to stay within those bounds.Never have I said "X tweak CAN NOT make a difference." Instead, I have simply asked for the evidence. And where appropriate, explained why I have some grounds for skepticism.

People who think in a blinkered biased fashion often only see an argument for skepticism as "A dogmatic denial of the claim" when in fact, of course, it is not at all. It is simply giving a reason why you are asking for better evidence than has been provided (e.g. if you make a claim that either does not seem to make technical sense, or that goes against some of my and other people’s own experience, these are reasons to withhold belief and ask for better evidence than someone’s "say so."). To express skepticism isn’t to say "Your claim is false" but to point out "you have not provided sufficient evidence for me to accept that claim, for these reasons..."

But you can’t really argue this to someone absolutely set on one way of thinking, or whose claims are threatened by "True Skepticism."

And I wouldn’t expect geoff to "get it" if after all this time it hasn’t sunk in. But geoff’s never ending stream of gaffs can sometimes be handy to point out various fallacies and bad arguments, so we have him to thank for that ;-)