@axo1989
That is amusing actually, I wonder why that is ... 🤔
I think it’s understandable to a degree. For one thing, doing blind tests can be a hassle, sometimes totally impractical (speakers especially). And generally speaking I think the members there can and do rely on the relevant tests having been done by other parties. For instance all the research by Toole/Olive/Harman Kardon et al, for selecting the relevant measurements in speakers. And also they can look to measurements of DACs and amplifiers to see that distortion levels are below known thresholds of audibility. So in many cases they don’t really need to perform their own blind tests, depending on what approach they take to buying equipment.
On the other hand, it is fairly galling to be disparaged as some pure subjectivist-in-sheep’s-clothing by folks there who haven’t really "put up or shut up" themselves in terms of personally having experience blind testing.
Generally speaking I don’t like to run from one forum to another, in order to bash the other. And clearly I’ve written a bunch in support of ASR here. Any critiques I raise here about ASR I’ve raised plenty of times on ASR.
Having been involved in many a philosophical debate, where you really have to have all your ducks in order because every assumption is going to need justification, I can’t help notice a tendency among *some* on ASR that I’ve seen elsewhere when people are appealing to science. It’s the mistake that "because I am citing the science" I am therefore "on the side of the facts" which means "my argument is sound whereas yours is bereft of The Facts."
One may as well say that because I’m standing on a stack of study papers, my claims are scientifically true. There is a self-blindness to the interpretation one is making from the science to the claims of any argument. Often a pretty glaring gap there. Citing purported facts isn’t good enough; what matters is whether the inference you are making from those facts to the claims in your argument are reasonable and sound. And it’s in there that you see people who claim to be of a scientific mindset making starkly anti-scientific leaps of inference! (That includes taking confident positions from studies with ridiculously small sample sizes, when it suits their prejudice).
As I’ve argued on ASR many times, I see some people arguing in a bubble, not really looking at how the implications of their position plays outside of the ASR bubble. For instance, the rejection of the worth of subjective descriptions, reports, reviews as utterly worthless and unreliable. I’ve argued that you simply can not take that too far because you will hit contradiction and absurdity, given the general reliability of our senses in navigating the world. There’s clearly some of a pure engineering mind-set who have never actually had to work in the "real world" where one must communicate about sound without appeal to instruments and measurements - an example being my own profession working in sound post production for film and TV. We communicate successfully all day long via subjective descriptions of sound, to pass information, guide and alter the sound to an agreed upon result. The proposition that purely subjective impressions and descriptions are Totally Unreliable simply can not explain this success, or offer anything practical in it’s place.
That’s what I mean about the way many people "argue in a bubble" where they think a conclusion makes sense just when applied to their particular area of interest in a hobby, while not examining it’s implications in the rest of the real world.
