opaqueice;176468 Wrote: > Gary, it's not like that - there's no such assumption. We don't > understand these psychological effects well enough to be able to say > why they occur or what you will think you hear. What we do know is > that they do occur, and very often - when people are asked which of two > identical things are better, they almost never say "these are > identical", and almost always say "this one is better". Not only that > they have very specific (and wrong, since in these controlled > experiments the two are identical) reasons for why one is better. This > is an established fact, but for some reason many people are very > resistant to it. > > This particular tweak, and many others, is very hard to explain through > physics. To accommodate it we would need either a very complicated and > unlikely mechanism using known physics, or we would have to invoke > something new and unknown. So we have two explanations for the same > fact - one which we know is there, which has been confirmed again and > again, and one which is very complicated and baroque or goes against > centuries of accumulated knowledge. There's not much of a choice > there, and so it isn't something interesting to investigage, because > it's very easily explained with something boring and conventional. > > Let me give one example (I'm purposely making it extreme to illustrate > the point). Imagine you're a scientist, and someone came to you and > said, when I flip this switch on the wall of my living room, the lights > go on. Then when I flip it back they go back off. I think it's because > there are some aliens watching that switch, and when it's up they > immediately fly down from their saucer and make the lights light up. > > Now obviously there's a simple, plausible explanation which doesn't > involve aliens - but the alien one isn't impossible! So at that point > do you go to the effort of investigating? > > To stretch the analogy a little further, suppose the person came back > and said, look, my house doesn't have any electricity, so it can't have > to do with that, but the light still goes on! That's the equivalent of > a double-blind test result - it eliminates the obvious explanation, > leaving room for something more interesting. But without that it's > really easy to explain, and not worth giving much credibility to the > alien hypothesis. > > Sorry for such a long post, but do you see my point?
You are really overcomplicating matters! There is no need for amazing explanations, only plausible ones. Personally I normally avoid possible explanations since they tend to turn into "reality" for some people. I can actually accept that things may happen which I don't fully understand. That's the starting point for further investigation. I might throw up some _posibilities_, since some people tend to say things are "impossible" even when clearly they are not. Your example isn't very good since you describe an actual effect looking for a cause, wheras in this tweak-case you don't believe there is any actual effect. -- P Floding ------------------------------------------------------------------------ P Floding's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2932 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=32301 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
