Sound Science Corner Pub

[JRG1990]

This isn't directly related to the subject of Sound Science, but it applies to what is going on here lately... and it involves psychology.

Psychology is the only way to make sense of this site, go and read some of the threads in the main forums there is some very strange cult like behavior going on.

 

[Wyville]

it's difficult for everybody. someone who's known to own TOTL gears and the latest stuff, will inevitably get used to have everybody rely on him to know everything about gears. because we all crave information on new and cool toys. that does give the owners a big head, no matter how humble and honest they try to be. so now you have that person used to talking to people who trust everything he says about gears, coming here in Sound Science... a place where without some supporting evidence, his claims are instantly turned down(no matter if correct or not). it's going to be really hard for that person to stay gracious and handle this with calm and method. he's not used to this environment and general notion of accountability. in most audio forums, when 2 people claim stupid opposite stuff, they end it with "agree to disagree" and they'll keep saying the same stuff in another page the next day like nothing happened.

now for the people who are in here expecting strict reasoning and fact based interpretations which are the foundations of any scientific approach. they are almost constantly talking to newcomers who post an argument that could be summarized as "my subjective impression is this, therefore this device does this objective stuff". and of course for people who are overly conscious about the difference between subjective reality and objective reality, most of those arguments have for us the legitimacy of the stuff you read from the flat earther websites. in my case, I would love this section to be what you describe, and my quasi-modo hat also makes me work toward getting a nicer environment. but at the same time, I spend a lot of time reading posts and thinking "how do I begin to explain how wrong this is when the guy obviously misunderstands the most basic concept about this world? and that despite objective and subjective being terms thrown at everything all day long in the hobby". depending on how the person will react to the warnings or doubts about his claims, it's going to be hard for some of the people in here not to think the guy is a troll or a complete moron, and get respectively angry replies, or replies along the lines of "you know nothing Jon Snow".
and that happens on a daily basis, because audiophiles are way too happy to go from "my experience is what matters to me"(perfectly rational approach, I follow it everyday), to "my experience is what matters", and then to "my experience is reality". the result of that fallacy is a diarrhea of objective empty claims pretending to justify random feelings and ideas. and that makes a lot of people in here very mad because they happen to care dearly for truth and reason.

how do you mix those people together without expecting a clash and some hurt ego doing most of the talking? I honestly don't know. it's like 2 distant civilizations meeting and taking most of what is normal for one side, as an open aggression for the other.
- yes if people in here could totally stop getting mad when reading nonsense, and turning a topic into a personal assault on the person who knows so little he doesn't even see what's wrong with his actions. if they could all stay cool, fully respectful pedagogues the battle would most likely stop. but what are the odds of everybody in here becoming a skilled pedagogue instead of just your average audiophile? I for one know very well how much I suck at keeping my calm and placing myself at the level of my interlocutor. it's a skill and not everybody has it.
- and yes if people posting in this section could be kind enough not to make claims they cannot support, and mistake subjective stuff with objective reality, we'd have very little to get mad about and that too would most likely be the end of personal attacks and feelings of aggression. but what are the odds of that happening in an audio forum? I'd expect 0% as a fairly accurate value.

so it's easy to blame the side we're not on and wait for them to fix the problem. but it's never going to happen. on the other hand, we all can try a little harder to solve our side of the problem instead of always raging about how it's the other's fault. personal attacks are never constructive, so let's try proof reading our posts and getting rid of that before sending it. empty claims are nothing burgers that prove nothing but will anger many people, be it for what is claimed or for the way it toys with facts and logic. so let's also try to proof read our posts and when things are unclear, try to reword them so they look more like opinions or hypotheses which they probably are. and if the claim seems legit, then go google some paper or some other demonstration to support the claim so it's no longer some BS empty claim.
it's a collegial effort, and probably the only chance for this section to become what it should always have been. the other option could be getting specific posting rules, which will most likely never happen for various very legitimate reasons. so I'm inclined to ask everybody to work on my first solution where everybody starts making the section a better place simply by paying more attention to what he's posting in it. I could keep my time moderating more strictly, but that would ultimately lead to several people banned and no real improvement on the quality of the content in the forum. part of how and why I ended up modo of this section is because I didn't believe that bans for personal attacks were helping the section in any way. we just kept losing those with knowledge along with the arrogant little ****s, so I'm really not in a hurry to resort to doing it. you guys make the content of this section, the secret to improving that content is in you all(this is so cheesy I just imagined myself in a Santa costume).

You have a lot of very perceptive points and commend you for what you are trying to do.

I will go a bit out on a limb here and say that an additional part of the problem is that I see quite a few people here that are really quite knowledgeable, but who make the mistake of equating that knowledge to an immovable truth. That I feel is part of the problem because once you have a conviction like that, "how can that other person possibly be such an idiot to think any different?!". It is a polarising dynamic that entrenches people. Whenever someone comes in here and states something different they will be overwhelmed by information that is considered "proof" in a unidirectional way. There is no engagement because it is people pushing their knowledge as fact and those facts are set in stone. That is what I meant by this forum being very rigid. It is not just about becoming a respectful pedagogue, it is also about bending over backwards to interrogate your own convictions. Knowledge is something ever-evolving and nothing is set in stone. Science is not about slapping each other in the face with "proof", it is not about being "right", science is about exploring, understanding and shedding new light on old knowledge. That is what I miss so much in this forum.

 

[castleofargh]

You have a lot of very perceptive points and commend you for what you are trying to do.

I will go a bit out on a limb here and say that an additional part of the problem is that I see quite a few people here that are really quite knowledgeable, but who make the mistake of equating that knowledge to an immovable truth. That I feel is part of the problem because once you have a conviction like that, "how can that other person possibly be such an idiot to think any different?!". It is a polarising dynamic that entrenches people. Whenever someone comes in here and states something different they will be overwhelmed by information that is considered "proof" in a unidirectional way. There is no engagement because it is people pushing their knowledge as fact and those facts are set in stone. That is what I meant by this forum being very rigid. It is not just about becoming a respectful pedagogue, it is also about bending over backwards to interrogate your own convictions. Knowledge is something ever-evolving and nothing is set in stone. Science is not about slapping each other in the face with "proof", it is not about being "right", science is about exploring, understanding and shedding new light on old knowledge. That is what I miss so much in this forum.

actual science is about coming to the realization that we don't know a all lot about the world, and trying to improve on that thanks to new experiences, new data, new approaches of the same old problem... being unable to look beyond what we know is the end of progress. in that respect I'm with you.
with that said, what we "research" in here is the already existing knowledge about a topic. scientific discoveries on the forum tend to fit 2 categories: what was already well known. and false deductions due to mistakes(or marketing agenda). ^_^ almost everything discussed in here has had existing models that resisted decades or more of scrutiny without being disproved so far. so IMO it stands to reason that all those stuff probably aren't going to suddenly be known to work in a radically different way. and that IMO is important because it draws some blurry line(but a line still) between being open minded, and keeping silver bullets in a gun in case werewolves attack us, and thinking it's rational because we haven't proved that they're not hiding around us.
now I'm obviously talking about general knowledge, and someone can very much make too many assumptions about what is and isn't set in stone. but that seems to me like a case by case problem.
to me being open minded is accepting new evidence even when contradictory to what I knew. so long as said evidence is at least as solid as the data that caused my previous conclusions on the subject, I'm game for a change of mind. I imagine that someone seeking the truth would be able to do that most of the time. but someone who cares about winning probably won't. not much we can do about that.
on the other hand, a guy saying he knows what he heard, or fishing for possible explanations as to why we should agree with his idea, I can only see those as conversation stoppers. and sadly those are the most likely ways someone will use to come sharing his findings and ideas in the forum. all thanks to the "just listen" mantra. so again I can imagine 2 sides of the same story: refusing to see new evidence vs thinking a sighted impression is evidence.

 

[Wyville]

with that said, what we "research" in here is the already existing knowledge about a topic. scientific discoveries on the forum tend to fit 2 categories: what was already well known. and false deductions due to mistakes(or marketing agenda).

This is not as straightforward as you might think it is. I always find this very hard to explain because it is something that comes through experience. That which is perceived as already well known, might in fact not be all that well known and merely based on inductive reasoning, yet taken by some as established fact. This might only be one aspect of a certain topic and therefore very easy to miss unless you bend over backwards to identify it and properly map things out. There is a certain depth to science that, perhaps quite logically, is not often present on enthusiast forums and I think it would greatly help this sub-forum if people would be a bit less convinced of themselves and less prone to explain away the experiences of others ("placebo" etc).

Anyway, just my 2 cents.

 

[Kammerat Rebekka]

^Maybe sound science isn’t the right place then. If it were to open up to claims that go against what established science has taught us over the last century and merely let folks relish in sighted testing, people’s word on something etc etc, it’d be no different than the remainder of head-fi.
For this part of the site to work properly we need real information, real data, real enthusiasm amongst those willing to take the next step... as well as newbies coming to grips with being asked about stuff if they fx say something that goes against the laws of physics.

 

[Wyville]

^Maybe sound science isn’t the right place then. If it were to open up to claims that go against what established science has taught us over the last century and merely let folks relish in sighted testing, people’s word on something etc etc, it’d be no different than the remainder of head-fi.
For this part of the site to work properly we need real information, real data, real enthusiasm amongst those willing to take the next step... as well as newbies coming to grips with being asked about stuff if they fx say something that goes against the laws of physics.

You misunderstand. I am trying to explain what it means to be "scientific" and that what I see in this forum falls short of that.

 

[Kammerat Rebekka]

Errmm? How so?
If this whole forum is to be considered as a scientific branch of head-fi we need to stay focused on the science.
Turn it around: what if it was you who'd been working with audio for decades - furthermore you have a proper education behind it all...and then you log on to head-fi and see all these mad claims being hawked in a forum supposedly concerning itself with science?
You would want to challenge those claims or indeed find out how they managed to come up with a result that goes against what we already know by now.
If you then merely are met with members insisting on their word/ears/esoteric analogies instead of actual scientific legwork, then this forum ends up defeating it's own purpose.
Sure there are many ways to refute claims...but when members over the course of many years continue to bring up the same claims over and over again, without having read the earlier 40 answers, the process can get a little heated (most especially when it is the same person reiterating the same claim in different ways).
In the words of Andre Linoge: Hell is repetition.

 

[bfreedma]

You misunderstand. I am trying to explain what it means to be "scientific" and that what I see in this forum falls short of that.

I understand what you're saying, but we probably need to accept that this isn't a formal scientific body that requires the same level of stringency that those do.

To wrap up the challenge in a single sentence. If members want to post here challenging the established parameters of audio science or our best understanding of them, they need to come prepared with or prepared to develop supporting evidence. Too many posters come in with preconceived notions of how audio works and simply refuse to produce more than their opinion based on sighted tests.

 

[Wyville]

I understand what you're saying, but we probably need to accept that this isn't a formal scientific body that requires the same level of stringency that those do.

Yeah I think so too and it is probably best to leave it at that.

Cheers!

 

[bigshot]

an additional part of the problem is that I see quite a few people here that are really quite knowledgeable, but who make the mistake of equating that knowledge to an immovable truth.

I understand what you're saying, but facts are facts. You can say that a fact doesn't matter for your particular application and that is perfectly justifiable. But you can't say "we don't know everything so we can't know anything". I see the "science doesn't know everything" argument being used all the time, and it is true to a point. But science as it relates to sound and as ir relates to the technology of sound reproduction is very well known. Edison may have flown by the seat of his pants and stumbled across scientific principles of sound reproduction by accident, but that isn't how things work over a century later. The truth is that the acoustic principles we talk about here have been known for decades. Many of them go back almost a century to Bell Labs. And digital sound is based on a theory that was proven in practice with the release of the CD format.

If someone wants to challenge an established fact, the way to do that is to carefully test for just that aspect with a carefully controlled test that is fair and verifiable. When offered that opportunity, the folks who come into Sound Science with a bee in their bonnet try to say there is no way to know or start getting belligerent. That just tells me that they are trying to justify an argument they know is flawed. That isn't challenging facts. That is self validation.

Placebo is real. So is self-validation and bias. We all exhibit these traits every day of our lives. These things tend to be self-reinforcing, so what appears to us to be self evident due to experience may actually be self delusion due to not controlling our natural tendency to stack the deck. Humans act like humans. It's nothing to be ashamed of. But you have to be aware that it happens and prevent it from influencing your decisions. This is probably the most difficult thing to manage in tests involving perception. The importance of applying controls to perceptual tests can't be over estimated.

 

[bigshot]

I notice that the two big troll bait threads are very close in the number of replies. Perhaps there is a blathering contest going on to see who can spew out the most self validating words in a single thread. Place your bets! It's neck and neck!

 

[castleofargh]

I plead guilty on account of feeding many trolls. I know I shouldn't, but when I see them with their sad eyes, I can't always refrain from feeding them. it's my inner PETA.

 

[Steve999]

For those of you silly enough to be interested in computer chess even though any decent computer chess engine can beat any human . . . .

Stockfish 10 is out!

https://stockfishchess.org/download/ (free, open source, etc.)

Made its way to the top of the charts instantly!

http://www.computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/4040/

(We'll leave out the little detail of Google's Alpha Zero teaching itself chess in a day and destroying anything else on the planet at chess: https://www.chess.com/news/view/google-s-alphazero-destroys-stockfish-in-100-game-match )

 

[bigshot]

Today a fella PMed me on Facebook in response to a post about a rare musical TV series that I recently got copies of. He's a well known musicologist and writes liner notes for a lot of CDs and videos. We chatted and it turns out that both of us have very similar setups... a media server with disk array storage of lossless MKV video rips and streaming audio and video all over the house using an Airport network. It's interesting to me because it's the first time I've met someone who has done the same thing. He also has a collection of music and video that may actually be larger than mine. (At least he thinks so! He hasn't seen my house!) Always nice to meet a kindred spirit.

 

[castleofargh]

For those of you silly enough to be interested in computer chess even though any decent computer chess engine can beat any human . . . .

Stockfish 10 is out!

https://stockfishchess.org/download/ (free, open source, etc.)

Made its way to the top of the charts instantly!

http://www.computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/4040/

(We'll leave out the little detail of Google's Alpha Zero teaching itself chess in a day and destroying anything else on the planet at chess: https://www.chess.com/news/view/google-s-alphazero-destroys-stockfish-in-100-game-match )

I haven't played a game in months. if you want to e-play, I believe I cleverly hide myself as castleofargh on chess.com. I only play 3days/turn games because there is like a law in the universe saying that if I wish to spend 40mn focusing on a game, that's exactly when 10 people I haven't seen in years will decide to consecutively come knock at the door to bring me to Mordor for some ring matter. so I've simply stopped trying to play anything resembling real time games.

and if you win I'll act like a proper chess player and tell everybody that you're a cheater.