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In Reply to: RE: "It is wired into their subconscious and in the air they breathe" posted by plantsman on March 01, 2012 at 04:14:31
You've managed to dream up one improbable situation where the possibility of a trade discount might - might! - influence the content of a review. The corruption would only happen if 1) the writer in question is a whore who is less interested in his integrity and reputation than in getting a discount on the pricier cartridge, and 2) the writer must have only the expensive Dynavector and no other cartridge from any other manufacturer, and 3) the Dynavector importer is a vindictive prick who punishes writers who don't rave about his entire line. Your scenario only works if all three conditions are met. Of course in real life the Dynavector importer is a nice guy who most likely would dismiss a negative review with a humorous comment about the reviewer's hearing rather than seeking revenge on him. But nevertheless you deserve praise for the novelty of your idea, even if it is as plausible as the absurd questions George Carlin concocted for the priest in his religious education classes as a child ("Father, suppose you're in a coma and miss your Sunday obligation, but you're on a ship and it crosses the international dateline so it's Sunday again, and you wake up - do you have to go to Mass?"). And your scenario still fails the broader challenge of explaining how trade discounts for reviewers routinely causes bad components to get undeserved praise or good components to be unjustly panned.
You might ask your invisible playmate to explain how the magazine publishing business works. Your claim that negative reviews would cause subscription rates to go up is risible.
Follow Ups:
You've managed to completely dodge the huge body of research that indicates that researchers, despite their best intentions, are highly susceptible to bias. Have you ever actually opened a scholarly journal in psychology, educational assessment, anthropology, field ecology or numerous other fields? Spend half a day in a good university library and you should easily be able to able to easily find twenty articles related to experimenter/observer/tester bias published in the last ten years. If you get a librarian to help you you can probably expand that count to fifty, many of them thoroughly peer reviewed. Of course we have your absolute assurance that you're better/purer than all those tedious science guys wasting their time with unnecessary elaborations in statistics and experimental methodology because you KNOW that you're impervious to bias either overt or subconscious. How could that possibly be interpreted as either monumental hubris or naivety? Are those priestly robes comfortable?The funny thing is that I'm actually not one of those people like the Hydrogen Audio crowd who insist that only measurements or statistically significant double blind listening tests are meaningful. As understand his position I'm probably closer to the sensibilities of someone like the late J. Gordon Holt.
Edits: 03/03/12
I've wasted enough time on you, obviously you can't defend your own illogic. Bye.
"You've managed to completely dodge the huge body of research that indicates that researchers, despite their best intentions, are highly susceptible to bias."
There are no unbiased experts. If you want to find out the truth of some matter you either do the necessary work yourself or you use someone else. If the latter, you are depending on that person's expertise and integrity. The problem is that experts gain their expertise through experience and that experience necessarily biases their point of view. Such is human nature. The legal system and investigative panels (such as the panels established by the National Research Council) deal with the problem by employing multiple experts and vetting their experience and biases. This works well, providing that the experts also have a certain amount of integrity. Having been an expert witness in Federal Court, I can tell you that it would have been a tough situation if I had been feeding out BS, as I would never have passed muster under the brutal cross-examination.
In the case of audio reviewers, there are two ways to calibrate a reviewer: compare their reviews with other reviews of the same product(s) and compare their reviews of products with which one is personally familiar with one's personal experience.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
I guess some people are offended by accusations of being human. weird.
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