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Re: John Atkinson's Rebuttal of Ben Goldacre's "Bad Science"

Well OK, but let's be completely fair then shall we? Goldacre says:

"But the most striking parallel is the widespread notion in the hi-fi community that blinded trials - where you ask listeners toidentify a cable without knowing if it's cheap or expensive - are somehow intrinsically flawed."

Is that a fair representation of what JA wrote? Let's examine. Here the extract from Goldacre's article where he quotes JA.

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I give you the editor of Stereophile, a respected hi-fi magazine of 33 years standing. He's talking about blinded tests on amplifiers: "It seems," he says, "that with such blind listening tests, all perceived subjective differences ... fall away ... when you have taken part in a number of these blind tests and experienced how two amplifiers you know from personal experience to sound extremely different can still fail to be identified under blind conditions ..." Now I'm getting worried. Here comes the money shot. "... then perhaps an alternative hypothesis is called for: that the very procedure of a blind listening test can conceal small but real subjective differences." Ouch. "Having taken part in quite a number of such blind tests, I have become convinced of the truth in this hypothesis." What voodoo is this? If there is a difference to be heard, then you will hear it.
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Does JA state that blind tests are "intrinsically flawed"? True he says that " ... perceived subjective differences ... fall away ...", but that's not the same thing.

Moreover it is clear that JA has provided further clarification of his remarks in the original article, clarification that Goldacre conveniently ignored. JA is explicit on this critical point when he says:

"I guess Mr. Goldacre hadn't read the rest of the 1989 essay from which he had quoted. I was writing about the listening tests I had organized at that year's Stereophile Show. I had taken two highly regarded amplifiers that were widely felt to sound different in normal listening, a solid-state Adcom GFA-555 and a pair of tubed VTL 300W monoblocks, and was trying to determine if they also sounded different in a blind test. The results were inconclusive, though a subsequent series of blind listening tests performed under optimum circumstances did result in statistically significant identification of the amplifiers. "

Thus to recap, when Goldacre said:

"But the most striking parallel is the widespread notion in the hi-fi community that blinded trials - where you ask listeners to identify a cable without knowing if it's cheap or expensive - are somehow intrinsically flawed."

he clearly misrepresented what JA said. I suppose you could argue, and little doubt you will, that in not explicitly making reference to JA in the statement that the assertion is unsupported, but to do so would be simple intellectual dishonesty!, after all he has explicitly used JA ("I give you the editor of Stereophile...") to create the "striking parallel" between the "hi-fi community" and other domains (e.g. Goldacre's "alternative therapy fans" for one).

Hence we may now add misrepresentation to go along with sloppiness in describing Goldacre's article.


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