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RE: Ignore the doubters!

Posted by Joe Roberts on September 21, 2015 at 06:14:10:
This extends to understanding how "Science" as a logical system and human social enterprise works. Most audio forum science is pretty close to trash, not so much in the realm of electronics where high-school lab conceptions are reasonably useful, but when EEs and guys who learned electronics in the Navy start talking anthropology and human research, it gets pretty silly."

-I don't think you are giving some enough credit, after all you don't know what they don't know. ;)
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In human research areas such as audio testing and evaluation, I see a lot of the same approach taken in the EE lab, which doesn't work!

This "scientific" approach to DBT and ABX and all that is based on totally discredited paradigms in social science. The basic notion is that people, or rather their behavior, can be studied in the lab similar to physics experiments. Control the "experiment" and good solid insights come out the other end.

I can tell what people don't know about this subject by what they write. This is bad science and really bad human research. Why? Because it doesn't recognize how people relate to the world and doesn't recognize and control many relevant variables. The result is that the test has little relevance outside the unique conditions of the test.

Where I get upset is not seeing that forum guys don't understand human research, this is a very specialized and complicated field. It is when these highly questionable notions are weaponized and used to shut down discourse, using the holy mantle of Science. I see it all the time.

Did you blind test that opinion? Sighted listening! Expectation bias!

I can understand when tech people get peeved at hearing about bogus new electronics phenomena invented out of thin air. Well, that's how I feel about this audio forum evaluation science. It is extremely dubious and certainly no basis for feeling superior and in control of listening evaluations (especially other peoples') the way we are in control of circuits.

It is not a science in the sense it is being framed and can not be.

I realize that many, perhaps most, have no idea what I am talking about sometimes and that the idea of scientific listening testing seems totally reasonable on the face of things, but it is not that simple, really not.

My main interest in pointing out things like this is to remove blockages to advancement and useful experimentation in audio. This is what I have been trying to do my whole audio career.

The tip off for me that I am on to something is how ferociously people defend their turf. When I first started writing and publishing articles about horns, an extremely unpopular subject at the time, I had drunk old geezers calling me up late at night, "Roberts, you bastard, you're putting audio back 30 years!" Numerous "pros" ridiculed me to my face, including one who had a complete horn system within two years.

Look at how people defend audio testing, when 99% of the defenders have no training in or understanding of the field whatsoever, and how strongly they defend Science when they don't have much insight into the profound intellectual complexities of their claims, and it appears that there are some really deep-seated understandings about the world and their place in it riding on those topics.

I get it that some personalities do not like to feel adrift and want to pin everything down with scientific certainty. Well, we are in fact more adrift than many would like and I think that is a good thing. It is what makes us interesting.

One important insight that I have gained in 30 years as an anthropologist in audio is that we modern first-world humans are not that far from our primitive ancestors. Science is another of many cultural activities that shares a lot with religion and politics. People are people and science does not offer an exit route.

Incidentally, I was a declared Physics major at U.Penn. That lasted exactly two classes. They put me in a class in Elementary Mechanics that consisted of me and 5 guys selected by the Chinese government to come to Penn to study Physics. After getting all As in AP Physics in high school, I thought I knew this stuff cold. Well, I felt like I was surrounded by Enrico Fermi, Walter Heisenberg, and Nikolai Tesla. Maybe I was. I swiftly dropped the class and took "Intro to Film Making" instead.

In retrospect, I think the Physics department was testing me in a "sink or swim" environment and I definitely saw some vivid underwater phenomena!

Sure, Physics has its place but it is not the universal key to understanding human existence. I'm glad I took the anthropology and philosophy of science/social theory route. These perspectives have been very useful in the audio world.