Magic wires...
Back to hardware... for about two seconds.
The subject of "designer cables" costing sometimes hundreds or even thousands of dollars (instead of five or ten dollars) came up, as it has over the years, in a forum I was recently participating in...
The audiophile victimization industry has got a lot of mileage out of the basic human trait of cognitive bias, which can lead people to incorrect interpretations of their own experience and presumed preference.
Behavioral scientists have found -- and recent brain scan studies have given sometimes dramatic support to the idea -- that humans allow a number of non-objective modes of thinking to color what they believe are uncolored perceptions. Humans want to believe in what they've previously believed. Uncertainty produces elevated anxiety in most people (backed by brain scan studies) and the human drive is to come to a conclusion, any conclusion -- and it is much more comforting if that conclusion is consistent with prior beliefs and belief frameworks.
IOW, most humans do not like their personal paradigms shifted.
Problems with the interference of personal belief and perceptual cognition pushed the scientists who specialize in the study of perception, beginning more than 100 years ago, to realize that simple blind testing was not enough.
In simple blind audio testing, the subject does not know what he's listening to, but the test giver does. Over and over, it was found that the test giver could contaminate the findings by giving subtle, typically unconscious cues about the source material. Eventually, the practice of double blind perceptual testing was established as absolutely necessary in much perceptual testing.
By keeping the test giver and taker in the dark over which of two sounds was which, more reliable, less biased results could be derived.
The subject of "designer cables" costing sometimes hundreds or even thousands of dollars (instead of five or ten dollars) came up, as it has over the years, in a forum I was recently participating in...
The audiophile victimization industry has got a lot of mileage out of the basic human trait of cognitive bias, which can lead people to incorrect interpretations of their own experience and presumed preference.
Behavioral scientists have found -- and recent brain scan studies have given sometimes dramatic support to the idea -- that humans allow a number of non-objective modes of thinking to color what they believe are uncolored perceptions. Humans want to believe in what they've previously believed. Uncertainty produces elevated anxiety in most people (backed by brain scan studies) and the human drive is to come to a conclusion, any conclusion -- and it is much more comforting if that conclusion is consistent with prior beliefs and belief frameworks.
IOW, most humans do not like their personal paradigms shifted.
Problems with the interference of personal belief and perceptual cognition pushed the scientists who specialize in the study of perception, beginning more than 100 years ago, to realize that simple blind testing was not enough.
In simple blind audio testing, the subject does not know what he's listening to, but the test giver does. Over and over, it was found that the test giver could contaminate the findings by giving subtle, typically unconscious cues about the source material. Eventually, the practice of double blind perceptual testing was established as absolutely necessary in much perceptual testing.
By keeping the test giver and taker in the dark over which of two sounds was which, more reliable, less biased results could be derived.
posted by TK Major at
8:19 AM
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