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In Reply to: RE: Bybee purifiers and other 'tweaks' in general posted by john curl on January 21, 2011 at 08:02:59
Science is based on skepticism. A skeptic invests the effort to understand the claim and the supporting evidence and theory.
A cynic is a lazy, dishonest person who cannot imagine anyone being more diligent or honest. The carping of cynics is the reverse of the flattery they use to overcome their lack of technical competence in their day jobs.
"It is all in your head" is a version of solipsism used by cynics to diminish anecdotal reports. It is logically impossible to disprove, but is sterile. Eliminating the possibility of prejudice in a scientific trial is much more expensive and difficult than the cynics would have us believe. Carping about the "burden of proof" in discussing audio tweaks is just more of the same laziness and dishonesty that marks cynics.
Follow Ups:
Science is based on observation, rigorous observation conducted in ways that give us a high degree of confidence in the observational data gathered.
Scepticisim is originally a philosophical stance rooted in a particular view of what kind of evidence is necessary for someone to be able to justify a claim to know something. Many philosophical sceptics take an extreme stance and assert that we can never have good enough grounds for making a claim to know anything and a few take the more extreme stance that we can never have good enough grounds for believing anything.
When it comes to audio and tweaks, it seems to me that the typical sceptic's view is that the only things which can work are those which agree with their personal view of what science currently believes. Many of them have no idea of what scientific method is and of how science actually works, nor any understanding of what is required for scientific proof, and many of them don't even have an undergraduate degree level understanding of the areas of science relative to some of the things they deride.
Things can certainly work without science knowing how they work. Lack of an accepted scientific account of how and why something works doesn't mean it can't work but that's what many of our audio sceptics claim. Science doesn't do that, it gathers observations, confirms or disconfirms the observations, and then—often quite slowly—develops theories to understand why the observed events occurred and to enable us to make predictions about what will happen in particular sets of circumstances.
Sceptics are actually anti-science. They don't withhold judgement until the claims are subjected to a thorough investigation, they tend to reject them out of hand because their notion of proof is based more on an intellectual stance regarding what is appropriate evidence than on the scientific method of painstakingly gathering and confirming observations and then using that observational data to develop theories which enable predictions to be made and tested.
David Aiken
Science has often proven wrong and corrected only because of contrary observations, many times at a critical point where one observation proves the theory and the other refutes it. But that is the goal, not the norm. All scientists need to be skeptical about the observation and most importantly the measures of it. Ultimately, it is the lack of replication that undoes initial observation, as in high temperature super-conductivity.
One thing that is essential to science is not dismissing observations out of hand. It is false science to do so, but it is valuable to suggest what test would invalidate the observations and even more important to do so. No pointing out mountains and not climbing them in science. A long time ago, I noticed that many developed democracies had experienced a turnout increase in the 1960s and declined since. Others had shown a steady decline. I could conceive of no explanation for this and could not get any publication of it. Many reviewers said, that it was interesting but I needed to show some demonstration for why this happened.
Finally, there is a substantial difference between good science and making a decision to buy something. Most things we buy have insufficient observations to fully justify our buying decisions. We often find that the reviewer's experiences don't prove true of ours. It would be great were others' experiences to exactly correspond to ours, but so would a world at peace.
'The public' is a very strange animal, and although a good knowledge of human nature will generally lead a caterer of amusement to hit the people right, they are fickle and ofttimes perverse." - P.T. Barnum
"Often referred to as the "Prince of Humbugs," Barnum saw nothing wrong in entertainers or vendors using hype (or "humbug", as he termed it) in promotional material, as long as the public was getting value for money. However, he was contemptuous of those who made money through fraudulent deceptions, especially the spiritualist mediums popular in his day, testifying against noted spirit photographer William H. Mumler in his trial for fraud. Prefiguring illusionists Harry Houdini and James Randi, Barnum exposed "the tricks of the trade" used by mediums to cheat the bereaved. In The Humbugs of the World, he offered $500 to any medium who could prove power to communicate with the dead."
Wow Al, as John said that was VERY WELL written and very accurate in my experience. Thanks for all you do here in AA.
ET
Well said, Al.
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