Home Propeller Head Plaza

Technical and scientific discussion of amps, cables and other topics.

  Register / Login

And you ignore the point! Buridan's Donkey

I gave you a link to a post by jj, who is a real expert on blind tests. Didn't you read it? Apparently not.

It's not just that you are likely to be biased by size, color, reputation, or attitudes, beliefs and expectations, it that we are built to perceive differences, and hence, will overdetect differences.

You might reflect on the apocryphal story known as Buridan's Donkey, a story probably invented by his opponents to reduce his theory to absurdity. A hungry donkey is place equidistant between to identical piles of food. Since neither pile is better than the other, the donkey can't make a decision and starves to death. Now, this story was designed to show that Buridan's psychological theories must have some flaw, as surely the donkey would just pick one, go over to it, and start eating. By pick one, I refer only to the fact that he can't go to both at once. There is nothing to prevent the beast from feasting on the other, too (presumably if still hungry). The relevance here is that it was not something in the piles of food that made the donkey decide which one to go to (first) but something inside the donkey.


____________________________________________________________
"Nature loves to hide."
---Heraclitus of Ephesus (trans. Wheelwright)


This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
  Sonic Craft  


Follow Ups Full Thread
Follow Ups


You can not post to an archived thread.