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  3. 170451-134201

Can You Hear Me Now

In an interview with Laurence Borden of Dagogo, Dr Earl Geddes talked about the ability of people to really have golden ears. In his work at Ford, he tried to gauge how good the ten member golden ear panel was. I will let him tell you his findings. “For the most part the study concluded that this panel was “not capable.” In other words their judgments could not be relied upon to be statistically stable. That said, there were two members of the ten who were capable, so it was possible. But the real point here is that someone is not a good judge of sound quality just because they think that they are – all ten members would have claimed that they were audiophiles and good judges of sound quality.
After several more studies along these same lines, I came to conclude that the more someone claimed to be a “golden ear” the less likely it was that they actually were.”  
That got me thinking: how many of our members would belong to the group of eight and how many would be with the two who could really hear. Interesting reading. The full interview can be found here:
https://www.dagogo.com/an-interview-with-dr-earl-geddes-of-gedlee-llc/
N.B. Dr. Earl Geddes is one of the pioneers of the Distributed Bass Array system. His work on the subject is well known. 
spenav

Showing 1 response by noske

noske
783 posts
 
In any experiment, especially psychological, the devil is in the details. Even when elementary errors of logic have been avoided, and even when the statistics have not been abused, measurements are often irrelevant to the goals of the study.

The whole scientific literature is littered with claims not supported by the data.


@terry9 Statistics are invariably abused. Either deliberately or by sheer utter incompetence. Neither transgression is forgivable. Swaths of rants could be (and have been) devoted to this, perhaps what you concisely describe as the devil is in the detail..

Robust studies devote an abundance of resources defining exactly what variables need and can be be quantified and in a manner that is beyond reproach.

Sadly, many empirical studies spend 5% of the time thinking about the problem and 95% of time finding a solution. The opposite approach, often incorrectly attributed to Einstein, is the one with merit.

Edit - I do not limit this comment to any particular field being analysed.  It applies generally.
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