Take it on faith: A cease-and-desist letter to those who only believe in measurements

@ghdprentice 

While I suppose this is intended as to be a helpful point of view, it is the kind of rhetoric that gives credence to those with unexamined beliefs to have more faith in there beliefs and that that truth is just a point of view. I’m not going to spend the morning refuting every part of it. But here are some of the issues. 

Why This Is Bad Rhetoric:

Good Reasoning Requires            But the argument uses

It’s compelling storytelling, but weak epistemology. Please explain this as well.

It uses emotionally resonant examples to downplay the rigor of scientific reasoning—while claiming to defend it.

My focus is to understand what we know an how we can know it and to converge on truth... not show the foundation of everything is faith. What has impressed me endlessly about science (I was trained and worked as a scientist for over a decade) was the rigor and reproducibility, the ability to reproduce endlessly the results of experiments with increasing accuracy. There is another thread somewhere where the four kinds of investigation of science are discussed... yes, you must use the correct approach to the right problems.  

This is the kind of rhetoric which folks that do not understand it point to and say, see even among the intellectuals truth is just faith. 

Along these lines, I do not like to use the word “know “because it assumes there is a truth, but indeed there are only beliefs. When everybody believes the same thing, then it is regarded as a truth. But is it? We know nothing. We believe much. There is no spoon.

I feel comfortable commenting as a four decade scientist.

The scientific method is a rational approach to solving problems. Measurements are only useful for solving problems if they are relevant.

This is what is problematic with the ASR approach- the measurements they make are not all relevant, as they are static and not done under dynamic conditions and do not typically examine aspects such as phase. 
 

The same mistakes were made by Julian Hirsch, who apparently never fully understood that whole circuit feedback was affected by time delay, and thus great amounts of such feedback, while reducing static distortion for an unvarying signal of a given frequency, actually greatly increased distortion for dynamic music reproduction through transient intermodulation distortion.

Great post! thanks...

 When i proposed the same points to Amir of ASR using  physicist Hans Van Maanen articles , he mocked him as a mere hobbyist ...

I feel comfortable commenting as a four decade scientist.

The scientific method is a rational approach to solving problems. Measurements are only useful for solving problems if they are relevant.

 

This is what is problematic with the ASR approach- the measurements they make are not all relevant, as they are static and not done under dynamic conditions and do not typically examine aspects such as phase. 
 

The same mistakes were made by Julian Hirsch, who apparently never fully understood that whole circuit feedback was affected by time delay, and thus great amounts of such feedback, while reducing static distortion for an unvarying signal of a given frequency, actually greatly increased distortion for dynamic music reproduction through transient intermodulation distortion.

It’s amazing how words written hundreds of years ago still have relevance today. Shakespeare might have been writing about ASR.

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy"

There is one criteria almost infallible to identify narrow mind or shallow mind, they have no imagination.