Our Beliefs and Attacking Ignorance

[Head_Unit]

everyone has opinions and learned "lore" accumulated trough the years

This is a fundamental thing you have spouted out I must say. "Lore" gets accumulated, then becomes outdated, but because the "lore" is so old it is believed more than newer facts. Like
- "Do something you love" for a living...yeah nice if you can manage it BUT you need to MAKE MONEY since the cost of living (especially housing) has gone up so much
- Class D amps all sound XXX (and their design technology can't possibly have improved in the last 40+ years); Class A and tube amps are all orgasmically wonderful (never ever mediocre or bad); Receivers can't be high fidelity and separates are always better...gee maybe it depends on individual designs ya know?!?
- Car leasing is throwing away money...er, so is buying a car at all! Which is financially cheaper really depends on the lease deal.
- If you get a big tax refund that is financially stupid because the government is using your money all year (REALITY: if you are not somewhat overwithheld, tax changes can hand you an unpleasant bill that you might not have cash on hand to pay. I had that happen to several tax clients and to myself once upon a time).
- Argh there is some other financial old saw that I simply cannot remember, which is simply no longer true but still gets parroted out in Readers' Digest and so on.

 

[bluefuzz]

I was always under the impression High Fidelity meant " reproduce the original recorded signal as accurately as possible"

This is an important point. There are many who come here with the assumption that their audio gear should somehow enhance, in some undefinable or magical way, the subjective experience of music. That 'hi-fi' is a baseline that can and should be exceeded. When talking about 'hi-fi' they expect high fidelity to the original performance magically recreated in their living room or perhaps 'what the producer heard at the console'. Both of which end up in muddy metaphysical speculation.

I think this is why many discussions get off on the wrong foot - having started from different assumption as to what audio/hi-fi gear is for.

Hi-fi – and by implication ASR – is about the accurate reproduction of the recorded signal. Preferably nothing less but certainly nothing more.

 

[Alexanderc]

I allow for a certain amount of ignorance in others because I assume(!) that the Dunning-Kruger Effect applies to everyone in some aspects of their lives. Who has time to fully understand everything they encounter?

I followed the link you posted and at the bottom of the page was this link, which I think is equally useful in this context: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/...some-people-dig-in-instead-admit-theyre-wrong

 

[Katji]

People only pay attention to new information when they want to
14 Sept 2021

A new paper in the Journal of the European Economic Association, published by Oxford University Press, indicates that we tend to listen to people who tell us things we'd like to believe and ignore people who tell us things we'd prefer not to be true. As a result, like-minded people tend to make one another more biased when they exchange beliefs with one another.

While it would reasonable to think that people form decisions based on evidence and experience alone, previous research has demonstrated that decision makers have "motivated beliefs;" They believe things in part because they would like such things to be true. Motivated beliefs (and the reasoning that leads to them) can generate serious biases. Motivated beliefs have been speculated to explain the proliferation of misinformation on online forums. Such beliefs may also explain stock market performance. [...]

Researchers here used laboratory experiments to study whether such biases in beliefs grew more severe when people exchanged these beliefs with one another. The researchers paired subjects based on their score on an IQ test such that both members either both had scores above the median or both had scores below the median. The subjects then exchanged beliefs concerning a proposition both wanted to believe was true: that they were in the high IQ group.

The experiment revealed that people who are pessimistic that they are in the high IQ group tend to become significantly more optimistic when matched with a more optimistic counterpart. An optimistic person is not, however, likely to change his beliefs if matched with a more pessimistic counterpart. This effect is particularly strong for people who are in the low IQ group, where it produces particularly severe biases. Overall, the results suggest that bias amplification occurs because people (selectively) attribute higher informational value to social signals that reinforce their pre-existing motivation to believe.

Halfway through the experiment, however, researchers gave subjects an unbiased piece of information about which IQ group subjects were in. This was highly effective at removing the biases caused by the initial exchange of beliefs. The results therefore suggest that providing unbiased, reliable sources of information may reduce motivated beliefs in settings like echo chambers and financial markets.

"This experiment supports a lot of popular suspicions about why biased beliefs might be getting worse in the age of the internet," said Ryan Oprea, one of the paper's authors. "We now get a lot of information from social media and we don't know much about the quality of the information we're getting. As a result, we're often forced to decide for ourselves how accurate various opinions and sources of information are and how much stock to put in them. Our results suggest that people resolve this quandary by assigning credibility to sources that are telling us what we'd like to hear and this can make biases due to motivated reasoning a lot worse over time."

 

[Frgirard]

Your writer has discovered the marketing with two century of delay.