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What is this? No golden ears!

antcollinet

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Well, you may have a point. It can also be about semantics, as well as touch points. If we take bias , according to Wikipedia:

Bias is a disproportionate weight in favor of or against an idea or thing, usually in a way that is closed-minded, prejudicial, or unfair. Biases can be innate or learned. People may develop biases for or against an individual, a group, or a belief.[1] In science and engineering, a bias is a systematic error. Statistical bias results from an unfair sampling of a population, or from an estimation process that does not give accurate results on average.[2]

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preconceived

(of an idea or an opinion) formed too early, especially without enough thought ...

notion

a belief ...


Which is consciously thought out or not? The interesting thing is the approach. Of course, it is quite pointless to involve someone to do a task if that person
more or less neglect to engage in what the end result of that "non-effort" person will be.

Now I didn't do that, "non-effort" , in my tests described in this thread but I could just listened o the discs for a few seconds, without hardly concentrating and just say: No difference (as I knew)
Note, I did not. I really tried and listened as best I could. I even turned off the freezer and refrigerator to reduce the background noise.:)

Interesting about Harman and the exclusion of those with hearing deficit. Totally reasonable, but was there "tone deaf" included? Those who wouldn't even be able to hear if, for example, the loudness functionality in an amp was on or not? Whether it is tone deafness, or non-training, or...well whatever it is in such a case of loudness? :oops:
But the bias we are taliking about is not just 'bias', it is 'cognitive bias'

it comes from all those automatic processes that filter all the streams of information coming in from our senses so we can understand it and process it without being overwhelmed by it. The headline of the article linked above ("we hear what we expect to hear") is misleading. First that is not what the study was studying (It is already established neuroscience). The specific study was looking to see what area of the brain is doing the filtering - and they found it (or at least some of it) is in the low level subcortex. The consious brain never even gets all the pre filtered information. In the study, the "expectation" is what the brain subconciously expects based on all your years of experience of similar situations. In fact it even posits that the brain encodes information as a difference from expectation rather than the full information - allowing it to dramatically reduce the information needed for that encoding. A little like how compressed video encodes only the differences from a previous frame or a key frame.

A good example of the subconcious nature of this is the demonstration at 0:30 of this video.

Our perception of what the sound is changes based on the mouth movents (making a B shape or F shape while "speaking"). Even when we conciously KNOW we are being tricked, and HOW the trick works, we still percieve the different sound. It is wired deep in our brain such that what the concious brain gets is filtered/modified by what the eye is seeing.

 
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egellings

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You might be able to edit a preconceived (mistaken) notion; a bias (belief), not so much.
 
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