tomjtx;152704 Wrote: > OK, i was refering to a test of antibiotics or cholesterol drugs , for > example. > The results can be determined by blood tests, the cholesterol is lower > or not, the infection is gone or not. > > It is irrelevant if the subject says he feels better(the placebo > effect) in these tests. So blinditis would not invalidate those tests.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure there is *always* a placebo control, even in those tests. Don't underestimate the power of psychology - taking a sugar pill and believing it is a cholsterol lowering drug may actually lower your cholesterol... and even if it doesn't, it's better to remove the possibility by controlling for it. > > I will ask some colleagues if there are any studies on ear training > tests. ie. whether a graded test gives different scores than an > ungraded test. I'm sure if you feel under pressure it will affect your performance, although I'm not sure whether it will decrease it or actually enhance it. It would be interesting to find out. Suppose we ran a blind trial on digital cables and got a null result (no significant differences). I think I can summarize things like this: Hypothesis 1: there is a condition, blinditis, which affects people only while they undergo blind tests, which causes them to think they can hear the same difference they heard while not being tested, when in fact they can't, and therefore they "fail" (meaning their choices are consistent with random) the test. Hypothesis 2: the differences between cables are too small to be perceptible. Occam's razor applies in this situation, I think... -- opaqueice ------------------------------------------------------------------------ opaqueice's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4234 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=29353 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
