hirsch;180007 Wrote: > > Note that blinding is not even mentioned in the above. It's simply a > way of removing a confounding variable so that a significant alpha > becomes more interpretable. That's it. If you think what I'm saying > is in any way false, I strongly recommend reading a book on > statistics/experimental design.
What you are saying *is* incorrect. As for reading a book, thanks for the suggestion. I'm a scientist - I do this stuff for a living, and I've read many books on the subject already :-). As far as I can tell, you seem to be thinking that a listening test is supposed to tell you whether or not there is any difference. If that were the case, it's true that a null result wouldn't indicate much - it would merely indicate that there is no difference large enough to be heard in that test, but many other possible differences would remain untested. However, a listening test is not testing whether or not there is a difference in general - it's testing whether or not there is a perceptible difference for that listener. That's it - nothing more or less. A "negative" result implies that there is not; a positive that there is. Clearly either result usually also implies something for other listeners and other circumstances as well, but formally you can ignore that if you want (your impaired hearing example goes here). It might be of some interest to those that think "negative" results don't mean anything to know that there is currently an effort in observational astrophysics to get people to publish them. The problem is that people, after doing analyses, often don't publish the results if they aren't surprising or don't contain a new and previously unobserved effect. This leads to a publication bias - it's like only reporting data which supports a conclusion and never data which doesn't; it leads to a skewed view of the evidence. The truth is the "negative" results (and again that's really not a well-defined concept) are just as meaningful and important as "positive". -- opaqueice ------------------------------------------------------------------------ opaqueice's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4234 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=32352 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
