In reply to:
I believe this describes "religion" does it not?
Yes, and interestingly yet, there is probably very little correlation between the "spirituality" or religiousness of a person and how much he tends to delve into the non-data-based, subjective "audiophiledom." I gues this itself would present an interesting Ph.D. thesis project in sociopsychology.
In reply to:
Ask sushi if he has ever written up a journal paper where the bottom line was how your experiments revealed nothing at all.
Yes, surprisingly, I recently wrote ONE paper (for the first time) with a completely negative set of results. And that's after several hundred publications in my scientific career so far. It is VERY true that 99% of "negative data" remain unpublished, and that sometimes poses the problem in the field.
At any rate, papers containing data affected by "experimenter bias" are rampant in my field (medical sciences). I would estimate well over a half of all published papers contain more or less "hoax" data, depending of the specific sub-field. And this is regardless of the prestige of the journal where the paper is published. And I am talking about a real "scientific" community here, where every publication has to go through a grilling peer-review process. I don't even want to start commenting on those numerous "pseudo-scientific" communities out there, including the world of audiophiles.
In defence of the scientific community, though, one great thing about the field is its self-policing capabilities. An author who repeatedly publish "unreproducible" results will quickly be eliminated from the community; he/she will not be able to sustain his/her career as a cutting-edge scientist.
Oh, incidentally, I am a devout Christian.
