4 ms·

Re:1 You don't care whether it's a placebo?!? We should get in touch, I have some expensive sugar pills to sell you that will do wonders for your ailment of cho

Re:1 You don't care whether it's a placebo?!? We should get in touch, I have some expensive sugar pills to sell you that will do wonders for your ailment of choice.

peatmoss 11y ago
To be clear, I don't think it actually is. I think many people don't listen in a way that any differences could be discerned. Streaming over your car stereo, going down the highway, for example. Or listening on a cheap phone with a bad DAC and cruddy headphones. I've read about various tests (usually not conducted with sufficient rigor to make me think too much about the results) in which people: 1. Couldn't differentiate lossless and lossy encoding 2. Preferred the lossy to the lossless. The former case isn't too worrisome for me. The latter case is, in that it signals that there is a discernible difference, and that we're habituating to compression. Yesteryear's LP pops and hisses replaced by crunchy, compressed cymbals. I am too young to be crotchety about the way music should sound, but I swear the music industry has turned me into this :-)
ksenzee 11y ago
I seldom care whether something that works for me personally is a placebo or not. If I can harness the power of my brain with a sugar pill, excellent. The placebo effect is powerful, and was the basis of a lot of medicine before the 20th century. Where it does matter, obviously, is science, which is the only tool we have to come up with solutions that are better than placebo. But "better than placebo" is a fairly high standard[1]. [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19246102 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19246102: "The placebo effect accounted for 68% of the effect in the drug groups. Whereas clinical trials need to control the placebo effect, clinical practice should attempt to use its full power."

4 ms·

Re:1 You don't care whether it's a placebo?!? We should get in touch, I have some expensive sugar pills to sell you that will do wonders for your ailment of cho

by svantana 11y ago

Re:1 You don't care whether it's a placebo?!? We should get in touch, I have some expensive sugar pills to sell you that will do wonders for your ailment of choice.

peatmoss 11y ago
To be clear, I don't think it actually is. I think many people don't listen in a way that any differences could be discerned. Streaming over your car stereo, going down the highway, for example. Or listening on a cheap phone with a bad DAC and cruddy headphones. I've read about various tests (usually not conducted with sufficient rigor to make me think too much about the results) in which people: 1. Couldn't differentiate lossless and lossy encoding 2. Preferred the lossy to the lossless. The former case isn't too worrisome for me. The latter case is, in that it signals that there is a discernible difference, and that we're habituating to compression. Yesteryear's LP pops and hisses replaced by crunchy, compressed cymbals. I am too young to be crotchety about the way music should sound, but I swear the music industry has turned me into this :-)
ksenzee 11y ago
I seldom care whether something that works for me personally is a placebo or not. If I can harness the power of my brain with a sugar pill, excellent. The placebo effect is powerful, and was the basis of a lot of medicine before the 20th century. Where it does matter, obviously, is science, which is the only tool we have to come up with solutions that are better than placebo. But "better than placebo" is a fairly high standard[1]. [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19246102 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19246102: "The placebo effect accounted for 68% of the effect in the drug groups. Whereas clinical trials need to control the placebo effect, clinical practice should attempt to use its full power."