> Talking purely abstractly, it's hard to settle the debate, Hm, the mistake in the abstract is pretty obvious and is acknowledge in the theoretical discussion

> Talking purely abstractly, it's hard to settle the debate, Hm, the mistake in the abstract is pretty obvious and is acknowledge in the theoretical discussions of all the "perfect efficiencies" theories - real life is never perfect! So sure, at the superficial/cocktail party level, you'll always have a lot of folks ignoring the obvious and repeating this silly mistakes. But then it's just as easy to do the same when looking at the specifics. I mean, the original example came from defending a specific obvious error? It's also not hard to find flaws in the specifics: like with the air conditioner friend "missing expertise", you don't need to have any expertise to look for such a directly measurable (even wihout instruments) stuff such as noise level! I mean, your friend could've gone and listened to different units working if this information is not covered anywhere online. Even though the fundamental issue of the challenge to find relevant reliable information is indeed very hard, there are so many force working against a poor guy at any level of actual expertise of said guy (so the post is right on the money here)!