Is Better really Better?
Interesting article [with a stupid title designed to appeal to Digg readers – and it worked, because that is how I found it ;-/]:
It talks about rating [essentially AB testing] fine wine, classical musicians, and Greek art. It points out that we also all have another what we would call, based on the previous posts, a mental processor that judges the sound, in our case, based on External Factors unrelated to the sound:
External Factors Processor
Price, appearance and brand quality influence some of our decision making when it comes to evaluating quality.
I also want to add that this is in addition to contextual temporal things like the ambiance and comparative level of inebriation in which we experience the playback.
[A few notes about the article.
The judges of the classical music competition did exactly the right thing. As revealed in Chia-Jung Tsay’s experiment, all sorts of people judged the quality of the playing by the top 3 contestants to be essentially equivalent – a tie. But the contestant who LOOKED like they were the best won. I ask: how else would you break a tie, if you were a judge, but to take visual flair and style of the musician into account, when the actual playing was insufficient to differentiate the contestants from each other?
Another point is that not all people are so susceptible to intuitively derived impressions of quality. If, as in the article
“In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, he describes our two modes of thought: System 1, like the adaptive unconscious, is our “fast, instinctive, and emotional” intuition. System 2 is our “slower, more deliberative, and more logical” conscious thought. Kahneman believes that we often leave decisions up to System 1 and generally place far “too much confidence in human judgment” due to the pitfalls of our intuition described above. “
Then, it may be good for you to know, as you read this series of extremely weird posts, that many people [including Neli and I] are more primarily ‘System 2’ people [which based on our background in math, engineering and the sciences makes some amount of sense]. So when we reach opinions it is almost always after deliberate boring-ass multitudinous comparisons and geologic time-periods of fractious debate. Doesn’t mean we are right, necessarily [even though we are :-)], and it does mean I am probably, no definitely, more boring that people who make snap judgments about things then move on, but it does mean we aren’t at all easily taken in by marketing BS and personality blitzes and ‘expert’ opinions.
But, taken in by high [or low, you know who you are] price tags? Nah. Deliberative and attention to fact-based reality. You bet.
But what subsumes all of this is that we all can [and want to be! :-)] taken in by good music [which is what this blog is all about].
Music can [forcibly. the more forcibly the better] strip away all this long-winded deliberation and logic and shallow marketing-driven prejudices and counter-insurgency-like anti-marketing prejudices and reboot us in the deeper, System 3 part of the mind. The Be Here Now reality with the Pluto fly-by imaginative. To be really truly awake in a way that is just… that is just so fine and hard to achieve in any other way.
So AB tests are almost always useless for determining absolute quality [yes, for System 1-type people and also for the rest of us because the time- and ambiance-constraints are so fearsome and tend to dominate the decision-space] but they can be fun and can be good for providing the fuel to explore strange new worlds and seek out new life in this tired dried up news weary world we all got stuck in.
