Bybee Fraud Protection

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We use "prejudice" as a pejorative because of the sloppiness of substituting it for "bigotry." But "prejudice" is perfectly fine, and I would say useful- one can have prejudice against stupid ideas that claim to violate first principles, huckstered for fun and profit.

It's a perfectly reasonable prejudice, no different than judging the peddler of a perpetual motion machine as a fraud. Why waste time examining obvious fraud? I feel a little silly that I did, but someone had to.
 
A few miscellaneous thoughts:
Experimental placebos are used as controls precisely because of the reality of the placebo effect.
"Affect" is a verb.
Not flattering, that testimony link.
Since "BQP" is the accepted acronym, the personality is tied to the product.
The question isn't whether or not 1-3/4" cables, BQP's, or wooden blocks have an effect. The question is why the effect does or does not exist.
 
Of course, Max. That is about all that I can say about the BQP's too. I have tried to find an explanation from physics books, and only gotten suggestive hints as to the nature of electron behavior regarding BQP devices.
Yeah, I haven't found definitive explanation either.
One interesting thing is that with A/B DPDT switching system change is not perfectly immediate.
I also agree that cheaper stuff can be improved with BQP's as I have done it over a long period of time, but it is not cost effective, if you have to pay for them.
Yes.

Dan.
 

Indeed, more than you can ever imagine with all the advice you ever had.

Thing is, Dan, I do it without whizz/amphetamines.
Never used them, but I did everything else (likely everything you never did).

That's the significant difference between you and me.
I'm talking from experience, with facts, by rational assumptions, open to feedback to turn them into rational arguments.
You speak from personal impression, sage advice from way back, and faith in the knowledge of a man you know nothing about.

Oh Yes, you've definitely seen the white flag raised.
 
Then one can readily see the analog here with audio perception of 'phantom effect' devices, I think. It's all part of the human condition............

My original point exactly.

And my second point is that objective-leaning folks are generally asking the questions:
1.) By what mechanism?
2.) Prove efficacy via gold (or at least "golder") standards.

Others asking about double placebo, etc, are why 99% of clinical studies are not compared to placebo (unless, of course, they're alt-med "studies", but I digress), but comparative to present best-practices. Comparing against placebo is unethical in that you're (almost invariably) NOT treating the patient.

* Which grumpily makes me wonder why alt-med stuff gets research $$'s and receives IRB approvals.

** Which grumpily makes me wonder why people buy things like these Bybee-a-ma-gigs. At least they're not getting public funding...
 
nature of electron behavior regarding BQP devices

Really, from a physics text? So, you have said yourself that some folks hear nothing but OTOH we have an effect that "is obvious to anyone" and works even better on cheap components. So what happened for those that heard nothing it certainly can't be the usual "their components aren't up to the task"?
 
Derf, Nobody needs BQP's any more than people need extra quality audio. It is a listening choice that some people find worthwhile. If I had never met Jack Bybee, I most probably would never have used them in practice. However, I heard the BQP's before I even met Jack Bybee, in my reference listening system, and that was 20 years ago. I trust my ears, especially when I had no cause to be biased, at all, back then. Even today, I do not build BQP's into my electronics, they are just too expensive! I do use a lot of them, however, outside the electronics, itself. Could I live without them? Yes, just like I could live without my negative ion generator, but WHY would I want to?
 
Others asking about double placebo, etc, are why 99% of clinical studies are not compared to placebo (unless, of course, they're alt-med "studies", but I digress), but comparative to present best-practices. Comparing against placebo is unethical in that you're (almost invariably) NOT treating the patient.
If you're referring to something like leukemia or a brain tumor, yes. Placebo treatment would certainly be unethical.
Your post, though, ignores and insults the extensive clinical research being done for something like chronic heartburn where placebos are legitimately used on volunteer patients.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
 
Sofaspud,

I don't think research into chronic heartburn (which is mechanistically chronic acid reflux, i.e. GERD) involves placebos, as standards of care generally involve dietary controls, acid blockers, and proton pump inhibitors. All act on hard endpoints to mitigate inflammation of the esophagus on up. Yes, absolutely, there's a lot of discomfort involved as well.

I truly meant no insult by that, and should I find myself wrong in suggesting placebos are rarely used, I will apologize and correct my stance immediately. I do try to keep up with drug/treatment development (at least the big journals) as my graduate studies* are supporting the development of a clinical diagnostics platform.

Placebos have no place with hard end-point trials, as we know their efficacy to be zero (e.g. sugar pills do not reduce tumor load). Softer endpoint (and by softer I mean subjective scales, not to devalue them) studies and/or diseases which lack a solid treatment pathway tend to be more placebo-controlled. At least that's what a quick search of NEJM with "placebo-controlled" resulted in.

Bill,

That study is from 1965.

* I'm going for my doctorate, but not *that* kind of doctor, so go heavy on the salt. 🙂
 
I deliberately chose the earliest study I could find to show that people have been trying to understand the placebo effect in drug trials for over 50 years. There are many more on this.

It is a confusing minefield for those of us without clinical training. I do suggest reading 'bad science' for a lighthearted view of this from someone who does understand things and has a serious message, or you can just trawl his website. Bad Science

Sadly the one member of my family who did understand all this died of cancer a couple of years ago. Trust a microbiologist to get the rarest form of sarcoma. I joked with her that someone will get a PhD from her tissue samples!
 
A placebo by definition does not work, rather it is an experimental control to gauge the statistical effect of the item under test. So when in a drug trial half of the patients are given placebo sugar pills while the other half receive the experimental treatment, the analysis will compare the improvement seen with the experimental treatment to that seen with the sugar pills. The experimental treatment will be deemed ineffective if the results show it having an effect that is not statistically different than placebo. So placebo is the standard of failure, not success.

As an example, one could design an experiment where Bybees are the experimental treatment and matched value resistors are the placebo. Blind listening comparisons would elicit the ability of listeners to distinguish the Bybees from the resistors. If the statistics showed that listeners could not distinguish the Bybees from the resistors, then Bybees would be judged ineffective. Those who are seeking placebo "benefit" would be much wiser to buy the resistor!

A placebo effect is working. Just the placebo isn't without the human component. Perhaps I'll just say P°E.

But you're not exactly right about what a placebo shows. If a P°E happens, it doesn't invalidate variable. In fact quiet the opposite, often. It's a better gauge for how much the variable does work. I'm not even sure what the standard is for effect quality. The worst scenerio is if the variable has worse results, as it shows a negative effect.

Many of our drugs aren't more effective than a placebo, at a significance. Either it's as good as the placebo or better, is enough with those wack jobs in that industry.

With audio were you to compare a placebo to the Bybee, you could only prove the Bybee to be no more effective than the placebo, unless it got consistant negative responses showing it degraded sound or didn't sound as good as a resistor. But that alone might tell you how much money you belive it's worth. However humans basically can't ABX very well. The ones who scored the best have the most experience with the item.

The concept of how a Bybee would work is sound. We know how skin effect works. We know how voltage division works. We've seen a measurement on the Bybee, posted here. It's different, but it's significance is the best arguement since as far as the measurement goes, it's barely there by our definitions of noise. Would you pay $200 for a micro-ripple correction? Could your stereo portray that difference?

I've got 5 years of hearing the difference. When I placebo myself with audio changes (and I do) they last from minutes to a week at best. I familiarize myself with changes that can be heard, or learn I can't tell when I reverse it. If it's not super obvious, I like to check by reverting. However over 5 years no matter how many systems and parts I use one of my conditioners on, the Bybee'd one always prevails as being better. It simply provides more control to the music, no question. Things are always better defined.
 
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