What makes a good experiment?
Let’s look at a bad one… Magazines tend to avoid ‘blind tests’ because they take a lot of time and may throw up results uncomfortable to them. But they do produce tests which masquerade as ‘blind’. We’ve all seen them. The favourite subject is cables because they are easy to swap around and also leave plenty of ‘fudge’ room afterwards 🙂 In a typical example a ‘tester’ invites a few pals round to his house. Over a cup of tea he (sorry – it’s always ‘he’) plays some music. Every so often he goes up to the system, everyone closes their eyes and he swaps speaker cables. They all listen some more, if it’s a good test they don’t talk to each other, and make notes but usually they chat. Then the tester goes off and whilst everyone closes their eyes he changes the cables again. Great – a perfect scientific blind test 🙂 – er not really… The whole test is utterly worthless. The single biggest flaw is the ‘human factor’. The Human Factor We have evolved for millions of years to become the
