> Ad experts and entertainment companies have known this for decades, but I get the sense the average American citizen still thinks of themselves as a free and independent thinker and not a product of their environment.
I feel like I've just experienced an extreme microcosm of this: I recently treated myself to an expensive power amplifier... and reluctantly embarked on the painful process of choosing appropriate audio cables. Through the other side I am still in disbelief over how entrenched the market and consumers are in their pseudo scientific BS - so much craziness - and almost every successful cable manufacturer and professional reviewer is in on the game (of which there are countless).
I'm usually of the opinion that within healthy competitive markets, capitalism tends to provides a kind of democracy, hopefully with emerging attributes such as honesty which naturally push the consumer towards making good decisions without being deeply informed - but clearly that is not always the case.
It's relatively simple to become informed about the basics of audio cables such as speaker wire [0], but that's not enough, you need a strong disposition of skepticism to wade through the sea of nonsense claims based on (real) electrical properties plucked from the science of general EE and sprinkled irrelevantly all over audio cable marketing and reviews and then echoed by it's users... that's the easy bit, next you will have another sea of anecdotal ABX reviewers that start to persuade you that the science could be missing something, now you enter the world of improper ABX tests, and the psychology of greater_cost+any_change = perceived as improved (e.g improving sound through simply disturbing wire connections, causing destabilisation of older amps by increasing the wire capacitance and hearing the added artificial oscillations as "detail").
TL;DR
It's possible to wade through all this, just like it is with political BS by looking up or testing every single claim - but it's exhausting! especially when there are so few people doing it.
I think we need to somehow fundamentally change people's attitude towards new information: with a high degree of scepticism... at some point it will become easier when the balance between BS generated and people debunking BS makes it undesirable and risky to bother generating BS.
There is still so much superstition in the world it's embarrassing.
I still remember in the late 90s early 00s some friends claimed that some blank CDs were better than others for audio and sounded better. Then I asked if when burning a word document to such CDs it had better text than on the cheaper CDs.
I feel like I've just experienced an extreme microcosm of this: I recently treated myself to an expensive power amplifier... and reluctantly embarked on the painful process of choosing appropriate audio cables. Through the other side I am still in disbelief over how entrenched the market and consumers are in their pseudo scientific BS - so much craziness - and almost every successful cable manufacturer and professional reviewer is in on the game (of which there are countless).
I'm usually of the opinion that within healthy competitive markets, capitalism tends to provides a kind of democracy, hopefully with emerging attributes such as honesty which naturally push the consumer towards making good decisions without being deeply informed - but clearly that is not always the case.
It's relatively simple to become informed about the basics of audio cables such as speaker wire [0], but that's not enough, you need a strong disposition of skepticism to wade through the sea of nonsense claims based on (real) electrical properties plucked from the science of general EE and sprinkled irrelevantly all over audio cable marketing and reviews and then echoed by it's users... that's the easy bit, next you will have another sea of anecdotal ABX reviewers that start to persuade you that the science could be missing something, now you enter the world of improper ABX tests, and the psychology of greater_cost+any_change = perceived as improved (e.g improving sound through simply disturbing wire connections, causing destabilisation of older amps by increasing the wire capacitance and hearing the added artificial oscillations as "detail").
TL;DR
It's possible to wade through all this, just like it is with political BS by looking up or testing every single claim - but it's exhausting! especially when there are so few people doing it.
I think we need to somehow fundamentally change people's attitude towards new information: with a high degree of scepticism... at some point it will become easier when the balance between BS generated and people debunking BS makes it undesirable and risky to bother generating BS.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speaker_wire