After joining this, so called, community, it struck me that many alleged objectivists on this forum don’t understand the fundamentals of science and engineering. In the interest of full transparency, I urge the members of this forum to honestly report their educational achievements. You have nothing to hide, do you?
Are you mad at somebody here? You're not asking really nicely, I know for a fact that there are crazy good and interesting people here, it's in fact probably my only source for codecs, updates etc.
I can't speak for myself, I am just an enthusiast that loves audio codecs, I love to see how low they can go and still sound good, then of course I'm into computers, encoders etc. but again, hopefully someone will fill your interests.
Some of us have met in person over the years. I see no need to divulge personal information to a public forum. I know who to trust, and who not to trust.
If you have trouble deciding that for yourself, or if you have trouble conversing with people on here in general, then it's your personal problem.
Do I have something to hide? Yes, and lots of it: Personal information about my family, children, etc. as well as my job and information about me and my employer. I won't risk any of that for a troll, disrupting a community which is otherwise pretty reasonable, and has been for many years.
I'd urge everyone to be very cautious about divulging information about themselves, their degrees or their employment. In my case, this could mean I'd lose my job, so just be careful.
It's common sense, Polemon. But it bears repeating, though. I'd never disclose anything else about my private life than I absolutely have to. If my word weighs less because of it, so be it. Who cares.
By the way, formal education is a big scam in some countries, and therefore a terrible metric of "intelligence".
While for some there might be good reasons to complete it anyway, it's very foolish to think that if someone intentionally opted out of formal education, they must therefore be silly. It's not true, there are lots of other ways to learn, and sometimes they are better than formal education, especially in areas like IT and Maths.
So even if people were willing to tell you, it would be a worthless information for the purpose you claimed. That means either you don't understand the above, or you are simply fishing for personal information and using some other excuses to cover it up.
Dear Sir or Madam,
I'll have you know that (world famous moderator) Pio2001 was nominated for both the Booker prize, a Golden Globe and the Fields medal simultaneously. Admittedly, I did the nominating, and had been drinking 90 proof George Dickel # 12 Tennessee whisky for several hours beforehand, but that's besides the point.
(Super moderator) Greynol has been (repeatedly) in contention for a Nobel Peace prize for his ongoing work with vinyl fundamentalists and high sampling rate fetishists, while rjamorim has been name-checked by none other than Roger Penrose (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose) at academic conferences on three continents.
While I'm no longer a CIRM (https://www.cirm.ca.gov/) fellow, my buddies in Rusty Gage's lab at the Salk Institute (http://logg.salk.edu/) are still continuously improving their swanky cerebral organoid cultures.
I'm told that even the earliest multilayered organoids refused to divulge their personal information to some random, surly jackass online who has demanded such from others yet presented exactly none of their own.
You see, even extremely primitive proto-brains in liquid culture just aren't that stupid.
One nice thing about science is that you don't have to be a scientist to benefit from it. When an astrophysicist tells me that the sun's surface temperature is 5778K, I can take their word for it. Likewise, when an engineer (like some of the Xiph.org people) tell me 24bit and 192kHz doesn't matter (or can even be harmful) when I'm listening to music, I can take their word for it. When a random youtuber claims the opposite, I can ignore them.
And again, the best part here is that I don't have to be a scientist myself. I can rely on people who have studied and worked on that stuff using the scientific method to arrive to their conclusions, and ignore crackpots who can only offer me uneducated guesses and/or beliefs.
This is on the back of a conversation where the OP had claimed that a blind test was not required to correlate audibility with THD measurements because he read something by someone he deemed as an authority. When the claim was rejected he decided to further this argument from authority by questioning the educational background of the people who contributed to the discussion.
All anyone needs to know is:
If any product sounds different enough to spend more money on it, then:
That difference will be easily demonstrated in an ears only listening test.