His post has a strong air of "the user asked me to debunk this article" prompting. It's definitely mostly filtered through a human writer, but there are also bits that clearly got ported in from the unfortunate AI tasked with inventing his argument, e.g. "Masley’s central rhetorical move is structurally simple."
"because he works on and thinks about sound way more than me,"
You'd think, but there is so much woo and folklore in sound engineering. For every analytical, self-critical creative mind, there's someone who's basically performing alchemy and numerology. You discover this in the middle of a project, and you go: "Wait, you believe _what_?" (Which ultimately doesn't matter if the track sounds good, but we're talking science here.)
I studied auditory neuroscience in grad school and the quoted descriptions of how sound and the auditory system work were painful to read. Especially the implication that outer hair cells maybe responding to imperceptible sounds (they respond to brownian motion!) may be responsible for the many ails of people who claim they suffer from infrasound, that one was hard-to-digest nonsense.
Outer hair cells (which I specifically studied with DPOAEs and ABRs) primarily work to help tune cochlear response to actual sounds. Sometimes they fire on their own, which doesn't really do anything anyone could tell, but mostly they are just a small part of the overall system that helps you focus on individual sounds. Activating them won't give anyone vertigo or whatever.
I read up thru 4, and seems like you're both engaging in some degree of good faith efforts here. I imagine the PI's not so subtly staking out his house (he's shared a clip in one of his videos), aren't helping make his posture less defensive. Hopefully it can peter out. While I believe I'm personally sensitive to certain ranges of sound, if the science isn't there yet, and you're pretty solidly presenting nuances that show it isn't, then it's up to broader community to design and fund rigorous studies to stamp this out, just like what was (sort of) done to address the concerns of the whackadoodles who blocked PG&E smart meter upgrades 2 decades ago.
"I’m not convinced by any of the author’s prior points here, so I maintain that Jordan’s sources either say the opposite of what he claims (that infrasound doesn’t cause harm) or are completely unrelated to what he’s saying (that audible noise pollution causes harm, with no mention of infrasound).”
I haven’t read each of the articles. It may be that some (or all) of them provide evidence for supposing that infrasound doesn’t cause harm. However, it’s worth noting that there’s ambiguity at three distinct but crucial points: what Jordan is claiming, what "the exact opposite" of his claim amounts to, and how the cited papers should be read. Disambiguating each requires distinguishing:
(i) Infrasound causes harm. [object level claim]
and
(ii) The cited articles provide evidence that <infrasound causes harm>. [evidential status claim]
This is important also because some responses to your original post are exploiting one or more aspects of this tripartite ambiguity.
The exact opposite or negation of (i) is "infrasound does not cause harm," and the exact opposite of (ii) is "the cited articles do not provide evidence that <infrasound causes harm>." Just as (i) and (ii) are logically distinct claims, so are their negations. If Jordan is relying on (ii) to support (i)—and this seems to be the case—to defeat his argument, it will suffice to have overriding reasons to think that (ii) is false. It’s not necessary to argue that (i) is false. You can undercut his argument without having to rebut it.
Why is this important? It allows you to dismantle Jordan’s argument even with a weaker interpretation of the papers in question, namely that they only show an absence of evidence for harm, not evidence of no harm (the stronger interpretation). It’s still correct to say, as you do, that the sources say the opposite of what Jordan claims, but it will be the opposite of (ii) not (i).
Two caveats:
First, like I said, it may be that the strong interpretation is the more plausible interpretation for some or all of the articles.
Second, there are cogent inferences from "no evidence that p" to "evidence that not-p." It’s not always a fallacy to reason from "absence of evidence" to "evidence of absence." As I suggested in my other response, likelihoodist and Bayesian confirmation models permit such inferences. And we more informally recognize the cogency of such inferences given additional conditions—for example, there has been an adequate investigation/experiment/critical examination and if an adequate investigation/experiment/critical examination has taken place, we would find some evidence that p is true if it is. So even if the authors of the cited papers do not themselves claim to present evidence that infrasound doesn’t cause harm, this might be a justified inference from the papers.
You say "You are so focused on winning a fight and nitpicking, you're totally neglecting frequency in your critique and leaning on dB as a crutch"
And then say the way I'm ignoring frequency is that sub 20 Hz can never be audible. But this is actually a factual disagreement we have. You're doing the same thing again.
You understand that that statement is not what you said it was, right? Did I ever say anywhere that you secretly knew that sub-20Hz frequencies are inaudible? Or did I just say you were wrong (as stated by the source you seem to cite in support of its audibility)?
Are you or are you not saying here that I'm totally neglecting that sub 20 Hz infrasound can never be audible? You knew I said they're audible in the original post, so you must not have thought I hadn't thought about it before. Only other option is you think I'm lying.
I am saying (and later even clarified as much in the thread!) that it is very difficult and very rare to hear sub-20Hz as a distinct frequency, and you are neglecting this issue by just simply stating that it can be made audible (perceptible, really).
That's not calling you a liar! It's just calling you wrong!
His post has a strong air of "the user asked me to debunk this article" prompting. It's definitely mostly filtered through a human writer, but there are also bits that clearly got ported in from the unfortunate AI tasked with inventing his argument, e.g. "Masley’s central rhetorical move is structurally simple."
Soon all internet beefs will be between human wrappers for rival AI models
"because he works on and thinks about sound way more than me,"
You'd think, but there is so much woo and folklore in sound engineering. For every analytical, self-critical creative mind, there's someone who's basically performing alchemy and numerology. You discover this in the middle of a project, and you go: "Wait, you believe _what_?" (Which ultimately doesn't matter if the track sounds good, but we're talking science here.)
Andy Masley clearly doesn't understand how argument works.
I assert Truth. The End!
Don't question the Doom Dogma, Andy. Everything is terrible, we're all gonna die, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar or a tool.
I studied auditory neuroscience in grad school and the quoted descriptions of how sound and the auditory system work were painful to read. Especially the implication that outer hair cells maybe responding to imperceptible sounds (they respond to brownian motion!) may be responsible for the many ails of people who claim they suffer from infrasound, that one was hard-to-digest nonsense.
Outer hair cells (which I specifically studied with DPOAEs and ABRs) primarily work to help tune cochlear response to actual sounds. Sometimes they fire on their own, which doesn't really do anything anyone could tell, but mostly they are just a small part of the overall system that helps you focus on individual sounds. Activating them won't give anyone vertigo or whatever.
I read up thru 4, and seems like you're both engaging in some degree of good faith efforts here. I imagine the PI's not so subtly staking out his house (he's shared a clip in one of his videos), aren't helping make his posture less defensive. Hopefully it can peter out. While I believe I'm personally sensitive to certain ranges of sound, if the science isn't there yet, and you're pretty solidly presenting nuances that show it isn't, then it's up to broader community to design and fund rigorous studies to stamp this out, just like what was (sort of) done to address the concerns of the whackadoodles who blocked PG&E smart meter upgrades 2 decades ago.
"I’m not convinced by any of the author’s prior points here, so I maintain that Jordan’s sources either say the opposite of what he claims (that infrasound doesn’t cause harm) or are completely unrelated to what he’s saying (that audible noise pollution causes harm, with no mention of infrasound).”
I haven’t read each of the articles. It may be that some (or all) of them provide evidence for supposing that infrasound doesn’t cause harm. However, it’s worth noting that there’s ambiguity at three distinct but crucial points: what Jordan is claiming, what "the exact opposite" of his claim amounts to, and how the cited papers should be read. Disambiguating each requires distinguishing:
(i) Infrasound causes harm. [object level claim]
and
(ii) The cited articles provide evidence that <infrasound causes harm>. [evidential status claim]
This is important also because some responses to your original post are exploiting one or more aspects of this tripartite ambiguity.
The exact opposite or negation of (i) is "infrasound does not cause harm," and the exact opposite of (ii) is "the cited articles do not provide evidence that <infrasound causes harm>." Just as (i) and (ii) are logically distinct claims, so are their negations. If Jordan is relying on (ii) to support (i)—and this seems to be the case—to defeat his argument, it will suffice to have overriding reasons to think that (ii) is false. It’s not necessary to argue that (i) is false. You can undercut his argument without having to rebut it.
Why is this important? It allows you to dismantle Jordan’s argument even with a weaker interpretation of the papers in question, namely that they only show an absence of evidence for harm, not evidence of no harm (the stronger interpretation). It’s still correct to say, as you do, that the sources say the opposite of what Jordan claims, but it will be the opposite of (ii) not (i).
Two caveats:
First, like I said, it may be that the strong interpretation is the more plausible interpretation for some or all of the articles.
Second, there are cogent inferences from "no evidence that p" to "evidence that not-p." It’s not always a fallacy to reason from "absence of evidence" to "evidence of absence." As I suggested in my other response, likelihoodist and Bayesian confirmation models permit such inferences. And we more informally recognize the cogency of such inferences given additional conditions—for example, there has been an adequate investigation/experiment/critical examination and if an adequate investigation/experiment/critical examination has taken place, we would find some evidence that p is true if it is. So even if the authors of the cited papers do not themselves claim to present evidence that infrasound doesn’t cause harm, this might be a justified inference from the papers.
"...he kept insisting I secretly knew he was right and was hiding the truth"
Please demonstrate where I did as much. I'm not going to bother reading the rest of this, because you're just completely lying now.
I have zero interest in interacting with you, to be clear. For anyone else they can read starting from here: https://x.com/AndyMasley/status/2046449238192570412
Here's where you claim infrasound is never audible https://x.com/AndyMasley/status/2046456215337611677
If this motte and bailey was something else I'm happy to clarify. How exactly am I misrepresenting you here?
You say "You are so focused on winning a fight and nitpicking, you're totally neglecting frequency in your critique and leaning on dB as a crutch"
And then say the way I'm ignoring frequency is that sub 20 Hz can never be audible. But this is actually a factual disagreement we have. You're doing the same thing again.
You understand that that statement is not what you said it was, right? Did I ever say anywhere that you secretly knew that sub-20Hz frequencies are inaudible? Or did I just say you were wrong (as stated by the source you seem to cite in support of its audibility)?
Are you or are you not saying here that I'm totally neglecting that sub 20 Hz infrasound can never be audible? You knew I said they're audible in the original post, so you must not have thought I hadn't thought about it before. Only other option is you think I'm lying.
I am saying (and later even clarified as much in the thread!) that it is very difficult and very rare to hear sub-20Hz as a distinct frequency, and you are neglecting this issue by just simply stating that it can be made audible (perceptible, really).
That's not calling you a liar! It's just calling you wrong!