superstition and snake oil

[Art Hovey]

Reading this article made me think of the many similar products and practices that we see among top-flight musicians.

http://yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/20 ... ce407.html

Does any of it seem familiar?

[Walter Webb]

I got black cat bone, and its pure and dry, got a 4-leaf clover 'bout to make me cry... gonna sprinkle goofer dust all around your head, got some black snake roots hid up underneath your bed... gypsy woman givin me advice, I got red hot tips I got to keep on ice... I got my mojo workin, but it just don't work on you.

[pgym]

Mouthpiece crock... uh, clocking.

[SousaSaver]

You want to REALLY see snake oil and superstition in action, cruise on over to a saxophone or trumpet message board... (just my opinion)

About this article, lets evaluate:
"The holograms, he explained, contained frequencies that reacted positively with the body's natural energy field." - Really? In English, this means MAGIC.

"In retrospect, a backlash was probably inevitable. Visibility leads to scrutiny, which can be tough for a company that has never adequately explained how its products work." DUH!

"Yale physics lecturer Stephen Irons was "a little appalled" after surveying the old website, he says. "It's a collection of pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo that at worst makes no sense at all and at best makes claims that are completely untestable." The site makes a few references to peer-reviewed journal articles, Irons notes, but the articles are tangential to its health claims—"the concepts of quantum teleportation and those other esoteric fields don't enter into human biology." - AMEN. I couldn't have said it better.

[Allen]

If we could only burn our plentiful supply of snake oil, we wouldn't need to buy the Middle East's.

At least some of our things have a basis in science. Once, when I asked my teacher what was the advantage of a heavy-weight mouthpiece, he gave me an answer that was thoroughly grounded in physics: "It makes a much bigger impression when you throw it at the conductor."

Allen

[MaryAnn]

"The subjects uniformly performed better on the second test, regardless of which band they were wearing."

This reminds me of some "scientific" thing I saw on TV that had Alan Alda as the guinea pig. It theoretically showed that even people like Alan have a hidden bias against women. It was the same kind of test.....you matched up phrases like "good at a techical job" with a picture or something. You got "trained" in the first test to a specific kind of physical response, and then, in the second test, the response was backwards to the first test, requiring more time to hit the key you wanted. The result was a bias against women.

I couldn't believe I was watching that, that Alda was so stupid as to not call out the design of the test as the cause of the results. The only way that kind of test would mean anything (and I am not saying AT ALL that bias does not exist, because I have certainly been subjected to it) is to have the first test become the second test for half the participants.

I mean, really, I would hope any 8th grader would have figured this out. Are professional athletes smarter than an 8th grader? Maybe so, if they are in on the profits.

MA