• barsoap@lemm.ee
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    2 days ago

    Nope it’s a very reasonable hypothesis. “Symptom X suddenly occurs frequently. That started when people started doing Y. According to our understanding, Y has a direct impact on the functioning of X”. Causation has still to be established formally but it’d be quite surprising if it was mere correlation, as in it would overturn the understanding audiologists have about how things work.

    Bluntly said: If you never train filtering out noise, then you suck at filtering out noise. That looks dead obvious, if it’s wrong, then in a very, very interesting way. General relativity vs. Newtonian mechanics kind of interesting.

    • nyan@lemmy.cafe
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      2 days ago

      The problem is not the hypothesis, the problem is that it isn’t really presented as a hypothesis. Reporting on the results before doing the experiment isn’t the way to go.

      Our theories of how the world works are necessarily incomplete, and experiments turn up things that overturn scientific understanding often enough. The way this is set up matches a common pattern of vilifying tech without seeing whether it’s deserved or not. Maybe not wearing a noise cancellation headset would, in fact, help this patient, but until that’s tested and found out to be true, reporting on it is just spreading FUD.

      • barsoap@lemm.ee
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        2 days ago

        her audiologist believes

        (emphasis mine). Belief is colloquial speech for working hypothesis. Her prescription will have been along the lines of “ease on those headphones, go to a forest or park and just listen, use them only if you really feel them to be necessary, try to expose yourself”.

        “Nothing can ever be acted upon unless we have a meta-study examining fifty double-blind studies” is pseudoscepticism.