from a more intelligent part of Usenet:

David Satz wrote:
Arny, I listened to the mp3 file and was amazed at several logical
U-turns that Mr. Atkinson took during the debate, without once
acknowledging that he was abandoning what he had said just a moment
before. I heard his effort to present himself as the reasonable man,
so
innocently unable to see why anyone would question his views--and I
also heard his repeated use of "we" and "our," not with reference to
his magazine, but referring to "our industry" which he was defending.

He made an enormous, unjustified leap from point A to point Q--point
A
being "I A/B'ed a pair of power amplifiers; they sounded the same to
me
in the A/B test, but after living with each of them for six months,
they didn't feel the same to me" while point Q = "Therefore, all
controlled tests are useless and irrelevant."

Even when no audible difference is detected between two amplifiers in
a
particular A/B test with particular listeners and loudspeakers, of
course those same amplifiers might still sound different if, for
example, a markedly different speaker load is applied to them, and/or
program material with different dynamics or spectral balance. It
doesn't take a degree in physics to realize that.

When he realized that the two amplifiers gave him different feelings
in
his home over time, he showed no evident interest in finding out
whether his changed feelings were [a] in fact due to changing between
the amplifiers at all (!) or [b] if so, whether any particular,
identifiable engineering issue might account for the difference in
feelings so produced. That's truly sad--after a whole year of
listening, he wasted his opportunity to learn something meaningful,
and
instead drew a bogus (but financially very profitable) conclusion.

Someone here compared this debate to evolution versus creationism.
Maybe a better analogy would be to a geocentric viewpoint versus a
heliocentric viewpoint on the solar system. I doubt that anyone here
can really "prove" that the Earth revolves around the sun; on the
contrary, it is the everyday experience of every sighted person on
this
planet that the sun and moon revolve around the Earth. If we hadn't
studied science and history, anyone who tried to tell us that our
senses were fooling us would seem foolish or crazy.

As rational adults, at least where astronomy is concerned, most of us
accept nowadays that our senses and feelings don't always lead us
directly to the truth--that there are entirely valid reasons why
something may seem one way and yet be another way in fact. The
question
is whether we wish to have an open mind about other areas of
experience
that might follow a similar pattern. That isn't necessarily pleasing
to
the ego, unless one's ego is peculiarly invested in one's loyalty to
truth and reason.

--best regards