What's Your Job IRL?

Discussion in 'Random Thoughts' started by MoatsArt, Oct 23, 2016.

  1. atomicbob

    atomicbob dScope Yoda

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    I'd prefer a delayed, mechanically sound flight to one that has an increased risk of dropping suddenly from the sky. There just doesn't seem to be anywhere to pull over and service once airborne.
     
  2. iFi audio

    iFi audio MOT iFi Audio

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    Yup, looks like a proper 8hrs/day job!
     
  3. Claud

    Claud Living the ORFAS dream

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    unemployment benefits judge
    I have been:
    a waiter
    a Kmart salesperson
    college student
    construction testing engineer
    Law student
    ambulance chasing lawyer
    unemployment benefits judge
    State agency attorney for the Division of Youth Services
    Assistant Attorney General
    unemployment benefits judge
    State agency head/administrator for the Cemetery Commission
    Operations manager for a cemetery
    unemployment benefits judge

    ITS GOOD TO BE THE JUDGE!!!!!

    Retired September 1, 2020
     
    Last edited: Aug 21, 2020
  4. dematted

    dematted Friend

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    I'm a philosophy academic/student as well as a biology and writing tutor.

    Coming to the audio world, I find a lot of the debates between "subjectivists" and "objectivists" pretty fascinating from a philosophical standpoint. Interestingly enough, they mirror a lot of debates in contemporary philosophy of mind between those who think that our experiences of color, sound, and tactile qualities can be straightforwardly reduced to various states of the brain, and those who believe that there's something irreducible about our sensory experiences. I do find that a lot of the people who want to "boil everything down to numbers" have a sort of lack of self-trust in their own perceptual capacities: they don't think that they deserve to be, or ought to be, the ultimate judge of what kind of experiences they are having, and as a result they search for something solid and indisputable (numbers!) that they can rest their judgements upon.

    Also, I'm amazed by the range of professions and backgrounds people have here. I'm sure I have a lot to learn from all of you.
     
    Last edited: Dec 13, 2019
  5. Pharmaboy

    Pharmaboy Friend

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    "I do find that a lot of the people who want to "boil everything down to numbers" have a sort of lack of self-trust in their own perceptual capacities: they don't think that they deserve to be, or ought to be, the ultimate judge of what kind of experiences they are having, and as a result they search for something solid and indisputable (numbers!) that they can rest their judgements upon."

    This is one of the more perceptive observations I've ever encountered on this site--where, as you mention, debates are always breaking out between "subjectivists" & "objectivists." It makes sense that there's a pattern of psychological needs & perceptions on both sides, and that what your comment gets at.

    Perhaps in a later post you'll comment on the needs & perceptions of (us) subjectivists: things like "did a lot of mind-altering drugs & never fully came back," "are so busy watching beautiful cloud patterns that they ignore pickpockets relieving them of wallet & passport," etc.

    Seriously, good stuff. The audio world would benefit from thoughtful analysis & discourse...
     
  6. dematted

    dematted Friend

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    Thanks very much for the kind words. I actually am of the opinion that, by and large, subjectivism is a somewhat more natural response to audio. After all, the whole point of this hobby is to experience sound in the best way possible, and that’s something that’s going to be very much relative to how you, as a particular individual, respond to and perceive music. So for me, subjectivism represents a kind of default position: in a way, we all start as subjectivists, thinking about how things sound -to us-. Then, in thinking further about how to describe our experiences so that they’re intelligible to a community of listeners, some of us end up looking at numbers, and some of us place more emphasis on using a language that can pick out certain elements of our own experiences that we think will be shared by others (ie, this sounds “warm” or “bright” or “analytical”).

    I’m going to think about all this a bit more, though, and once I have my thoughts together, I’ll (maybe) start a thread about some of the distinctive philosophical problems raised by audio (particularly the objectivist/subjectivist debate). I think there’s a lot of very interesting problems here, problems that, no doubt, no single individual has the ability to adequately answer.
     
  7. Bill-P

    Bill-P Level 42 Mad Wizard

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    I'd tend to think of this place and many others that do measurements as one massive Mary's Room experiment.

    (Here's a video for those who don't get the reference)



    I think the objectivists' stance is very shaky not because they "do not trust themselves" but because they forget one very fundamental fact: they are basically saying that if they "properly measure" me... then that means they will know and understand everything from my perspective. And vice versa.

    But real life doesn't work that way.

    Science and physics are "models" that we "think up" in order to better "explain" phenomena to other people who have not had the chance to experience or observe said phenomena. Or put another way, a scientist is merely somebody who quantizes (measures) his subjective experience (observations, etc...) in order to "attempt" to explain the experience to someone else who doesn't have the same perspective.

    This is precisely why it is dangerous when you "submit" to an "authority" in measurements without knowing where they are coming from. In a real scientific community, people would still constantly try to repeat experiments for themselves in order to confirm data they were shown. Has anyone who owned an O2 actually taken the circuit apart and measured it at different points in order to better understand what it's doing? Or actually, have they measured the O2 at all in their specific system? With their specific AC conditions? Or are they just reading words and then believing everything as "facts"? That sounds like a religion to me.

    So I don't tend to think of this as a "debate". Merely that the other side sometimes may not realize the implications of what they are looking at.

    I don't claim to know and "understand" everything, either, but at least I know I shouldn't trust everything blindly without being able to confirm them for myself.
     
  8. Deep Funk

    Deep Funk Deep thoughts - Friend

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  9. dematted

    dematted Friend

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    Thanks for these thoughtful remarks. The Mary's Room experiment is rather suggestive, though it's worth noting that Frank Jackson, the philosopher who originally advanced the thought-experiment, now thinks it doesn't accomplish what he originally believes it did.

    I think there are some pretty low-hanging fruit one can knock down, as far as the objectivists go. It's clear, for example, that the vast majority of what they're doing does not qualify as science; science is typically peer-reviewed, adheres to established norms of scholarly practice, and is open in the sort of methodology and techniques it employs. Obviously, what certain people in the objectivist camp are doing falls drastically short of these criteria, and the claim that they are doing science amounts to nothing less than a sort of dialectical ruse meant to give their practices a prestige that they do not deserve. So I do very much agree with the latter half of your post.

    However, I'm not sure I agree with the former half. Assume that we have an epistemically responsible objectivist with more or less acceptable scientific practices (this rules out, of course, the vast, vast, majority of the current self-proclamed 'objectivists', so this is mostly for the sake of argument). Now, is it necessarily the case that you have a more privileged access to "your perspective" than they do? One of the recurrent themes of recent cognitive science is how much of our mental processes are basically unknown to us: we often perceive and think things without knowing that we do. So it may be that the individual with all the measurements could know some things about how you're perceiving things that you don't. They could know how a piece of music sounds to you more intimately than you do.

    Of course, one still might argue that one has some sort of privileged access to one's own experiences. And, as a matter of fact, I think that's right. But it's exceedingly difficult to draw out what this kind of privileged access amounts to in robust terms.

    It might also be that it's just good epistemic and ethical practice to, in general, trust people when they report their own experiences, no matter what some scientific measurements might be. I also think that's right. There's something utterly arrogant about someone who thinks, for example, that the vast range of differential responses to various pieces of audio equipment are merely the results of some type of placebo effect, and that these individuals are not, in fact, thinking and hearing what they believe that they are.

    Regardless, I fear we're getting somewhat off topic! If anyone wants to talk about this stuff further, feel free to throw me a PM.
     
    Last edited: Dec 14, 2019
  10. Hrodulf

    Hrodulf Prohibited from acting as an MOT until year 2050

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    Joined Reflector Audio this week. I guess I kinda qualify to be an MOT, if someone here wants to be the king of BWC with a 16x18" driver system.
     
  11. Lyander

    Lyander Official SBAF Equitable Empathizer

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    @dematted would be interested to see the conversation continue in a Random Thoughts thread— free rein there more or less, within bounds of decency and forum culture, and if nothing else I'm genuinely keen on philosophical discussions in general, though I lack skill and knowledge in the field.

    P.S.
    *pointed stare at @Hrodulf's tag*
    Kidding man, congrats! Sounds ridiculously exciting, this would be the laughably good-measuring gear you'd mentioned before? Think you've more or less earned trust regardless of MoT status so by all means don't share any impressions and just ship a set to me for eval ;) (kidding, I can't do speakers).
     
  12. iFi audio

    iFi audio MOT iFi Audio

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    This hobby we're in gathers very different people, that's true!
     
  13. iFi audio

    iFi audio MOT iFi Audio

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    Just saw that name and remembered myself about fabulous speakers me and my boss once heard at one journalist's listening room in central Europe about two years ago.
     
  14. redrich2000

    redrich2000 Facebook Friend

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    Here's one that will be unexpected... I am a trade union organiser. I work for the union that covers university staff at a uni in Sydney. I help them campaign, mostly for more secure jobs (75% of staff in the sector here do not have permanent jobs) and managable workloads. Uni staff are reasonably well paid here, but they work 10-20 hours unpaid overtime a week, sometimes more. Academic staff take annual and long service leave to work on their research because their teaching loads are so high it's the only way they can hit the research targets they are required to.
     
  15. dematted

    dematted Friend

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    As someone in academia, let me just say that we appreciate the work that you do. The proliferation of non-tenure track and adjunct positions in the past few decades has been terrible for academics, and we need more people like you to ensure that we have smart and competent organizers fighting for us.
     
  16. Pharmaboy

    Pharmaboy Friend

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    This is a great thread. The last 2 posts really hit home.

    (I just love it when the shit gets real)
     
  17. Hrodulf

    Hrodulf Prohibited from acting as an MOT until year 2050

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    It was prolly this system. We have one of these in the office and it sounds pretty killer.
     
  18. JustAnotherRando

    JustAnotherRando My other bike is a Ferrari

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    Who does this cover- academic and admin staff? What about, say, maintenance and catering (guessing they might not be direct employees)? Asking purely out of curiosity, as I studied in Sydney.
     
  19. redrich2000

    redrich2000 Facebook Friend

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    We cover everyone who is emplyed by a university. Because of a weird carry over from previous amalgamations, there are a small number of general staff in NSW who are in the CPSU (public sector union), but they are tiny and shrinking and we have vastly more general staff members.

    There is crepping outsourcing of things like security, maintenance and IT. It varies from site to site, at USYD there a still a lot of blue-collar maintenance and gardening staff emplyed by the uni and in our union. Where they are outsourced, union coverage becomes more complex. For example, staff who teach english or other bridging courses is privatised arms (Insearch at UTS, UNSW Global etc) sometimes we have coverage, sometimes the Independent Education Union does. People who work in those types of arrangements are usually incredibly precarious, casual contracts and 4-6 week teaching schedules. So it's rare that many of them join the union.
     
  20. iFi audio

    iFi audio MOT iFi Audio

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