Polite Rules for discussing Audio related things

Have we become so accustomed to cynicism that this "new norm" now dominates our thinking? We go there so easily and quickly at times.

Neil Peart of Rush said it so well in Witch Hunt: "Quick to judge, quick to anger, slow to understand, ignorance and prejudice, and they walk hand in hand."

I try to be helpful to fellow 'goners if I’ve had experience with a piece of equipment or a system, but often when I have offered advice, someone follows up immediately with some unhelpful comment and, I don’t care if the arrow is thrown my way, but I feel bad for the OP who is now less informed and perhaps even more confused. I supported a particular brand and model of phono stage recently to help a fellow who was looking for suggestions and soemone jumped in with, "yeah if you want your system to sound like a tomato, nyuk, nyuk."

Is this the way of the world?

Whatever happened to Socratic Circles, consisting of (from Wiki) "cooperative argumentative dialogue between individuals, based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to draw out ideas and underlying presumptions." "The Socratic method is a method of hypothesis elimination, in that better hypotheses are found by steadily identifying and eliminating those that lead to contradictions. The Socratic method searches for general, commonly held truths that shape beliefs and scrutinizes them to determine their consistency with other beliefs. The basic form is a series of questions formulated as tests of logic, intended to help a person or group discover their beliefs about some topic, exploring definitions or and seeking to characterize general characteristics shared by various particular instances."

That doesn't sound like anarchy or existentialism to me, and usually I look for discourse that follows this method, but it's been awhile since I took philosophy back in college and since I last read Plato, Camus, Sartre or Hume.

Andy Williams and The Osmonds. Now that's audiophile country.

I’ve been reading up on nucelons, beta decay and the nuclear shell model just to get a "breath of fresh air." It’s comforting to know that nucleons are considered to be point like, without any internal structure.

Geoff: How did you know? I directly worked with quantum dots, or, semi-conductor nanocrystals, for several years in a variety of biological applications for the biotech industry. They are composed of a crystaline core and a shell of a few thousand atoms (as an insulator to protect the core from oxidative damage) and usually are about 5 to 10 nm in diameter. They are not easy to make as a bulk with a uniform, small-size distribution. But excite them with a voltage or by laser photonic energy, and they emit a bright beautiful band of fluorescence color that is highly photostable.