I think that the microwave example is flawed in what seems to me to be an important way.
You write:
Imagine that you’re in the market for a new microwave. You’re standing in the aisle, looking at three options—one for $89, one for $199, and one for $389. How do you decide?
Visitor to a village stops a local and asks, “How do I get to Aberdeen from here?”
Local answers, “Och, if I were going to Aberdeen, I wouldn’t start from here!”
Which is to say, if you find yourself asking “should I get the $89 microwave, the $199 microwave, or the $399 microwave?”, you have already gone wrong; any further thinking you do on this topic is also going to be wrong; any calculations of tradeoffs is going to be irrelevant and/or misleading; and you are quite likely to make a poor purchasing decision.
I recently purchased an electric toothbrush (to replace my existing one, which had finally begun to show signs of deteriorating performance after many years of use). The new toothbrush I got cost $10. Note that this is the best toothbrush available on the market (given my needs); there are many models that are more expensive, but they are all worse than the $10 model I bought. Let me be very clear about this: if I had spent more money, I would have gotten an inferior product—not in “value per dollar” terms, but in absolute terms.
A similar thing happened with another recent purchase: a trash can for my kitchen. The trash can I got cost $12. If I had instead gotten the model recommended by The Wirecutter (as I was advised to do), I would have paid over 10 times more, and ended up with a kitchen trash can that was much worse in almost every way that matters to me; the design of the more expensive trash can would have introduced a new source of constant annoyance into my daily routine (making my everyday life worse in the sorts of little ways that add up to noticeable stress over time).
Many things are like this. It is a fundamental mistake to think that spending more money necessarily gets you more of anything that you value. It is, in fact, quite common for spending more money to get you less quality and less aesthetics and less ease of use and less durability and less reliability and … etc.
When deciding what to buy—which thing, what kind of thing, how many things, etc.—you should not start with consideration of prices of products and then ask how much you’re willing to spend and so on. To do so is to head off in the wrong direction. You should start by thinking about what it is that you want/need. (And, from there, what should follow is an iterative process where you figure out what sorts of products satisfy your wants/needs, whether they’re available, how much they cost, etc., and then use this information about market conditions and so on as the basis for further considerations of your wants and needs… but at no point in this process should you ever use price as a proxy for, or even an indicator of, “quality” or “value” or any such thing, and this especially applies to relative prices.)
Many things are like this. It is a fundamental mistake to think that spending more money necessarily gets you more of anything that you value. It is, in fact, quite common for spending more money to get you less quality and less aesthetics and less ease of use and less durability and less reliability and … etc.
When deciding what to buy—which thing, what kind of thing, how many things, etc.—you should not start with consideration of prices of products and then ask how much you’re willing to spend and so on. To do so is to head off in the wrong direction. You should start by thinking about what it is that you want/need. (And, from there, what should follow is an iterative process where you figure out what sorts of products satisfy your wants/needs, whether they’re available, how much they cost, etc., and then use this information about market conditions and so on as the basis for further considerations of your wants and needs… but at no point in this process should you ever use price as a proxy for, or even an indicator of, “quality” or “value” or any such thing, and this especially applies to relative prices.)
I would’ve agreed with a more subdued version of this point, but given the absolute language (“fundamental mistake” etc.), this goes way too far for my taste.
Price is not a perfect proxy for criteria like performance, durability, or reliability, but it does carry non-negligible information. For example, supposing I wanted to build a new PC, it’s immediately obvious that the more expensive build has a higher performance. That doesn’t mean that the more expensive purchase is the best purchase for me, given my (so far unstated) requirements. But insofar as I care about a certain level of performance, filtering by a minimal price would save me a lot of time.
More to the point, your suggested process for deciding what to buy sounds really effortful. Depending on the domain of purchase, such an investment of time and energy can either pay off in spades, or be a huge waste of resources when one could instead just buy some product recommended on Wirecutter, or a well-rated Amazon product or something. (For example, I recently had to buy an aluminium sealing tape, i.e. a <10€ product, and so I just bought an arbitrary high-rated product rather than doing tons of research.)
I usually spend way too much time on ultimately irrelevant product research, so when I see a suggestion to ignore a valid but imperfect source of information because there’s a more effortful way of obtaining better information, I feel compelled to suggest to reverse that advice.
Finally, there’s the problem that one is often insufficiently aware of one’s requirements. For example, I recently bought a new smartphone, thinking that the increased height of 1 cm would be barely acceptable for my hands. But once I got the new smartphone, I realized it had a significantly increased screen coverage, so its screen was ~4 cm taller than my old one, which immediately made the smartphone utterly unusable. In this case my error was not that I did insufficient research, but that I was insufficiently empirical: doing extensive research to find the perfect product for your needs only works insofar as you’re actually aware of all your important needs, and how you weigh them against one another.
Depending on the domain of purchase, such an investment of time and energy can either pay off in spades, or be a huge waste of resources when one could instead just buy some product recommended on Wirecutter, or a well-rated Amazon product or something.
What I am saying is that doing as you suggest very often (and, in fact, increasingly often) ends up being completely misleading—not just “not ideal” or some such, but actually much worse than doing as I suggest.
I usually spend way too much time on ultimately irrelevant product research, so when I see a suggestion to ignore a valid but imperfect source of information because there’s a more effortful way of obtaining better information, I feel compelled to suggest to reverse that advice.
But it’s not a valid source of information. That’s my point!
For example, supposing I wanted to build a new PC, it’s immediately obvious that the more expensive build has a higher performance.
I have built many PCs over the years (there are at this moment six machines that I built, sitting in this room), and I can tell you that this is not correct.
Finally, there’s the problem that one is often insufficiently aware of one’s requirements. …
On this point I agree with you. (But it’s not clear whether this is meant as a counterpoint to anything that I said? It does not seem to be any such thing…)
I have built many PCs over the years (there are at this moment six machines that I built, sitting in this room), and I can tell you that this is not correct.
I’ve also built a smaller number of PCs over the years, maybe 5-ish. I always set a rough budget, then chose the best components in terms of price/performance (and e.g. silence), relative to that budget. I don’t understand how you’re ever supposed to get worse performance by using that algorithm while tripling your budget.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that a random $3000 PC necessarily has higher performance than a random $1000 PC. But e.g. my original example linked to these PC build guides, and there I would be shocked if a random highly voted $3000 build would lose in performance to even the best $1000 build.
How is that consistent with saying that price is not a valid source of information?
On this point I agree with you. (But it’s not clear whether this is meant as a counterpoint to anything that I said? It does not seem to be any such thing…)
What I meant here was: How am I supposed to follow your advice to do all this effortful research (how many hours are we talking here, anyway?), when the way to find out what I actually need is to try a bunch of versions of the product in question, at which point I immediately realize that some weird new requirement like “smartphone screen must not exceed a certain height” trumps all my other requirements.
First, it would be foolish to suggest that, in any given category, any more expensive thing is always worse than any less expensive thing, and indeed that is not what I claimed. (Note, again, what I said: “It is a fundamental mistake to think that spending more money necessarily gets you more of anything that you value.”—I did not emphasize ‘necessarily’ in my initial comment, but it’s there for a reason!)
Second, an obvious point, but one whose importance is easy to overlook, is that the PC builds you link to, are not single products, but collections of parts, each of which is itself a retail product. The correct question is not “is this PC build better than that PC build”; rather, the correct question is “is this PC case better than that PC case”, “is this graphics card better than that graphics card”, etc.
(Note that this does not apply to all of the parts, but only some of them! So, for example, the cheapest and the most expensive builds you link to have different amounts of RAM: 16 GB vs. 32 GB. Obviously, 32 GB of memory is going to cost you more than 16 GB of memory. On the other hand, you should ask whether DDR5-4800 RAM is actually going to give you superior performance to DDR4-3200 RAM, such that 32 GB of the former justifies a price increase of 3.5x over 16 GB of the latter, instead of only 2x. Note that there is no guarantee whatsoever that there will be any performance difference, nor even that the difference, if any, will be positive.)
And the answers to these more appropriate sub-questions may not be obvious at all! The Antec DF700 Flux ATX Mid Tower Case, from the cheapest build, costs ~$110; the Fractal Design Torrent RGB ATX Mid Tower Case, from the priciest build, costs ~$250. Is going from the former to the latter an improvement at all? Is it possible for a more expensive PC case to be worse, in all relevant ways, than a cheaper PC case? I can answer this one easily: yes, it absolutely is possible; examples abound.
On the other hand, the MSI Radeon RX 6600 XT 8 GB MECH 2X OC Video Card, from the cheapest build, costs ~$400, while the Zotac GeForce RTX 3090 24 GB GAMING AMP Core Holo Video Card, from the priciest build, costs ~$1500. Is the latter a better graphics card? Yes. (Whether the performance difference is relevant to your needs, or worth the difference in price, is another matter entirely, outside the scope of our discussion.) But this gets us into my next point…
Third, PC components such as RAM, graphics cards, CPUs, etc., are products whose performance is, compared to most consumer products, very easy to quantify and measure. (But note that the danger of Goodhart’s law lurks behind every performance benchmark! The history of the consumer/enthusiast PC market is rife with such cases…) Because these components are routinely used to produce measurable output (whether that be “Bitcoins mined per hour” or “rendered frames per second” or whatever else), there is a quantitative check on evaluated quality, which is easily measurable, more or less publicly accessible, and therefore tied closely to demand and thus price.
And it is therefore not surprising that it’s precisely such components of a build where this is not true, such as cases (see above), that are where it is most likely that you can find yourself paying more for less (or, at best, for nothing).
Fourth, the PC enthusiast community is a source of high-quality data about the market and the products therein. We build PCs, we test them, we write detailed reviews, etc. That you linked to PC Part Picker is not a coincidence. There is no Microwave Picker, Toothbrush Picker, Trash Can Picker, etc. (Amazon, you say? But Amazon sells computers, too—why didn’t you link to there? Because, of course, Amazon is an extremely low-quality signal, where the dominant optimization pressure is not toward accuracy, but toward deception. The Wirecutter? As I’ve noted before, The Wirecutter is notorious for its inaccurate and misleading claims.)
For most consumer products, there is no such high-quality data source, and consequently there is no reason to expect that the pricier product is always, or even almost always, going to be “better” in any meaningful way.
In summary: the “PC build” example is extremely non-representative, because (a) each build is a collection of individual retail product categories, in each of which relevant quality may or may not be strongly correlated with price; (b) computer components have performance that is much more easily quantifiable and measurable than is that of most consumer products; (c) there is a PC enthusiast community which generates high-quality data about the products in question, on which basis it is possible to evaluate the builds—as is not the case for the great majority of consumer products.
What I meant here was: How am I supposed to follow your advice to do all this effortful research (how many hours are we talking here, anyway?), when the way to find out what I actually need is to try a bunch of versions of the product in question, at which point I immediately realize that some weird new requirement like “smartphone screen must not exceed a certain height” trumps all my other requirements.
Here I will only note that the standard advice in such cases is “buy the cheapest version of whatever it is; use it until it breaks (or no longer satisfies your needs); at that point you will have gotten a great deal of data to inform subsequent purchases, if any”.
Doing a great deal of research first, before taking any action whatsoever, is certainly a typical (or perhaps stereotypical) “rationalist” failing, and I do not by any means endorse it. (Indeed you may note that I never said anything about “do[ing] all this effortful research”; there is no particular reason why the sort of thought process to which I alluded in my initial post should take all that long. The difficult part—apparently—is the insight, in the first place, that such an approach is correct.)
Note that this is the best toothbrush available on the market (given my needs); there are many models that are more expensive, but they are all worse than the $10 model I bought. Let me be very clear about this: if I had spent more money, I would have gotten an inferior product—not in “value per dollar” terms, but in absolute terms.
Here’s how I would put this: I like the ISO 9000 definition of “quality” as the “degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fulfils requirements”.
When you want to find the best product for yourself, you have some requirements in mind. Suppose those requirements include criteria like “affordability” or “ease of repair” etc. Then more expensive products, while ostensibly “better” in some Platonic sense, likely aren’t a good fit for your needs, and couldn’t be described as high-quality in this sense.
That said, I agree that the microwave example, as written in the manual, would likely benefit from a revision, though I figure its current form likely does just fine in a workshop setting.
more expensive products, while ostensibly “better” in some Platonic sense
I think that I am not quite getting my meaning across… my point is that, in this case—and in many other cases—are not ‘ostensibly “better” in some Platonic sense’. They’re not better in any practical sense. They’re just worse. They are inferior products. If someone gave one to me as a gift, I would discard it, and buy the $10 toothbrush instead. If the $10 toothbrush cost $100, and the $100 toothbrushes cost $10, without changing any of their other characteristics, I would spend the extra money to get the actually better one.
My point in that quote was that while these products may be made of e.g. ostensibly better materials, they’re inferior relative to your requirements. In your framing (of products that are “just worse”, irrespective of requirements), it seems to me like one should be able to buy the $10 toothbrush, sell it for $100, outsell the originally more expensive item, and make $90 profit. As I presume that this doesn’t actually happen, I conclude that some customers prefer the product that originally costs $100, and it can ergo not be considered “just worse”.
When you judge a product as “just worse”, that sounds to me like it’s supposed to be a universally applicable and objective judgement. But it seems to me like products can only be judged subjectively (i.e. relative to one’s own requirements). For instance, if you gave a bunch of LWers the choice of which toothbrush to buy for personal use, I expect you would not be able to get unanimous agreement on your choice. So how can the other products be considered to be “just worse”?
while these products may be made of e.g. ostensibly better materials
No. They’re not. They’re really, genuinely not.
In your framing (of products that are “just worse”, irrespective of requirements), it seems to me like one should be able to buy the $10 toothbrush, sell it for $100, outsell the originally more expensive item, and make $90 profit.
And that’s the mistake you’re making. There is no good reason to believe this to be possible unless you think that purchasing decisions are driven primarily by customers’ accurate evaluations of product quality… which condition happens to be violated precisely in the case where it is commonplace to use price as a signal of quality!
I conclude that some customers prefer the product that originally costs $100
Consider the scenario where a customer prefers a product which is, in fact, inferior, given his needs. Does this scenario strike you as incoherent, as described? Or merely impossible in practice? Or neither incoherent nor impossible? If the latter, how common would you say that it is?
For instance, if you gave a bunch of LWers the choice of which toothbrush to buy for personal use, I expect you would not be able to get unanimous agreement on your choice.
Unanimous? No, of course not unanimous. There is always the “lizardman quotient”, even among LessWrongers.
More generally, whether customers’ judgments are rational given their needs and wants is, indeed, the key piece of this puzzle. People on Less Wrong are not immune to this particular bias (indeed it is my experience that “rationalists” have a huge blind spot when it comes to this topic, due, perhaps, to a greater trust in markets than that of the average person).
The expensive ones might do annoying things like beep to tell you it’s been two minutes of brushing.
Sure, they have all sorts of unnecessary features.
If they don’t take the same type of head
Indeed they do not.
The cheap one might be a better shape or weight.
Substantially so. The cheap brush I’ve got both has a better-shaped head and bristle layout than most fancy ones, and a much more ergonomically favorable body shape.
The expensive ones might be more complicated in ways that make them likely to break sooner.
Yep, for sure. The toothbrush I had lasted me for about 10 years. The fancy ones won’t.
They might have different charging methods, and you prefer to method for the cheap one.
Or the cheap one has better battery life.
A single AA battery, lasting for weeks. The fancy ones generally have rechargeable internal (non-user-serviceable) batteries with a proprietary charger—so when the battery stops holding a charge, you’re out of luck and must replace the whole thing.
(ETA: Note that the toothbrush being rechargeable means that I now must devote space in the bathroom to the charger—including the hassle of arranging for it to plug into an AC outlet—or else have to have the brush sitting in another room of the house, instead of conveniently located in the bathroom. With the AA-powered toothbrush I’ve got, it just sits near my sink, like any normal toothbrush.)
The expensive ones might have Bluetooth, which you might disprefer even apart from its effects on e.g. battery life.
Yep, this comes under the “unnecessary features” heading.
The bottom line is that the more expensive toothbrushes have, quite literally, no advantages over the cheap one (given my needs), and many disadvantages. Switching to a more expensive model would be a strict downgrade, a choice that is unambiguously dominated by sticking with the cheap one.
I think that the microwave example is flawed in what seems to me to be an important way.
You write:
This brings to mind the old joke:
Which is to say, if you find yourself asking “should I get the $89 microwave, the $199 microwave, or the $399 microwave?”, you have already gone wrong; any further thinking you do on this topic is also going to be wrong; any calculations of tradeoffs is going to be irrelevant and/or misleading; and you are quite likely to make a poor purchasing decision.
I recently purchased an electric toothbrush (to replace my existing one, which had finally begun to show signs of deteriorating performance after many years of use). The new toothbrush I got cost $10. Note that this is the best toothbrush available on the market (given my needs); there are many models that are more expensive, but they are all worse than the $10 model I bought. Let me be very clear about this: if I had spent more money, I would have gotten an inferior product—not in “value per dollar” terms, but in absolute terms.
A similar thing happened with another recent purchase: a trash can for my kitchen. The trash can I got cost $12. If I had instead gotten the model recommended by The Wirecutter (as I was advised to do), I would have paid over 10 times more, and ended up with a kitchen trash can that was much worse in almost every way that matters to me; the design of the more expensive trash can would have introduced a new source of constant annoyance into my daily routine (making my everyday life worse in the sorts of little ways that add up to noticeable stress over time).
Many things are like this. It is a fundamental mistake to think that spending more money necessarily gets you more of anything that you value. It is, in fact, quite common for spending more money to get you less quality and less aesthetics and less ease of use and less durability and less reliability and … etc.
When deciding what to buy—which thing, what kind of thing, how many things, etc.—you should not start with consideration of prices of products and then ask how much you’re willing to spend and so on. To do so is to head off in the wrong direction. You should start by thinking about what it is that you want/need. (And, from there, what should follow is an iterative process where you figure out what sorts of products satisfy your wants/needs, whether they’re available, how much they cost, etc., and then use this information about market conditions and so on as the basis for further considerations of your wants and needs… but at no point in this process should you ever use price as a proxy for, or even an indicator of, “quality” or “value” or any such thing, and this especially applies to relative prices.)
I would’ve agreed with a more subdued version of this point, but given the absolute language (“fundamental mistake” etc.), this goes way too far for my taste.
Price is not a perfect proxy for criteria like performance, durability, or reliability, but it does carry non-negligible information. For example, supposing I wanted to build a new PC, it’s immediately obvious that the more expensive build has a higher performance. That doesn’t mean that the more expensive purchase is the best purchase for me, given my (so far unstated) requirements. But insofar as I care about a certain level of performance, filtering by a minimal price would save me a lot of time.
More to the point, your suggested process for deciding what to buy sounds really effortful. Depending on the domain of purchase, such an investment of time and energy can either pay off in spades, or be a huge waste of resources when one could instead just buy some product recommended on Wirecutter, or a well-rated Amazon product or something. (For example, I recently had to buy an aluminium sealing tape, i.e. a <10€ product, and so I just bought an arbitrary high-rated product rather than doing tons of research.)
I usually spend way too much time on ultimately irrelevant product research, so when I see a suggestion to ignore a valid but imperfect source of information because there’s a more effortful way of obtaining better information, I feel compelled to suggest to reverse that advice.
Finally, there’s the problem that one is often insufficiently aware of one’s requirements. For example, I recently bought a new smartphone, thinking that the increased height of 1 cm would be barely acceptable for my hands. But once I got the new smartphone, I realized it had a significantly increased screen coverage, so its screen was ~4 cm taller than my old one, which immediately made the smartphone utterly unusable. In this case my error was not that I did insufficient research, but that I was insufficiently empirical: doing extensive research to find the perfect product for your needs only works insofar as you’re actually aware of all your important needs, and how you weigh them against one another.
What I am saying is that doing as you suggest very often (and, in fact, increasingly often) ends up being completely misleading—not just “not ideal” or some such, but actually much worse than doing as I suggest.
But it’s not a valid source of information. That’s my point!
I have built many PCs over the years (there are at this moment six machines that I built, sitting in this room), and I can tell you that this is not correct.
On this point I agree with you. (But it’s not clear whether this is meant as a counterpoint to anything that I said? It does not seem to be any such thing…)
I’ve also built a smaller number of PCs over the years, maybe 5-ish. I always set a rough budget, then chose the best components in terms of price/performance (and e.g. silence), relative to that budget. I don’t understand how you’re ever supposed to get worse performance by using that algorithm while tripling your budget.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that a random $3000 PC necessarily has higher performance than a random $1000 PC. But e.g. my original example linked to these PC build guides, and there I would be shocked if a random highly voted $3000 build would lose in performance to even the best $1000 build.
How is that consistent with saying that price is not a valid source of information?
What I meant here was: How am I supposed to follow your advice to do all this effortful research (how many hours are we talking here, anyway?), when the way to find out what I actually need is to try a bunch of versions of the product in question, at which point I immediately realize that some weird new requirement like “smartphone screen must not exceed a certain height” trumps all my other requirements.
Re: the PC build example:
First, it would be foolish to suggest that, in any given category, any more expensive thing is always worse than any less expensive thing, and indeed that is not what I claimed. (Note, again, what I said: “It is a fundamental mistake to think that spending more money necessarily gets you more of anything that you value.”—I did not emphasize ‘necessarily’ in my initial comment, but it’s there for a reason!)
Second, an obvious point, but one whose importance is easy to overlook, is that the PC builds you link to, are not single products, but collections of parts, each of which is itself a retail product. The correct question is not “is this PC build better than that PC build”; rather, the correct question is “is this PC case better than that PC case”, “is this graphics card better than that graphics card”, etc.
(Note that this does not apply to all of the parts, but only some of them! So, for example, the cheapest and the most expensive builds you link to have different amounts of RAM: 16 GB vs. 32 GB. Obviously, 32 GB of memory is going to cost you more than 16 GB of memory. On the other hand, you should ask whether DDR5-4800 RAM is actually going to give you superior performance to DDR4-3200 RAM, such that 32 GB of the former justifies a price increase of 3.5x over 16 GB of the latter, instead of only 2x. Note that there is no guarantee whatsoever that there will be any performance difference, nor even that the difference, if any, will be positive.)
And the answers to these more appropriate sub-questions may not be obvious at all! The Antec DF700 Flux ATX Mid Tower Case, from the cheapest build, costs ~$110; the Fractal Design Torrent RGB ATX Mid Tower Case, from the priciest build, costs ~$250. Is going from the former to the latter an improvement at all? Is it possible for a more expensive PC case to be worse, in all relevant ways, than a cheaper PC case? I can answer this one easily: yes, it absolutely is possible; examples abound.
On the other hand, the MSI Radeon RX 6600 XT 8 GB MECH 2X OC Video Card, from the cheapest build, costs ~$400, while the Zotac GeForce RTX 3090 24 GB GAMING AMP Core Holo Video Card, from the priciest build, costs ~$1500. Is the latter a better graphics card? Yes. (Whether the performance difference is relevant to your needs, or worth the difference in price, is another matter entirely, outside the scope of our discussion.) But this gets us into my next point…
Third, PC components such as RAM, graphics cards, CPUs, etc., are products whose performance is, compared to most consumer products, very easy to quantify and measure. (But note that the danger of Goodhart’s law lurks behind every performance benchmark! The history of the consumer/enthusiast PC market is rife with such cases…) Because these components are routinely used to produce measurable output (whether that be “Bitcoins mined per hour” or “rendered frames per second” or whatever else), there is a quantitative check on evaluated quality, which is easily measurable, more or less publicly accessible, and therefore tied closely to demand and thus price.
And it is therefore not surprising that it’s precisely such components of a build where this is not true, such as cases (see above), that are where it is most likely that you can find yourself paying more for less (or, at best, for nothing).
Fourth, the PC enthusiast community is a source of high-quality data about the market and the products therein. We build PCs, we test them, we write detailed reviews, etc. That you linked to PC Part Picker is not a coincidence. There is no Microwave Picker, Toothbrush Picker, Trash Can Picker, etc. (Amazon, you say? But Amazon sells computers, too—why didn’t you link to there? Because, of course, Amazon is an extremely low-quality signal, where the dominant optimization pressure is not toward accuracy, but toward deception. The Wirecutter? As I’ve noted before, The Wirecutter is notorious for its inaccurate and misleading claims.)
For most consumer products, there is no such high-quality data source, and consequently there is no reason to expect that the pricier product is always, or even almost always, going to be “better” in any meaningful way.
In summary: the “PC build” example is extremely non-representative, because (a) each build is a collection of individual retail product categories, in each of which relevant quality may or may not be strongly correlated with price; (b) computer components have performance that is much more easily quantifiable and measurable than is that of most consumer products; (c) there is a PC enthusiast community which generates high-quality data about the products in question, on which basis it is possible to evaluate the builds—as is not the case for the great majority of consumer products.
Here I will only note that the standard advice in such cases is “buy the cheapest version of whatever it is; use it until it breaks (or no longer satisfies your needs); at that point you will have gotten a great deal of data to inform subsequent purchases, if any”.
Doing a great deal of research first, before taking any action whatsoever, is certainly a typical (or perhaps stereotypical) “rationalist” failing, and I do not by any means endorse it. (Indeed you may note that I never said anything about “do[ing] all this effortful research”; there is no particular reason why the sort of thought process to which I alluded in my initial post should take all that long. The difficult part—apparently—is the insight, in the first place, that such an approach is correct.)
Here’s how I would put this: I like the ISO 9000 definition of “quality” as the “degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fulfils requirements”.
When you want to find the best product for yourself, you have some requirements in mind. Suppose those requirements include criteria like “affordability” or “ease of repair” etc. Then more expensive products, while ostensibly “better” in some Platonic sense, likely aren’t a good fit for your needs, and couldn’t be described as high-quality in this sense.
That said, I agree that the microwave example, as written in the manual, would likely benefit from a revision, though I figure its current form likely does just fine in a workshop setting.
I think that I am not quite getting my meaning across… my point is that, in this case—and in many other cases—are not ‘ostensibly “better” in some Platonic sense’. They’re not better in any practical sense. They’re just worse. They are inferior products. If someone gave one to me as a gift, I would discard it, and buy the $10 toothbrush instead. If the $10 toothbrush cost $100, and the $100 toothbrushes cost $10, without changing any of their other characteristics, I would spend the extra money to get the actually better one.
This isn’t about “affordability” at all.
My point in that quote was that while these products may be made of e.g. ostensibly better materials, they’re inferior relative to your requirements. In your framing (of products that are “just worse”, irrespective of requirements), it seems to me like one should be able to buy the $10 toothbrush, sell it for $100, outsell the originally more expensive item, and make $90 profit. As I presume that this doesn’t actually happen, I conclude that some customers prefer the product that originally costs $100, and it can ergo not be considered “just worse”.
When you judge a product as “just worse”, that sounds to me like it’s supposed to be a universally applicable and objective judgement. But it seems to me like products can only be judged subjectively (i.e. relative to one’s own requirements). For instance, if you gave a bunch of LWers the choice of which toothbrush to buy for personal use, I expect you would not be able to get unanimous agreement on your choice. So how can the other products be considered to be “just worse”?
No. They’re not. They’re really, genuinely not.
And that’s the mistake you’re making. There is no good reason to believe this to be possible unless you think that purchasing decisions are driven primarily by customers’ accurate evaluations of product quality… which condition happens to be violated precisely in the case where it is commonplace to use price as a signal of quality!
Consider the scenario where a customer prefers a product which is, in fact, inferior, given his needs. Does this scenario strike you as incoherent, as described? Or merely impossible in practice? Or neither incoherent nor impossible? If the latter, how common would you say that it is?
Unanimous? No, of course not unanimous. There is always the “lizardman quotient”, even among LessWrongers.
More generally, whether customers’ judgments are rational given their needs and wants is, indeed, the key piece of this puzzle. People on Less Wrong are not immune to this particular bias (indeed it is my experience that “rationalists” have a huge blind spot when it comes to this topic, due, perhaps, to a greater trust in markets than that of the average person).
I’m curious what it is about these toothbrushes that makes you prefer the cheap one?
Off the top of my head, a few possibilities that seem plausible to me:
If they don’t take the same type of head, the heads that fit the expensive toothbrushes might be more expensive and/or lower quality themselves.
The expensive ones might do annoying things like beep to tell you it’s been two minutes of brushing.
The cheap one might be a better shape or weight.
The expensive ones might be more complicated in ways that make them likely to break sooner.
...or in ways that make them harder to use.
They might have different charging methods, and you prefer to method for the cheap one.
Or the cheap one has better battery life.
The expensive ones might have Bluetooth, which you might disprefer even apart from its effects on e.g. battery life.
Sure, they have all sorts of unnecessary features.
Indeed they do not.
Substantially so. The cheap brush I’ve got both has a better-shaped head and bristle layout than most fancy ones, and a much more ergonomically favorable body shape.
Yep, for sure. The toothbrush I had lasted me for about 10 years. The fancy ones won’t.
A single AA battery, lasting for weeks. The fancy ones generally have rechargeable internal (non-user-serviceable) batteries with a proprietary charger—so when the battery stops holding a charge, you’re out of luck and must replace the whole thing.
(ETA: Note that the toothbrush being rechargeable means that I now must devote space in the bathroom to the charger—including the hassle of arranging for it to plug into an AC outlet—or else have to have the brush sitting in another room of the house, instead of conveniently located in the bathroom. With the AA-powered toothbrush I’ve got, it just sits near my sink, like any normal toothbrush.)
Yep, this comes under the “unnecessary features” heading.
The bottom line is that the more expensive toothbrushes have, quite literally, no advantages over the cheap one (given my needs), and many disadvantages. Switching to a more expensive model would be a strict downgrade, a choice that is unambiguously dominated by sticking with the cheap one.