Guidance on Purchasing and Avoiding Coercion

Ok, the scourge of the web! Sometime in the distant past, we would be fulfilled just to get an alright taco in NYC. Presently, unless you get the VERY best anything as evaluated by the web

Same goes for everything from gourmet expert's blades to rucksacks to whatever it is (I recommend The Sweethome as a fantastic site with purchasing guides for huge amounts of items). Entertainingly enough, I think we have wound up with this issue for a similar reason that individuals cry on about reference diagrams: since we neglect to demonstrate the information focuses hidden the rundown measurement. Investigate these illustrations from this paper:

For most purchasing guides, they generally simply report the maximum (as opposed to the mean in most logical reference diagrams), however the issue is the same. The maximum is most valuable when your dispersion resembles this:

In any case, revealing the maximum is far less helpful a measurement when your dissemination resembles this or this:

What I mean by this is the point at which we read an internet shopping guide, we expect that their best pick is WAY superior to the various alternatives—an exemplary instance of the anomaly conveyance I indicated first. (This is the reason we feel like butt holes for getting the second best anything.) But for some things, the best scoring thing isn't too much superior to the second best. Or, on the other hand perhaps the third best. Like toward the beginning of today, when I was considering getting a can brush and instinctually went to look into an audit. Maybe there are some latrine brushes are superior to others. Possibly there are some with a lethal defect that implies you truly shouldn't get them. But I’m guessing that most toilet brushes basically are just fine. Of course, that doesn’t prevent The Sweethome providing me a guide for the best toilet brush: incredible, profoundly thankful. In any case, in the event that I simply go to the neighborhood store and get a can brush, I'm presumably not too far-removed. Which is to state that the conveyance of "scores" for the latrine brush are most likely firmly stuffed and not especially separated—there is no anomaly can brush.

While there may be cases where there is truly a clear outlier (like the early days of the iPod or Google (remember AltaVista?)), I venture to say that the distribution of goodness most of the time is probably bimodal. Some products are good and roughly equivalent, some are duds. Often the duds will have some particular characteristic to avoid, like when The Sweethome says this about toilet brushes:

We were quick to dismiss toilet brushes whose holders were entirely closed, or had no holders at all. In the latter category, that meant eliminating the swab-style Fuller brush, a $3 mop, and a very cheap wire-ring brush.

I think this sort of information should be at the top of the page, and so you buying guide could say “Pretty much all decent toilet brushes are similar, but be sure to get one with an open holder. And spend around $5-10.”

Then again, when you read these guides, it often seems that there’s no other rational option than their top choice, portraying it as being by far and away the best based on their extensive testing. But that’s mostly because they’ve just spend like 79 hours with toilet brushes and are probably magnifying subtle distinctions invisible to the majority of people, and have already long since discarded all the duds. It’s like they did this:

Now this is not to say those smaller distinctions don’t matter, and by all means get the best one, but let’s not kill ourselves trying to get the very best everything. After all, do those differences really matter for the few hours you’re likely to spend with a toilet brush over your entire lifetime? (And how valuable was the time you spent on the decision itself?)

All of this reminds me of a trip I took to New York City to hang out with my brother a few months back. New York is the world capital of “Oh, don't bother with these, I know the best place to get toilet brushes”, and my brother is no exception. Which is actually pretty awesome—we had a great time checking out some amazing eats across town. But then, at the end, I saw a Haagen Dazs and was like "Oh, let's get a coffee milkshake!". My brother said "Oh, no, I know this incredible milkshake place, we should go there." To which I said, "You ever had a coffee milkshake from Haagen Dazs? It's actually pretty damn good." And good it was.