Very interesting Article

[Tesselator]

http://arstechnica.com/science/news...f-favorite-brands-as-threat-to-self-image.ars

Any comments?

 

[Michiel Schierbeek]

What is good today may be bad tommorow, although some lenses remain good for ever.
I do have sympathy for certain brands but I will never push or even strongly recommend a certain brand or product to someone when asked for advise anymore.
I have a few bad experiences with that. I was really enthousiastic about the G1 and recommended it to my stephfather, a Hasselblad and Leica user in the past, because he wanted advise from me. I said; I never advise people anymore to buy a certain product, because often they are unsathisfied with it and blame me afterwards.
He never dared to tell me he didn't use the G1 anymore because he could not handle the interface and secretly bought a Sony point and shoot. :ROTFL:

And for myself I am not brandloyal. But I do like open platforms like Android. And M4/3 and the Sony Nex (7) with which one can explore the whole lenshistory.

In my eyes it is plain silly to be fanatic about brands. Enthousiastic about certain products,yes.

I know people who have been driving Volvo's their entire lives. Fine cars, if you can afford them, but boring.
I am to fickle for this kind of loyalty.

Michiel

 

[ggibson]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

Our brains are susceptible to logical sorting errors like this. We have to gather so much information to construct a world-view in our minds, it's impossible to reconcile everything when facts can seem contradictory. Thus our brains search to reinforce our current mindset by discarding information that would otherwise force us to reevaluate past decisions. Because we make decisions about how to perceive things so quickly and automatically, sometimes logic is not followed.

 

[pellicle]

Any comments?

well, firstly

note that when knowledge is zero that confidence in opinion is still high.

then from stats we know that aspects of a population can be expressed by how they differ around an 'average' in 'normal distribution'

I suspect that most of us here are are up in the well informed bracket compared to the majority of the 'market'

then building on this we have this research on the public ability to react to information and correct errors in belief, from this link:

A timely piece of research from a professor of politics in the United States may throw some light on just why election campaigns tend to be vacuous, fact free zones and why political manipulation is so effective.

Georgia State University's Professor Jason Reifler conducted a series of experiments that looked at whether citizens changed their views when they were presented with the correct facts.

...

So we know that our ignorance about certain issues makes it easy for us to be misled but your research shows that we don't necessarily change our minds even when we have the facts
...

So not only did they not believe the facts that you were putting before them; they actually reinforced the incorrect views they originally had.
...

When you believe something about the political world or even about the non-political world and it's really important to you, when you're told that you're wrong that can be a pretty threatening experience.

People don't like being wrong. They have trouble adjusting to it and incorporating new information.
...

The downside of the research that my co-author and I have done to date is that it's very depressing. We don't have a terribly good understanding yet of ways to try and improve public debate, to try and improve political dialogue.

If it's any consolation the reason that we got into this line of research is that we actually someday hope to be able to suggest ways that will improve public debate.

But so far in all honesty we're a bit discouraged.

so I'm not surprised at all, and my experience is that is the same thing which drives religion or football team worship.

 

[Audii-Dudii]

I would offer this article as well ... interesting site, too.