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by wutbrodo 4028 days ago
Perhaps a more concrete definition of an analogous concept would make this clearer: Are you familiar with the concept of a prior distribution[1]? The point of a prior is that, before you get any of the evidence, you can still have some sense of how likely each event is. If you asked me whether a microwave with more features would be more expensive, I would feel pretty comfortable saying "yea probably". As mentioned downthread, this is based on the fact that 99.9% of the time, in every single industry, products that are more functional will be more costly (all else held equal, obviously).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_probability
1 comments
caskance 4027 days ago
Like I said, that prior is wrong regardless about how comfortable you feel about it. The real question you should be saying yes to is whether a microwave with more USEFUL features would be more expensive. A microwave with the "feature" that "it has a 10% chance to self-destruct each time it finishes heating something" would cost less, since no matter how hard you try to spin that as a feature, a reasonable person would see it as a defect.
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wutbrodo 4027 days ago
On the increasingly minuscule chance that you're not just trolling (posterior probability!), it should be trivially obvious that what makes TV-smartness a "feature" but not stochastic microwave self-destruction is not some objective measure of usefulness, but rather the fact that only the former is marketed as beneficial with the reasonable expectation (on the part of the marketers) that some/many consumers will believe it.

If you truly don't understand this distinction, then this whole conversation (indeed, this entire posting/thread) is hopelessly beyond your comprehension.

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caskance 4026 days ago
A bold claim coming from someone who thinks "It's not a bug, it's a feature" is successful marketing rather than a punchline.
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wutbrodo 4021 days ago
> A bold claim coming from someone who thinks "It's not a bug, it's a feature" is successful marketing rather than a punchline.

Thanks for confirming my suspicion; the fact that "it's a feature not a bug" is pretty unethical has nothing to do with whether it can successful or not. It's a useful logical tool to learn to distinguish "is" from "ought"; whether or not you think that Smart TVs are better than dumb TVs or not has no bearing on whether or not they're marketed as such and most importantly believed as such by the majority of consumers.

Hell it's not even one of the worst heuristics in play: (higher) price and popularity of a product as a heuristic for quality may be even worse than "more features" as a heuristic, and these two are extremely prevalent. And yet just because I don't like them doesn't mean I pretend that these tendencies simply don't exist.

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