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> The "second-order" advertising (e.g. critic recommendations, word of mouth) is much harder to deal with, especially if you believe that some people have good, unbiased, not-unduly-influenced opinions that you will benefit from listening to. My only recommendation is to curate the people whose opinions you listen to very carefully, and think hard about who they might be (possibly unwittingly) influenced by. But we rely on other people's opinion precisely to avoid thinking hard about everything, which would be overkill at best, and could even kill you at worst. What you say is idyllic, but in practice we just go with the flow. It's easy and safe, from an evolutionary point of view. Choosing requires energy, time and attention [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice], and it has a big opportunity cost [http://www.brainpickings.org/2013/11/27/the-psychology-of-se...]. Do I need to thoroughly bet every "expert" that I listen to? In practice, this is infeasible. You definitely should do it for important stuff, but advertising covers many other unimportant things (such as yoghurt brands) for which it's economically optimal to just assume everyone is an expert. Also, you approach advertising and human bias such as social proof as only bad things, and I think one needs to also consider the good side of it. Even for things not so trivial as yoghurt, perhaps if I spend 40 hours choosing for the best car I can make an optimal decision; or perhaps choosing the one that is advertised the most is sufficient; I get a suboptimal choice but psychologically it's less demanding; socially is more acceptable (as I have the same car as the rest); heuristically it might even hold some intelligence (advertising power carries some information about financial strength, financial strength about solid business, and solid business about good products). Typically, you will shortlist a couple of cars and try them. It's a matter of being a satisficer and not a maximizer [http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-you-make-decisions-says-a-lo...]. |