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Jiro comments on Rationalists Are Less Credulous But Better At Taking Ideas Seriously - Less Wrong
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If the person doesn't know anything about computers or backups, he can't distinguish "I'm not trying to sell you something" from "I am trying to sell you something and I'm lying about it" and he'd have to do a Bayseian update based on the chance that you're trying to sell him something. Furthermore, he knows that if you are trying to sell him something, the fact that you are trying to sell him something would make it likely that anything you say is untrustworthy (and the fact that you are lying about your intent to sell him something increases the probability of untrustworthiness even more).
So the customer is being rational by not listening to you.
I am not a salesman.
I am, however, reasonably competent with technology. Growing up in a congregation of all age groups, this made me one of the go-to people whenever somebody had computer problems. I'm talking middle-aged and above, the kind of people who fall for blatant phishing scams, have 256mb of RAM, and don't know what right-clicking is.
Without fail, these people had been aware that losing all their data would be very painful, and that it could happen to them, and that backing up their data could prevent that. Their reaction was universally "this is embarrassing, I should've taken that more seriously", not "I didn't know a thing like this could happen/that I could have done something simple to prevent it". Procrastination, trivial inconveniences, and not-taking-the-idea-seriously-enough are the culprit in a large majority of cases.
In short, I think it requires some contortion to construe the typical customer as rational here.
I note an amusing and strange contradiction in the sibling comments to this one:
VAuroch says the above is explained by hindsight bias; that the people in question actually didn't know about data loss and prevention thereof (but only later confabulated that they did).
Eugine_Nier says the above is explained by akrasia: the people did know about data loss and prevention, but didn't take action.
These are contradictory explanations.
Both VAuroch and Eugine_Nier seem to suggest, by their tone ("Classic hindsight bias", "That's just akrasia") that their respective explanations are obvious.
What's going on?
Well, it depends on what precisely we mean by them "knowing" about data loss.
Limits of language, I think. Both explanations are possible, giving what the parent post said; both VAuroch and Eugine_Nier may have had experience with similar cases caused, respectively, by hindsight bias and akrasia, which makes their explanation appear obvious to them.
A lot of the time, I've noticed that "it's obvious" means "I have seen this pattern before (sometimes multiple times), and this extra element is part of the same pattern every time that I have seen it"
I meant less that the explanation was obvious and more that it was a very good example of the effect of hindsight bias; hindsight bias produces precisely these kinds of results.
If something else is even more likely to produce this kind of result, then that would be more likely than hindsight bias. I don't think akrasia qualifies.
To elaborate on what I think was actually going on: People 'know' that failure is a possibility, something that happens to other people, and that backups are a good way to prevent it, but don't really believe that it is a thing that can happen to them. After the fact, hindsight bias transforms 'yeah, that's a thing that happens' to 'this could happen to me' retroactively, and they remember knowing/believing it could happen to them.
That's just akrasia.
Classic hindsight bias. If you went to a representative sample of similar people who had not recently suffered a backup-requiring event, they would probably think the second version, not the first.
Hindsight bias is almost certainly a component. Plus, I was a friendly member of their in-group, providing free assistance with a major problem, so they had two strong reasons to be extra-agreeable.
Even so, in my experience, your second sentence does not match reality. As in, doing exactly that does not in fact yield responses skewing toward the second option, even among the very non-tech-savvy. Many of them don't know exactly how to set such a thing up (but know they could give a teenager $20 to do it for them, which falls under "trivial inconveniences"), but the idea is not new info to them.
My sample size here is small and demographically/geographically limited, so add as many grains of salt as you see fit.
Well, look, of course I'd prefer to sell the customer something. If, knowing this, you take everything out of my mouth to be a lie, then you are not, in fact, being rational. The fact that I would specifically say "buy it elsewhere if you like!", and offer to set the backup system up for free, ought to tell you something.
The other part of this is that the place where I worked was a small, privately owned shop, many of whose customers were local, and which made a large chunk (perhaps the majority) of its revenue from service. (Profit margins on Apple machines are very slim.) It was to our great advantage not to lie to people in the interest of selling them one more widget. Doing so would have been massively self-defeating. As a consequence of all of this, our regular customers generally trusted us, and were quite right to do so.
Finally, even if the customer decided that the chance was too great that I was trying to sell them something, and opted not to buy anything on the spot, it is still ridiculously foolish not to follow up on the salesperson's suggestion that you do something to protect yourself from losing months or years of work. If that is even a slight possibility, you ought to investigate, get second and third opinions, get your backup solution as cheaply as you like, and then take me up on my offer to install it for free (or have a friend install it). To not back up at all, because clearly the salesperson is lying and the truth must surely be the diametrical opposite of what they said, is a ludicrously bad plan.
It tells customers something, but considering that these are plausible marketing techniques, it's not very strong evidence.
If you tell the customers that something is really important, that they should buy it, even if from somewhere else, this signals trustworthiness and consideration, but it's a cheap signal considering that if they decide, right in your store, to buy a product which your store offers, they probably will buy it from you unless they're being willfully perverse. Most of the work necessary to get them to buy the product from you is done in convincing them to buy it at all, and nearly all the rest is done by having them in your store when you do it.
Offering to provide services for free is also not very strong evidence, because in marketing, "free" is usually free*, a foot-in-the-door technique used to extract money from customers via some less obvious avenue. Indeed, the customers might very plausibly reason that if the service was so important that they would be foolish to do without it, you wouldn't be offering it for free.
Given that setting up backups on a Mac is so easy that, as I suggested in my quoted spiel, the customer could even do it themselves, this is not a very well-supported conclusion.
Well, duh. You "extract" money from customers by the fact of them liking you, trusting you, and getting all their service done at your shop, and buying future things they need from you, also.
I think you underestimate how doggedly many people hunt for deals. I don't even blame them; being a retail shop, my place of work sometimes couldn't compete with mail-order houses on prices.
You're right, though: if they decided then and there that they would buy the thing, the customers often in fact went ahead and bought it then and there.
But you might plausibly think "hmm, suspicious. I'll wait to buy this until I can do some research." Fine and well; that's exactly what I'd do. Do the research. Buy the thing online. But dismissing the entire notion, based on the idea that "bah, he was just trying to sell me something", is foolishness.
The customer is estimating the probability that the statement is a sales pitch. The fact that many people would hunt for deals affects the effectiveness of the sales pitch given that it is one, not the likelihood that the statement is a sales pitch in the first place. Those are two different things--it's entirely possible that the statement is probably a sales pitch, but the sales pitch only catches 20% of the customers.
Yes; that comment was a response to your scenario whereby someone has already decided to purchase the item. You asserted that said person would then surely purchase it in the store, at the moment of the decision to purchase. I claimed that some people are too keen on getting a good deal to do that, opting instead to wait and buy it mail-order or online.
This is unrelated to the probability of my statements being a sales pitch.
Thus, a person might think: "Hmm, is this merely a sales pitch? Perhaps; but even if it is, and it succeeds in convincing me to buy a backup device, I might well still not buy it here and now, because I really want a good deal." They might then conclude: "And so, given that the salesman knows this, and is nonetheless insistent that I should buy it — and is even encouraging me to buy it elsewhere if it'll get me to buy it at all — I should take his words seriously; at least, seriously enough to look into it further."