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SaidAchmiz comments on Rationalists Are Less Credulous But Better At Taking Ideas Seriously - Less Wrong
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The difference, however, is that in Pascal's Mugging, after you pay the mugger $5 (or whatever), you remain absolutely clueless about whether he was for real, or a swindler, and whether the threat he described had the slightest grounding in reality.
In this case, after you take the low-cost action (doing a bit of research, looking for a second opinion), you now know whether the salesman was feeding you a line of nonsense or whether he was warning you of a real threat.
In any case, I think that all you've shown is that declaring a situation to be a Pascal's Mugging is not a good proxy for deciding whether you should do something.
Salesmen make lots of claims. What you suggest would mean that pretty much every time you talk to a salesman, you need to go and research all the claims the salesman makes that imply danger. In fact, by your reasoning, every time a tea leaf reader tells you to do something, you ought to research it to determine if the tea leaf reader is correct about that. After all, by your own argument, there are many cases where if you do the research you will know whether the tea leaf reader's suggested course of action is helpful. Certainly if the tea leaf reader told you to do backups, research would tell you whether that's true.
Salesmen often know what they're talking about. They could be lying, or not. Tea leaf readers, however, just make stuff up.
It remains true that a customer who followed your logic would lose all their valuable data, whereas a customer who rejected your logic would have everything backed up, and lose nothing. In short: if you're so smart, why aintcha rich? (In utilons, in this case, rather than dollars.)
Not in my experience.
Perhaps you're going to the wrong stores?
There's a difference between big-box stores and small mom-and-pop outfits. Of course the sales floor at Best Buy is staffed entirely by morons. That's why we buy things on Amazon. (Well, not the only reason.)
I assure you that being knowledgeable gets you far in sales, given certain conditions.
Perhaps. I don't go to stores (other than food) much. I can't recall last time that I was buying something expensive and the salesman knew more about that thing than I did.
Well now, hold on. I wouldn't expect a salesman to know more about computer technology than I do; but I've got a background in comp sci and IT; it would be an unreasonable expectation.
If, however, you're an average person, a layman, and you've not done your own research (perhaps because you're not savvy enough to do that, or too lazy, or something), and you go into a good tech-related store, then expecting the salesman to know more than you do is quite reasonable.
So it depends on what sorts of things you buy, and on where your own expertise lies.
Personally, the last time I went into a store and the salespeople knew more than I was in a hardware store. It was a small place in Brooklyn, strictly local, non-chain, been around as long as I can remember. Those guys really know their stuff.
Probably not :-P
The combination of salesmen telling the truth about things they know and lying about things they know is, as a whole, comparable to a tea leaf reader who neither knowingly tells the truth nor knowingly lies much..
Yes, he'd be unlucky. He'd be unlucky enough to have stumbled into one of the few rare cases where being rational produces a bad result. Being told to do backups is not a typical case of listening to a salesman (or tea leaf reader). It's a highly unusual case.
Just because someone would have been better off if they had done action X, it does not follow that it would then have been rational to have done action X.