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Algon30

Yep, that sounds sensible. I sometimes use consumer reports in my usual method for buying something in product class X. My usual is: 
1) Check what's recommended on forums/subreddits who care about the quality of X. 
2) Compare the rating distribution of an instance of X to other members of X. 
3) Check high quality reviews. This either requires finding someone you trust to do this, or looking at things like consumer reports. 
 

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by KvmanThinking
1 min read
5

7

I don't know how to say this in LessWrong jargon, but it clearly falls into the category of rationality, so here goes:

Consumer Reports is a nonprofit. They run experiments and whatnot to determine, for example, the optimal toothpaste for children. They do not get paid by the companies they test the products of.

Listening to what they say is a wayyy better method of choosing what to buy than trusting your gut; you have consumed so many advertisements and they have all taken advantage of your cognitive biases and reduced your ability to make good decisions about buying stuff, skewing you towards buying whosever ads were most targeted and most frequent.

As far as I can tell, they care about your online privacy and will not scoop up all your data and sell it to random data brokers.

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Or other organizations that test for standards of quality and/or safety

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You should use Consumer Reports
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[-]ErioirE60

Another useful heuristic is that electrical devices that have been UL listed[1] are typically better quality than ones without. This is particularly relevant for cheap/disposable items like light bulbs where the cheapest ones tend to expire long before the expected lifetime of the actual LED. (I'm looking at you 'bargain' Walmart LEDs that died after less than a year of regular use!)

Note that UL is a for-profit organization. I have never heard anything bad about it but perverse incentives could create conflicts of interest in any number of ways in the future. I hope there is someone monitoring that sort of thing.

  1. ^

    Or other organizations that test for standards of quality and/or safety

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[-]ChristianKl50

Consumer Reports is a nonprofit. They run experiments and whatnot to determine, for example, the optimal toothpaste for children. 

The link says nothing about them having run any experiments in their quest to make toothpaste recommendations and they recommend toothpaste based on arguments that aren't about their own experimental results. Claiming that a process that doesn't test how effective toothpaste is at creating beneficial clinical outcomes like having lower caries as determining "optimal toothpaste", sounds strange to me. 

Their process might be better than just using marketing processes, but it's very far from actually running a clinical trial that looks at which toothpaste is optimal for dental outcomes. They don't even seem to understand enough of the domain to understand that Xylitol is an active ingredient in toothpaste.

They do not get paid by the companies they test the products of.

That claim also seems wrong given that they say "When you shop through retailer links on our site, we may earn affiliate commissions. 

If you want to approach toothpaste rationally, the way you do it build a mental model of the evidence landscape.

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[-]romeostevensit50

Mixed reports on how they have degraded in quality and sometimes misrepresented how thorough their tests are, but still a time saver for finding higher quality options for things you want long service life from like home appliances.

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[-]Algon30

Yep, that sounds sensible. I sometimes use consumer reports in my usual method for buying something in product class X. My usual is: 
1) Check what's recommended on forums/subreddits who care about the quality of X. 
2) Compare the rating distribution of an instance of X to other members of X. 
3) Check high quality reviews. This either requires finding someone you trust to do this, or looking at things like consumer reports. 
 

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