SaidAchmiz comments on Rationalists Are Less Credulous But Better At Taking Ideas Seriously - LessWrong

43 Post author: Yvain 21 January 2014 02:18AM

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Comment author: SaidAchmiz 21 January 2014 07:10:51PM 5 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Desrtopa 21 January 2014 09:15:33PM * 4 points [-]

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.

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.

Comment author: SaidAchmiz 21 January 2014 09:27:34PM 1 point [-]

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.

foot-in-the-door technique used to extract money from customers via some less obvious avenue.

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.

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.

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.

Comment author: Jiro 21 January 2014 11:27:14PM 0 points [-]

I think you underestimate how doggedly many people hunt for deals.

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.

Comment author: SaidAchmiz 21 January 2014 11:34:45PM 1 point [-]

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."

Comment author: Jiro comment score below threshold [+] (29 children)

Comment author: SaidAchmiz 22 January 2014 01:15:41AM 4 points [-]

All of this seems like a fully general counterargument to doing anything that any salespeople tell you to do, ever.

One imagines that some of those customers who later returned to angrily and tearfully demand data recovery, followed something like your line of reasoning, and decided not to back up their data. As a result, they are now sitting on top of their giant pile of utility.

... oh wait.

Do you think it's just chance that following your logic leads you to lose, in this case? And not just lose: be almost guaranteed to lose, if in fact you have something to lose. (All hard drives fail. All of them. It's just a matter of time.)

Comment author: Jiro 22 January 2014 06:07:26PM 3 points [-]

All of this seems like a fully general counterargument to doing anything that any salespeople tell you to do, ever.

It is sometimes smart to do something that a salesperson tells you to do. But you shouldn't do it because the salesperson tells you; the fact that the salesperson tells you to do it is not very useful information.

One imagines that some of those customers who later returned to angrily and tearfully demand data recovery, followed something like your line of reasoning, and decided not to back up their data.

They had no reason to believe the salesperson's advice was good. The fact that the salesperson's advice was good, and following it would have left them better off, doesn't change this. It just makes it a case of bad luck. Saying "If they had followed the advice of that salesman they'd have been better off, so they should have listened to that salesman" is like saying "if they had followed the advice of that tea leaf reader, they'd have been better off, so they should have listened to that tea leaf reader."

Comment author: private_messaging 22 January 2014 06:33:36PM * 2 points [-]

It is sometimes smart to do something that a salesperson tells you to do. But you shouldn't do it because the salesperson tells you; the fact that the salesperson tells you to do it is not very useful information.

Yeah, exactly. In that particular case, you're either savvy enough and you know that you should backup your data (in which case you're likely to buy backup storage from someone other than overpriced Apple), OR you're not savvy enough, in which case you have to take it on faith that e.g. hard drives break down often enough, that there's no existing built-in redundancy to begin with, that the backup solution actually works, etc etc.

edit: Besides, good hard drives have yearly probability of failure of less than 5%, so the data better be simultaneously worth several hundred bucks and not be worth sharing with other people, copying to other computers, etc.

Comment author: Nornagest 29 January 2014 11:20:29PM * 1 point [-]

It might be worth mentioning here that cheap external hard drives are crap. I've made a practice for the last few years of using them for backups and anything else I need a terabyte drive for (mostly media storage), and in that time I've lost three of them, about one every year and a half. I haven't lost an internal drive since about 1995.

The usual point of failure seems to be the backplane rather than the drive itself, though. So the data's recoverable as long as it's not hardware encrypted.

Comment author: SaidAchmiz 29 January 2014 10:49:24PM 0 points [-]

sharing with other people, copying to other computers, etc.

What do you think "backing up" means, exactly?

It's not some tech magic that only happens in the presence of certain specific, specially sanctified, pieces of equipment. If you have your data in more than one place, such that if one location goes down, the data still exists elsewhere — congratulations, your data is backed up.

However, if we're talking about a full backup, then there's also another consideration:

the data better be simultaneously worth several hundred bucks

It's not just the data, it's also your time.

Without a Time Machine backup

Your hard drive goes down. You buy (or receive, via warranty replacement) a new hard drive. You then have to spend the next several days:

a) reinstalling your operating system; b) reinstalling all of your programs; c) performing all software updates; d) reconstructing all of your application-specific settings and other aspects of your configuration.

With a Time Machine backup

Your hard drive goes down. You buy (or receive, via warranty replacement) a new hard drive. You boot from your system DVD or recovery partition and click the button to restore from backup. In an hour or two, as if by magic, your system is fully restored to its state as of the last backup, data, applications, settings, and all.

If your data plus at least a day, usually several days, of time lost, is not worth even one hundred dollars (which is how much a terabyte hard drive plus external enclosure costs these days), then I suppose you're not doing anything of particular value with your time and you may freely ignore my advice.

Comment author: private_messaging 29 January 2014 11:57:04PM * 0 points [-]

If your data plus at least a day, usually several days, of time lost, is not worth even one hundred dollars

You forgot the division by the probability of this happening.

I'm not saying backups are not worth it, I do backup my system, what I am saying is that it's not necessarily the case that backups are worth it for your regular person that doesn't customize things a lot, doesn't have much valuable data, uses very few programs regularly, and what ever valuable data they got is backed up on other computers. edit: for that matter, average person's settings are probably of negative value to them, heh.

edit : holy cow , some drives have annual failure rate of 0.9% .

Comment author: SaidAchmiz 30 January 2014 12:16:47AM 0 points [-]

regular person ... doesn't have much valuable data

I don't know what "regular people" you hang out with, so this might be true in your experience. When I worked retail, many of our customers were creative professionals of some sort — musicians, photographers, digital artists, writers, etc. Their computers had tons of work-relevant data.

Another example: my mother, certainly a "regular person" insofar as she has no tech industry background, is an educator. On her computer are things like work-related documents; syllabi; curriculum design docs; teaching materials; etc. All of that is certainly valuable.

Do you actually know people who own and use a personal computer, but have no valuable data on it, or very little? Also, how do you peg the value of your Great American Novel you've been writing in your off time for the last three years?

Comment author: private_messaging 30 January 2014 12:44:44AM * 0 points [-]

I don't really hang out with regular people generally, and I was speaking in the data by sheer tonnage. The examples you're listing fit on a single SD card. Non computer proficient people I know are really paranoid about the computer failing so they copy their stuff onto disks manually (even though better options are available).

How much revenue in dollars do you think a typical person with failed hard drive will lose, on the average?

(The total net worth of the data I got is definitely in the six and most likely in the seven figures range in terms of total loss of revenue if i'd lost all of it, so it's backuped rigorously of course, off site too in case of fire) edit: also I have large data that is valuable, not just photos (which people nowadays upload someplace on the internet).

Comment author: SaidAchmiz 30 January 2014 02:01:36AM 0 points [-]

The examples you're listing fit on a single SD card.

What?!

<consults Newegg>

It seems you can get SDXC cards in capacities up to 256 GB... for over $600. The up-to-$100 range gets you, perhaps, 64 GB. The sort of data I refer to in my first example most certainly does not fit onto one of those; and even the largest SD cards in no way, shape, or form have the capacity to let you do a full backup (i.e., the kind that saves you all that reinstall time) on a machine you use for any kind of media work.

(The total net worth of the data I got is definitely in the six and most likely in the seven figures range in terms of total loss of revenue if i'd lost all of it, so it's backuped rigorously of course, off site too in case of fire) edit: also I have large data that is valuable, not just photos (which people nowadays upload someplace on the internet).

Well, there you go. I don't know why you think "regular people" don't do important, valuable things on their computer, or don't have lots of data, but in my experience, they certainly do.

In any case, my original point remains, which is that even if you backup your several megabytes of important Word documents onto Dropbox, and that's your entire backup strategy, and your time is so worthless to you that you don't mind spending hours or days reinstalling...

... that's still a backup strategy. Not backing up would still be worse.

(As an aside, measure the value of time exclusively in lost revenue has always struck me as shortsighted as heck.)

continue this thread »

Comment author: SaidAchmiz 22 January 2014 01:16:27AM 2 points [-]

Also, are you asserting that all cases of low probability of large consequences are equivalent to Pascal's Mugging?

Comment author: Jiro 25 January 2014 03:52:59PM * 0 points [-]

It's equivalent to Pascal's Mugging when

1) There's a large consequence, with a low probability, and a low cost action which should be taken to avoid the consequence (or to get the consequence if it's positive)

2) It is said that the size of the consequence makes up for the low probability, either explicitly or implicitly

3) The low probability of the large consequence has a large component consisting of uncertainty about the probability itself. This typically involves questions like "are they lying about the probability", "are they exaggerating the probability", or "are they mistaken about the probability".

Comment author: SaidAchmiz 26 January 2014 12:11:16AM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: Jiro 26 January 2014 12:38:46AM -1 points [-]

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.

Comment author: SaidAchmiz 26 January 2014 12:44:35AM 1 point [-]

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.)

Comment author: Lumifer 26 January 2014 02:57:48AM 2 points [-]

Salesmen often know what they're talking about.

Not in my experience.

Comment author: SaidAchmiz 26 January 2014 03:10:51AM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Lumifer 26 January 2014 03:27:27AM 2 points [-]

Perhaps you're going to the wrong stores?

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.

continue this thread »

Comment author: Jiro 26 January 2014 01:02:45AM * 1 point [-]

Salesmen often know what they're talking about. They could be lying, or not. Tea leaf readers, however, just make stuff up.

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..

It remains true that a customer who followed your logic would lose all their valuable data

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.

SaidAchmiz comments on Rationalists Are Less Credulous But Better At Taking Ideas Seriously - LessWrong

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