On Cockroaches, Microwave Ovens And Opinions
My best friend Luis runs a family business which consists of refurbishing and repairing all kinds of appliances and white goods. His dad started the business decades ago and it’s been around ever since, eventually becoming a well-known name in the area, where not only households but also businesses—for example restaurants—rely on their services to keep their kitchen equipment running smoothly. And because my friend himself handles those restaurant-owned electric appliances when they are turned in for repair, he gets an indirect, privileged peek into the general hygiene of such places. How? Well, it has happened more often that he would like to admit that, after opening a microwave case, a colony of curious insects emerged from the depths of the faulty electronic artifact. He learned his lessons and developed a method; he keeps an insecticide spray next to him, puts his finger in the trigger and aims accordingly right before taking the last screw off.
This insight—knowing which restaurants have questionable or plainly AWOL hygiene and pest control practices—and perhaps unsurprisingly, led him to avoid going to those places to eat. Insight that he kindly transferred to me so I could avoid such adventures as well. I have always appreciated the fact he shared that with me and, although I never saw what he saw, I trust him dearly.
Luis’ peculiar insight about area restaurants was shared only with me and his family. But what if he shared it with more people? What if he talked to a local journalist and the whole thing ended up documented on the front cover of a massive local newspaper? Said restaurants would’ve probably gone out of business. As I wrote before in some other article, a big chunk of the global economy is driven by ignorance or, more accurately, by strategic opacity of information. In some twisted way, careless owners of filthy restaurants do comparatively better the less their customers know details about them.
This showcases the value of reviews and the fact that the public nowadays has a chance to convey their experiences online about a variety of things for others to be aware of. You can find reviews about everything: restaurants, hotels, companies, mundane products such as vacuum cleaners. Luckily, dating sites do not allow users to leave reviews, otherwise, many would die a virgin.
The more informed we are, the less intuitive we get. The more reviews you read—good and bad—about an electric toothbrush, the more your decision-making becomes cognizant of battery life, battery capacity, brushing modes, how many times it vibrates per minute—yes, that’s a thing1—or how much it weighs.
But, reviews are subjective human opinions. A review is nothing else than someone’s personal account of “cockroaches escaping the oven”. Typically, reviews are about way more trivial things than that. Then, whoever consumes those opinions chooses to trust third-party stories created by strangers and allows them to influence their decision making process under the assumption such stories are true. Just like I did with my friend Luis, but with people you have never met nor you will ever meet. Opinions are eagerly consumed without much questioning these days, and even more if said opinions align well with my pre-established beliefs. And many exploit this. Intentionally devastating reviews for products and services are a thing, and some people make a living out of it. There is a “bad review” prosperous industry where individuals of questionable morals push creators to pay them money in exchange for not getting an intentionally vicious review, which of course could—and will—affect future sales of their creations. On a similar note, resentful employees may take the chance to inflict some damage by leaving an incendiary anonymous review about their employer for all to see. Goes to say, bad reviews can also be absolutely honest, accurate and therefore very valuable to learn about the downsides of things. But how to tell the difference between genuine and fabricated?
Most online reviews are given for free. But you can monetize reviews, and without blackmailing anyone. Opinion demand is bullish at the moment. In some white-collar domains, opinion-generators—sorry, reviewers, or consultants—sell their hot takes about X or Y to clients who are willing to pay for professional subjectiveness. Investors and companies, for example, hire reviewers to convey opinions about projects or ideas. Alas, many of these walking opinion-factories are a joke: inexperienced, unaccomplished, unexposed to any relevant, tangible experience. At times, lacking even the most basic context, but still trusted enough to rule out sound ideas due to irrelevant minuses, or getting projects stuck due to trifles. Nothing new under the sun: the law of triviality —an observational adage coined by C. Northcote Parkinson in the late 50s—argues that people commonly give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. Parkinson provides the example of a fictional committee whose job was to approve the plans for a nuclear power plant spending the majority of its time on discussions about relatively minor but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bicycle shed, while neglecting the proposed design of the plant itself, which is far more important and a far more difficult and complex task.
Clinging to the 90s nostalgia that has invaded me a while ago, Kurt Cobain said: “We have no right to express an opinion until we know all of the answers.”
A brush head vibrates at hundreds of times per second, with the latest models at 31,000 strokes per minute or 62,000 movements per minute (517 Hz)