xnor
Active Member
- Joined
- Jan 12, 2022
- Messages
- 193
- Likes
- 207
But Ingenieur, you're talking about subjective preference that you can put on anything. So by that logic nothing can be objective, which is in line with the denial of objective reality that I have mentioned before.
Engine noise or how quiet the cabin is can be measured. We can even look at the noise spectrum and approximately say how loud it will be perceived. Those are significant, real, measurable, objective differences.
So you can determine e.g. which car is quieter under the same conditions. But "subjective preferences" can be seemingly arbitrary due to cognitive bias and can therefore be on the side of the louder car (even if quieter is considered better). This might simply be due to disliking the other car's manufacturer. Even if there are no real differences, there can still be a clear subjective preference (that would vanish in a blind test btw).
Subjective preference cannot reliably tell you anything about actual performance, just like opinions do not reliably tell you about what is true and what isn't. No matter how strong people agree with an opinion, form groups that share common opinions, fall prey to groupthink, peer pressure ... it still can be completely wrong.
Engine noise or how quiet the cabin is can be measured. We can even look at the noise spectrum and approximately say how loud it will be perceived. Those are significant, real, measurable, objective differences.
So you can determine e.g. which car is quieter under the same conditions. But "subjective preferences" can be seemingly arbitrary due to cognitive bias and can therefore be on the side of the louder car (even if quieter is considered better). This might simply be due to disliking the other car's manufacturer. Even if there are no real differences, there can still be a clear subjective preference (that would vanish in a blind test btw).
Subjective preference cannot reliably tell you anything about actual performance, just like opinions do not reliably tell you about what is true and what isn't. No matter how strong people agree with an opinion, form groups that share common opinions, fall prey to groupthink, peer pressure ... it still can be completely wrong.