Originally Posted by
rpenmanparker
You're doing the "not enough negative evidence thing" like so often happens on this forum. By that I mean you are expressing concern about something and then saying that concern has not been sufficiently dispelled. The lack of internet complaints isn't convincing. The positive reviews aren't convincing. But the problem with this approach is that such concerns can never be sufficiently dispelled. I see this with industrial safety issues all the time. Once someone imagines a potential safety problem, all the history of that problem not having been real is not sufficient to dispel the fear. Negative evidence-it just has never happened in the past-is never convincing to folks that fear the problem will happen in the future. It's too bad, because lots more folks could be happily riding these very cost effective frames.
Well... protesting the form of my argument is not going to be terribly convincing...
. The human imagination and intuition is our greatest strengths as human beings. It's what makes us different from computers. You aren't going to convince me my intuition is wrong without positive evidence.
See, I don't like statistical methods. it's a problem I have, particularly as an engineer. Statistics are a black box. Samples go in, lots of information, the black box does its thing and an answer spits out, throwing away 99.99% of that information to arrive at a couple numbers that look good on a chart. None of the outputs are based in the reality of physics and form. It's all just data manipulation; massaging data samples a certain way to uncover the parameters of an
a priori defined pattern. Too often, people use that manipulated data in its raw form, without considering actual physical cause in making decisions. In my opinion, this is wrong. Using the data manipulation black box to guide an exploration of physics and form is fine; mistaking that manipulated data
for real knowledge about the world is wrong.
On top of that, self selected internet reviews by people looking to justify their decision in their mind (because the price difference between name brand and Chinese OEM factory direct are so different, it causes cognitive dissonance even amongst the most ardent supporters) is not terribly good statistics. There are lots of threads (do a search) about Chinese factory direct frames breaking. These are discounted as being "not reliable" by supporters... and the fallback argument if the "reliable report" argument fails to discredit, is that by paying $500 rather than $2k for a frame, you just go buy a new one. For the supporters, they pat themselves on the back for saving $1500, and if something goes wrong, there is a strong incentive to quietly go out and buy a new frame. They write off their original $500 and pat themselves on the back for saving $1000.
It's up to the factory direct companies to prove to me their product is reliable. I look at things that are simultaneously cheap and shiny with suspicion.