> Consumers often lack the resources, information, or decisions tree in most instances to look for any indicators of actual knowledge in the field beyond that credential
This is true. I have no clue how to check the expertise of my dentist, apart from using my own mental bullshit detector (of limited use here) and reading reviews by others (also of questionable use, because who reviews their dentist? And where?).
The analogous problem exists for certain kinds of expensive products with the property that they usually work well, but sometimes become flaky. Think a washing machine. Who posts a review about their washing machine four years post-date that it's still going strong? And absence of base rate information makes absolute numbers of bad reviews mostly meaningless.
>>expensive products with the property that they usually work well, but sometimes become flaky. Think a washing machine.
that is a different problem, consumerism killed that. There used to be several media companies that focused on long term durability of "durable goods" like washing machines and such
But today most people buy new appliances not when they fail but when they need to upgrade to the latest technology, or because new government regulations makes them unfeasible to use / service, or because the Calendar function on their smart fridge does not work with google cloud anymore (true story), etc...
That may be true for a lot of folks, but that's not the only issue.
From my experience, the biggest issue is that a lot of the appliances and other gadgets we have these days are very complex. You have to be an electrical engineers, software engineer and a mechanical engineer, or a big service company that employs all three, to be able to fix anything.
Additionally it's sometimes really difficult to find service manuals for a lot of these things. If your doodat is flashing error code E-71-X1-C and the user manual you have just says "call for service", what are you going to do about it? You typically need pretty serious google-fu magic to find enough information to start figuring out what's wrong.
When my dryer broke several years ago I think I found the proper service manual for it on a site that looked exactly like a SEO spam site and seriously sketchy. Downloading the PDF I was praying my anti-virus application was up-to-date.
This is true. I have no clue how to check the expertise of my dentist, apart from using my own mental bullshit detector (of limited use here) and reading reviews by others (also of questionable use, because who reviews their dentist? And where?).
The analogous problem exists for certain kinds of expensive products with the property that they usually work well, but sometimes become flaky. Think a washing machine. Who posts a review about their washing machine four years post-date that it's still going strong? And absence of base rate information makes absolute numbers of bad reviews mostly meaningless.