Thread: Help with choosing a finishing stone

Originally Posted by PonderingTurtle

Percieved performance.

The point about the cost is not that what someone paid for it effects their experiance, it is what someone believes about the quality of something will effect their experiance of that quality.

Yes, that is a phenomenon that occurs, but you are claiming it occurs all the time, which is false.

If you're point were true, I would be incapable of saying that some unidentifiable stone (probably Japanese but no guarantees) that I got from an junk dealer in Hawaii out performs all of the the Eschers that I own because there is no way to know it's properties before using it. I didn't pay enough for it to warrant being boasted about, it is almost unusably small, shows no indication of being anything special or rare, and is, in general, a mystery stone (of which I have many, this one is not unique or special on that regard, either). But you know what, it does outperform the Eschers, plain and simple (and I'll still make that claim even though it's unfeasable to be used with any regularity, in fact I'm disappointed that it's such a nice stone).

Your analogy to wine prices/satisfaction does not specify whether the people in the tests were seasoned wine tasters, my guess is that they are not (most tests like that seek out "average individuals" explicitly). So to say that a seasoned wine taster will show the same results as an average individual is the fallacy of weak analogy in that the wine taster is more likely to base his judgement on the actual properties of the wine, in comparison to his (extensive) past experiences than any random person would be.

Just because the average person can't do it, doesn't mean that nobody else can.