Path: news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: Radey Shouman <shouman@comcast.net>
Newsgroups: rec.bicycles.tech
Subject: Re: Patching TPU innertube
Date: Fri, 03 Jan 2025 03:09:38 +0000
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Frank Krygowski <frkrygow@sbcglobal.net> writes:

> On 1/1/2025 7:49 PM, Radey Shouman wrote:
>> Frank Krygowski <frkrygow@sbcglobal.net> writes:
>> 
>>> On 1/1/2025 6:30 PM, Radey Shouman wrote:
>>>> Frank Krygowski <frkrygow@sbcglobal.net> writes:
>>>>
>>>>> On 12/31/2024 6:25 AM, Catrike Rider wrote:
>>>>>> On Tue, 31 Dec 2024 17:54:03 +0700, John B. <slocombjb@gmail.com>
>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I read Frankie's violins. If I remember the test correct it was
>>>>>>> carried out in a hotel room and the test players got to play each
>>>>>>> instrument for something like 1 minute.
>>>>>
>>>>> Perhaps you should read more than one article before wading into a
>>>>> discussion you know nothing about.
>>>> I have no opinion on whether violin players can tell the difference
>>>> between Strads and modern violins.  It's not important to my point,
>>>> which is that *someone* can tell the difference, even if it requires an
>>>> electron microscope.  That is all that is required to explain the
>>>> difference in price.  Even if the preference is completely unrelated to
>>>> the sound actually produced by the violins.
>>>> A preference for old violins based completely on history and emotion
>>>> may
>>>> be a problem for you, but it makes perfect sense to economists.  The
>>>> multi-million dollar price seems to be the biggest issue for you; I'm
>>>> not sure why.
>>>
>>> It's not an issue for me, and I didn't say it was. I'll never attempt
>>> to buy a Strad, and I'll never expect to get millions if I sell one of
>>> my fiddles.
>>>
>>> But since this is Usenet, so you can read back to see the flow of the
>>> thread. We got into this kerfuffle from Roger's statement that "feel"
>>> of a tire can be important, apart from rolling resistance.
>> I did read the thread.
>> 
>>> I expressed some skepticism, saying "Given what I've read about
>>> violins (Stradivarius can't be told from modern ones in blind hearing
>>> tests) and wines (cheap wines really light up pleasure centers in the
>>> brain if tasters are told the wine is expensive), I'm somewhat
>>> skeptical of a lot of "feel" judgements regarding bike tires - and
>>> bikes."
>> The issue you introduced with violins and wines is price. Not much
>> was
>> made of price differences with bike tires, although if you can't tell
>> the difference cheaper is always better.  Paying large amounts for
>> something that may not be objectively better certainly seemed to bother
>> you.  If that's not really the case then perhaps you should review your
>> communication style.
>
> OK, I'll try again - not that I'm hopeful.
>
> I mentioned price because in our society, it's common to assign a
> higher price to things that are reputed to be better. Price is thus
> considered a signifier of higher quality.

Prices in our society, insofar as it functions, are negotiated, not
assigned.  Sometimes just by large numbers of people deciding to buy or
not, but still.

> What characteristic of a violin is thought to be signified by a high
> price? Its sound. More expensive violins are expected to sound better,
> and much more expensive violins are expected to sound much better.
>
> What characteristic of a wine is thought to be signified by a high
> price? Its flavor. More expensive wines are expected to taste better,
> and much more expensive wines are expected to taste much better.
>
> But do super expensive violins sound better? Do super expensive wines
> taste better? It's not obvious! Sound and taste are not directly
> measurable. They are "soft" properties, entirely subject to the
> judgment of the observer. So can observers _really_ tell "better" from
> "worse" in a way that corresponds to price?
>
> Nope. With violins, it's been shown dozens of times by careful tests
> that listeners do not consistently rank the sound of Strads far better
> than violins costing one five hundredth as much. In careful blind
> tests, wines have gotten similar results.

That's fairly clear, but it reads like a burlesque of the engineering
mentality.  Reminds me a bit of a guy with whom I shared an apartment
while in grad school.  His position was that food should never cost more
than $0.79 per pound, that being the price of a whole chicken at the
grocery store.  A few years after he got his degree and went back to
France (of all places) I heard that he had committed suicide.  Still
makes me sad sometimes.

Suppose I apply your logic to paintings, which are expected to look nice
hanging on a wall.  I might have a painting that looks very much like
one done by Jan Vermeer -- similar perspective, colors, composition,
brushstrokes.  It might be difficult for anyone to tell that it was not
actually painted by Vermeer.  Alas, were that to be discovered the price
would collapse.

Perhaps if it turned out to be a genuine fake Van Meegeren it might have
enough historical weight to be worth at least something:

https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/best-vermeers-forger-and-his-fakes/

Is this rational?  I don't know, but that is how the market works.

A violin, particularly one more that three centuries old, is not just a
practical means of making sounds.  It is a historical artifact and a
work of art.  That it plays about as well as the best modern instruments
is remarkable.  If you don't value these things, (and there is no reason
you should), then you're just not part of the market.  A few hundred
examples is a tiny number when one Chinese city supposedly produces more
than one million violins every year.  Really high quality modern violins
seem to go for hundreds of thousands of dollars, so millions for a
Stradivarius doesn't seem absurd.

Wine is another example where the really expensive bottles really are
quite rare -- every vintage year in every vinyard is different, and
every year of aging makes a difference as well.  Can most people taste
the difference between an excellent bottle and a really valuable one?
Likely not, but most people are again just not part of that market.

There is a more quotidian example of big differences in wine pricing,
though, and that is buying a bottle of wine in a nice restaurant.
Likely you will play three or four times what you would in a store, but
people do that every day.  They like to drink their wine with good food,
in a celebratory atmosphere, and maybe even show off.  Is it rational,
when they could buy better tasting wine for less and stay home drinking
it out of dixie cups in their underwear?  Once again, I don't know.

I agree that it's hard to compare bicycle components by feel, especially
when relying on memory, but I don't think that violins or wine are close
to being analogous.  No one trains his butt to feel the subtle
difference in bike ride the way wine tasters develop their senses, or
pays as much attention to the exact sensory experience of road vibration
as musicians do to the sound of music.

> I think the same likely applies to the "feel" of bicycle bits, at
> least among close competitors. Many of us have been around here long
> enough to remember the blind test results of several bike frames made
> from different grades of steel tubing, back in those days of
> steel. Road test "experts" couldn't agree on what "felt" best, and
> often ranked the cheapest as the best riding. I suspect the same would
> be found for the "feel" of roughly similar tires.

Surely part of the trouble here is that the most expensive wasn't
supposed to be the most pleasant to ride, it was supposed to be
the fastest.  That also may not have been true, but at least it's closer
to being measurable.

> In a sense, on this particular issue I'm agreeing with Mr. Tricycle,
> who claims over and over that almost _everything_ is subjective.
>
> But again, I'm not hopeful that he or you or John will agree with me
> regarding judgments of "feel." The default posture of you three is
> that I'm wrong no matter what I say. You won't let yourself admit
> anything else.

--