I have posted about the anti-Vista bias before. Now, there’s nothing wrong with not liking a product- but the strange thing is that Vista loathing seems to be strongest among those who have never used the software (or barely used it). The latest example is my officemate who bought a new laptop the other day that came pre-loaded with Windows Vista Home Basic. He immediately proceeded to delete the incumbent operating system and install XP (though after grudgingly acknowledging that Vista “does look good”). Since then he has been struggling to download the drivers necessary for the downgrade, going through so much pain just so he can get back to warm fuzzy XP. He is almost done now; Vista is completely gone, XP is back, his system works fine except it still shows an unknown device for which the driver is missing (and he doesn’t know what device that is). I am sure he will figure it out by tomorrow. And the total amount of time he spent on Vista was about three minutes.
Bias is an unfortunate and immensely complex thing, affected as it is by so many externalities, but it is always funny to see it in action.
Abhishek, bias is a truly very complex.
Rationality is not a science, it’s an art. It’s a way of trying to make the brain which was never designed (by natural selection) to be particularly rational, try and see things in the world using Bayesian probabilities.
I love Eliezer Yudkowsky’s thoughts from http://www.overcomingbias.com/
Anonymous, thanks for the link.
[...] 2, 2008 by Abhishek In this post on anti-Windows-Vista-bias, I wrote Now, there’s nothing wrong with not liking a product- but [...]