Hello.
In the Telegram channel, he published two pictures in portrait mode, they show a sculpture of a clown on Tsvetnoy Boulevard.
Look at these pictures carefully.
I admit honestly, it was pure water manipulation, since in front of you is the same picture. This is the same photograph, the difference is only in a slightly changed scale and the numbered ones – one and two. There was no processing, everything is the same.
I am very glad that our readers, though not all of them, said that there is no difference, the picture is the same. I will try to give a few comments that characterize the choice well.
“The photos are almost identical. I like the second one better. I will assume that Eldar is practicing with the 13th and 14th iPhones. Like, there is no difference, innovation is zero, Apple is EVERYTHING … .. but Samsung obviously worked with cameras on fold4 and the difference is HUGE.
“By and large, I didn’t see the difference, but on the second one, the object is a little better isolated from the background (it seems more voluminous), if you look closely.”
“In general, there is no difference, upon closer examination – rather the second.”
“There is no difference, but for some reason I like the 2nd one more.”
“FR on the second is less. DD on the second is larger, respectively, it looks more contrasting. The second one is more interesting.
I would like to illustrate with an example how information noise arises when people “see” a difference, including where it does not exist and cannot exist. Any choice dictates to people that subject A and subject B are different. In fact, they may be the same, but the very posing of the question makes you look for and find this difference. Which in practice is not and cannot be! We are biased, and this is a common property of a living person. Let me share with you one experiment that perfectly characterizes a person’s choice and his assessment of “objective” characteristics.
A small group of subjects, in front of them is a box in which a smartphone is hidden, you need to evaluate the loudness and purity of the sound of the speaker. Plays several different tunes and songs. The ratings are relative, you just need to rank smartphones – first, second, third and fourth. What smartphone is inside, no one knows. Only four boxes, the scores were distributed as follows.
| Box #1 | Box #2 | Box #3 | Box #4 | |
| Volume | 2 | 1 | 3 | 4 |
| Pure dynamics | 1 | 3 | 4 | 2 |
If you conduct such experiments on different groups of people, then the result will surprise you, it will be chaotic, neighboring places will constantly change, that is, the difference, even if it exists in the real world, is not very noticeable.
With the same people, we carry out the same experience a few days later, only soft pencil inscriptions appear on the boxes – Apple, Samsung, Sony, Avva. Let’s look at what happened to the ratings.
| Box #1 (Samsung) | Box #2 (Avva) | Box #3 (Sony) | Box #4 (Apple) | |
| Volume | 2 | 4 | 3 | 1 |
| Pure dynamics | 2 | 3 | 4 | 1 |
People “know” which brands are better and adjust their ratings to fit their perceptions. When there’s a hint of what’s inside, the estimates change drastically, people “know” that Apple is better at everything. Let’s read the comments about it, box #4, which says Apple:
- bright sound, I want to dance and dance;
- rich bass, which is important to me. This kind of music fills you with energy;
- clear sound, you can hear every note, the volume is perfect.
The same people said the following about box number 2:
- there is no energy, the sound is deaf, the volume is excessive and cuts the ear;
- no bass, no energy;
- The speaker distorts the music, there is not enough volume.
Don’t ask what Avva is, just a made up name. But now the most interesting thing is that there were no different smartphones inside the boxes, there was the same model set to the same volume, with the same set of melodies and songs. Subjective perception changed as people looked for a difference that wasn’t there. Out of more than a dozen people, only one found the strength to say that there is no difference, all boxes sound the same. But he also changed his mind in the second experiment when he saw the names of the companies.
The culmination was that when people were shown the contents of the boxes, many immediately said that they felt the same sound, but they chose, because there should be a choice. Several people have claimed that we somehow switched the devices in the boxes, as they are sure that they heard different sounds, and they trust us less than they trust their feelings.
In blind testing of photographs, you can also manipulate people’s opinions, and there are many ways to do this. You remove EXIF information, give instructions for people to compare each shot independently, rate how much they like it or not. But before one of the comparisons, you mention that the pictures that show a little more yellow are taken on the iPhone (visually, these pictures are worse, that’s how people judged them before). Similar shots with yellowness suddenly get more and more positive ratings, people look for yellow and know how to “correctly” evaluate a photo.
A fan of any brand has built-in distortions of reality, he obviously knows that brand X is better than anything else. And if he is given a hint on how to distinguish this brand in “blind” testing (and he simply does not know this initially), then he will make the “right” choice.
I decided to remember this because we are waiting for the excitement that the new iPhones are head and shoulders above what it was. And the screen in the iPhone 14 is completely different than in its predecessor (which, of course, is not the case, they are the same in everything). Distortions are characteristic of all of us, the question is how much we understand and realize them. I am very glad that our audience can identify the same pictures, which means people can think critically. I am sure that if I did this experiment somewhere else, the result would be very different for the worse.
The amount of information noise exceeds reasonable limits, and each speaker sincerely believes that his opinion is important, unbiased, unlike everyone else. I really liked the comment regarding the Galaxy Fold: “So far, the Fold is like a tube TV. Heavy, thick, without an external screen and this is a huge minus. It’s not worth the money.”
As you can imagine, the person who wrote this has never seen the Fold, let alone held it in their hands. He knows about the “heaviness” in his ideas, he does not remember very well the pictures he saw. A finishing comment in response to the fact that a person has never held a device in his hands: “This is your opinion, and just as unreasonable and erroneous. I’m talking about the line as a whole.”
Apparently, somewhere in the Fold line there was no external screen, or you need to put three or four devices together so that they are inconvenient. In a word, there is some nonsense here, but the most important thing is that this is informational noise with a minus sign about a particular product. If you knew how quickly I learned to ignore such statements. For many years in a row, “users” of this or that product appear, telling terrible horrors about it. From a recent one: “Samsung is impossible to use, ads pop up everywhere in the menu, ads in every application.” The story is understandable, they don’t like the brand, as a result, a person invents some negative things and distributes them wherever he can. Why is a separate question. But in my practice there were many people who convincingly repeated other people’s words, as if they had a problem with the device. And when I offered them help, promised that in one company or another they would fix everything, you just need to write or call, they disappeared completely. They never had a problematic product, they just worried about the company. This is the kind of informational noise that fills the Internet, and often global conclusions are drawn from isolated cases. The network has become like a magnifying glass that can highlight something that is not significant on the scale of large countries, these are isolated cases.
You need to understand that the same informational noise, manipulation attempts are systemic in nature. The sharper the controversy, the more interesting the media and social networks, the greater the involvement of the audience. Reality is sometimes boring, does not give the scale that is needed. One of the founders of the public MDK at the conference admitted that at the beginning of the journey, events were often invented to evoke people’s emotions. There was even regret that today it is no longer so easy to do, since you will have to answer for inventions within the framework of the law, you can get a real term. It is also the history of the formation of the network, where inventions have become reality, and people’s subjective opinions are trying to be turned into reality. On the Internet, everyone can find an opinion to their liking, this is the advantage of the Internet. But how realistic will such an opinion be in relation to the product? Most likely not, but few people care.