Belief vs. rationality, excellence or "Improvement of products, impetus from/by reviews and individuals"

Why do people continue to buy Supernova lights? (or other manufacturers that do not behave properly) They do this even though the products do not perform anything like the manufacturer's claims and they continue to lie in 2013 as they did in 2010. First it was about the light output that their lights supposedly produced. Along with that one of the guys from that firm making denigrating remarks about the Philips LBL which was suposedly "not bad at all, close to the Airstream" when in reality the LBL hammers the Airstream then as it does now with the latest version of the Airstream. They kept the bogus lightoutput values on their site up to 2013 despite the results from my challenge to them to let their lamps be measured. Supernova was in a tight spot in 2010 and whatever they did would be a problem (see my review of the E3-pro for more on this). My challenge showed that I was right and the lightoutput of the Airstream is way lower than the LBL and nowhere close to the claimed values. But they didn't change the lumen claims on the website. However, I predicted that within 2 years proper measurement would be the norm and they would have to follow suit. I was right about that, and in 2013 they lowered the claimed lumen values. But to explain this, instead of admitting their mistake, their argument of why they reduced those claimed values was that the manufacturer now measures differently, which is not true. See my main lighting page, section on other headlamps that might be interesting for the full story on the latest claims by Supernova. Don't people mind being lied to?

Why do people get annoyed (angry even!) when I say the SON28 is not worth it and not the best dynamo?

The answer to all these questions is: Belief.

People have beliefs, they want to believe (think back to the poster Mulder has on the wall of his workspace on 'X-files'...).

They want to believe that they have bought the best dynamo or headlamp. They like the looks of it, the claimed performance and then decide 'this is what I want'.

So why is Supernova not bust? Because people want to believe, and the reason they have or get the belief that such a lamp is the best for them, is the desire to believe, which makes the (correct) view of the high build quality of the housing extend to the whole lamp (which is incorrect).

Most people have such beliefs and most people can be influenced by advertising. I am virtually immune, in any area, to advertising so I notice these things. I always check specifications, reviews, and try to find out for myself, estimating the things I do not have good data on, how good something I want to buy is. This is the way I used to select what I wanted to buy in my youth already. I didn't get persuaded by advertisements, but I wanted to buy something because of the qualities that I could make out.

Sometimes that didn't work, and it still can be a problem, because the reviews and information from other sources such as magazines or these days forums, is often incomplete, too incomplete to choose what's best for me, and in the case of in particular bicycle lighting and leather saddles, this is exactly what my site is about, to give enough information.

Someone on a German forum in 2010 mentioned, and it was meant in a friendly way (you don't see that often), that my reviews were possibly biased toward the Philips lamps because they are Dutch. Well, I said then: no, and I don't even consider the Philips lamps Dutch: They are German designed, China-made, for a Dutch company, so it's German first, Chinese second, Dutch third...

Some people have this 'belief', that German products are the best, or Western European products are the best, and that Chinese products are rubbish. I don't have such beliefs, lots of Chinese products are excellent. Many high quality products such as top cameras are made in China so saying what's made in China is bad, is just stupid. There a lot of crappy products made in Western Europe too. If I find that a chinese headlamp is better than any W.European lamp, I will say so. Though I do have concerns about offshoring all production to China, but that's something completely different and that's a bigger question for societies as a whole.

My beliefs are examined all the time, and you can see this when reading this website, which is in a sense a journal of discovery, though a lot I knew beforehand as "it should be this way". You can see this from the points I gave in 2007 of what would constitute proper headlamp reviews. This has been proved absolutely correct even though I had not done any reviews yet, as my reviews started with the Edelux in 2008. The later specifications of what's needed in reviews after buying an Edelux were a bit expanded but again showed to be absolutely correct in the following years.

When I bought a wheel with SON28 dynamohub, but I didn't make myself believe that I had indeed bought the best dynamohub (which was the prevalent opinion and from reviews this is what I could make out was correct, but I missed out on finding a few dissenting voices about vibrations this hub causes that you can feel in the handlebar, and missing those comments made me make the wrong choice of which dynohub to buy). Instead of making myself believe that vibrations are to be ignored, I bought another dynamohub (Shimano DH-3N80) which was much more pleasant to use.

Now let's examine how businesses work: They make something that they can make a lot of money with, the more money the better. Very rarely are businesses inclined to strive for excellence in their products. Apart from excellence in trying to do better in reviews, and thus in sales. The real excellence they are striving for, is thus in sales, in whichever way. A product that's good enough to be the highest seller makes a company disinterested in improvements unless they have plenty of capital and consider improvement projects "why not, we don't need to but in case the competition comes up with something really good, this might be an insurance against that".

If businesses were truly interested in excellence, they would probably make less money. And in a business sense a company like Supernova seems to be very successful, but this is because of advertising and because people 'want to believe'. This company markets a 'view of excellence' which most people who can afford to spend the money that these lamps cost, want to believe. Such people are in essence looking for a Rolex as a headlamp: Not better than any cheapo digital watch, but a status symbol (if not to impress others, then for themselves to make themself feel good).

Other manufacturers: B&M make products that are sometimes good, sometimes bad, but they hog the OEM market it seems, with the gazillion product versions and good prices for some lamps, which makes these interesting for OEMs. They thus have a different strategy, that also doesn't involve making stuff up, which Supernova feels the need to do, after all, they must convince customers that their lamps are truly Rolexes and not Casio watches in an overpriced shell. But B&M made a pretty big faux pas with the Luxos, saying customers were at fault for problems with the Luxos' loose cable. No they weren't at fault, the electronics was way too sensitive to leak currents which I documented which shows they didn't do proper testing. And the concept of using a 3.5mm plug in a headlamp is just plain stupid. Their behaviour here also gives me the itch to give them a virtual kick in the ass...

Then we have some of the 'Dutch' makers of lighting such as Spanninga and Axa/Basta. What is Dutch? that the entire company must be in Dutch hands? Products developed in NL? Developers must be Dutch so no German designer working in NL for example? From the information I have probably all their products are designed partially or for the most part in Taiwan or China, e.g. the optics. In any event, most of their products I consider poor. And most of their products are poor. If not 'insufficient' as the headlamps often are, then 'downright antisocial' as taillamps with point light sources are... But then just about all manufacturers do this...

Some people on the forums recognize that even though they bought a Supernova and though it performs well, it's not performing as they claim... It is refreshing to see such an attitude, as I recently (Dec. 2013) saw on the IBC forums. But I also see stupidity that shows people don't understand what objectivity means (measurements are not needed, measurements are not a review and only give additional information) and in general there is a lot of resistance to accepting reality...

This page is not meant to justify my website, nor my views, my tests or anything, no, my reviews and analyses are justified by themselves. This page, as the page about objectivity, is about human behaviour, and I write about it here because it's interesting and I want to share my findings. And analysis of human behaviour explains why there are no changes, or only very slowly, not just in bicycle lighting but in any field, be it politics or pollution. Everywhere you see the same: People who just lie to help their business or any other endeavour (example: "there is no problem with pollution" as some nutters have claimed for years about climate change, using extremely stupid arguments to justify their claim).

On this page I wanted to explain behaviour of people and businesses, and until that changes, until reviews in magazines are better (coming out on top in a magazine review is still considered something to be advertised with), or until customers ask everywhere why headlamps and taillamps are often so bad, and until people stop buying products from companies that don't behave properly, nothing will change except directly by competition and that usually means change will only come when a manufacturer is forced to make a better product than the competition (so as to get more sales), possibly in some area that the other manufacturer didn't do in case they can't compete on other feautures.. And thus we get small steps in product improvements, each improvement possibly in a different area, which means that for example the 'perfect' headlamp is still a long way away. This is in particular so because the top headlamps (and taillamps) are a niche market. The real value is in getting manufacturers of bicycles to use lamps on their bicycles which generates not thousands but hundreds of thousands of sales. And most sales of bicycles are in the low to mid end of the market which means prices must be low, so the top headlamps are not used there...

Last modified: Sat Jan 25 15:42:40 CET 2014