People Use Weighted Factors [CF Article]

I generally like / agree with the approach of reviews at TheWireCutter. For example: The 9 Best Laptops for 2022 | Reviews by Wirecutter

I’d guess they’re using weighted factors in the background, either explicitly or implicitly. But at least they seem aware that different factors are important to different people and highlight that in their reviews.

The format and structure for Wirecutter looked reasonable. The actual content (the opinions, reasoning and recommendations) for that laptops page seemed fairly poor to me.

One thing this reminded me of – particularly wrt the sorts of reviews that are helpful and which aren’t – is that it’s completely different to a common way that products are selected/filtered. e.g., on Amazon, PCPartPicker, etc.

for example: here’s the filters from https://pcpartpicker.com/products/cpu/ (PCPartPicker’s “Choose a CPU” page)

There are some obvious binary factors – like CPU socket (it needs to match the motherboard, or the motherboard needs to match your preferred CPU). But the sliders are all built around breakpoints. There’s no weighting going on, just raw filtering.

After that maybe someone applies some non-binary logic – e.g., sorting by price and making intuitive tradeoffs between which combination of {cpu, motherboard, gpu} they’ll buy, but all that is left up to the user. The interface is entirely compatible with MFDMM and yes/no.