You said that inter vs. intra brand survivorship bias didn’t matter. I think it does, since the former likely has a much bigger effect (models from premium brands generally last longer overall due to higher reliability, whereas random units from cheaper brands last longer due to pure chance).
>...anything.
>If you crank the standards for "solid" high enough, you can make literally anything become unknowable.
This is arguing in bad faith. There is a high level of evidence required to support the extraordinary claim that modern appliances are generally less reliable than old appliances, after controlling for price point. I believe a reasonable amount of evidence to support this claim would require unbiased sampling of a statistically significant number of appliance service records over the years. Otherwise, we’re just idly conjecturing.
That said, I take back my claim that the requisite evidence is unobtainable. We unequivocally know that cars have gotten much more reliable over the years, based on purchase frequency and service records (remember, cars’ odometers used to top out at 99999 miles because they weren’t expected to last longer). There is no reason we couldn’t do similar surveys with appliances.
>Is the corollary that we have no way of detecting planned obsolescence?
No, the corollary is that it would be equally difficult to infer if planned obsolescence has gotten more frequent over the years. That’s very different from being unable to detect planned obsolescence at all. It’s easy to inspect a particular appliance (or line of appliances) and find evidence of premature failure points, as the linked article nicely did.
You said that inter vs. intra brand survivorship bias didn’t matter. I think it does, since the former likely has a much bigger effect (models from premium brands generally last longer overall due to higher reliability, whereas random units from cheaper brands last longer due to pure chance).
>...anything.
>If you crank the standards for "solid" high enough, you can make literally anything become unknowable.
This is arguing in bad faith. There is a high level of evidence required to support the extraordinary claim that modern appliances are generally less reliable than old appliances, after controlling for price point. I believe a reasonable amount of evidence to support this claim would require unbiased sampling of a statistically significant number of appliance service records over the years. Otherwise, we’re just idly conjecturing.
That said, I take back my claim that the requisite evidence is unobtainable. We unequivocally know that cars have gotten much more reliable over the years, based on purchase frequency and service records (remember, cars’ odometers used to top out at 99999 miles because they weren’t expected to last longer). There is no reason we couldn’t do similar surveys with appliances.
>Is the corollary that we have no way of detecting planned obsolescence?
No, the corollary is that it would be equally difficult to infer if planned obsolescence has gotten more frequent over the years. That’s very different from being unable to detect planned obsolescence at all. It’s easy to inspect a particular appliance (or line of appliances) and find evidence of premature failure points, as the linked article nicely did.