Ironically—it’s hard know whether to take your survey results at face value given the complexity of human motivations (if it wasn’t for the meme, would people’s reaction be different?).
If we ran an experiement where there were 2 stalls set up in public (ideally not in SF, thus almost nobody is in on the joke), and each offers free food—one serving the best ice cream available and one serving the bear fat + salt + honey mixture—which do you think will draw longer lines?
(If anyone is persuaded by this post that the bear fat would win and is willing to wager, perhaps we can run it for real!)
What if people are required to try a tiny bit of each before deciding which one they want a full helping of? In that setup I’m still extremely confident the ice cream wins—it would be crazy imo for anyone to update meaningfully due to this survey.
Of course, as we dive more into the nitty gritty of the setup it becomes relevant how the product/stunt is positioned etc. - but the fact that there are all these considerations that need to be made serves to further reinforce the point that it’s hard to predict human preferences!
Ironically—it’s hard know whether to take your survey results at face value given the complexity of human motivations (if it wasn’t for the meme, would people’s reaction be different?).
If we ran an experiement where there were 2 stalls set up in public (ideally not in SF, thus almost nobody is in on the joke), and each offers free food—one serving the best ice cream available and one serving the bear fat + salt + honey mixture—which do you think will draw longer lines?
(If anyone is persuaded by this post that the bear fat would win and is willing to wager, perhaps we can run it for real!)
That would be a different experiment, as it would also be testing whether people would, for example:
Predict from sight/marketing that BFWHAS was tastier than ice cream
Believe that buying BFWHAS would be better for their status
Those factors could go either way, but they’d disrupt a pure test of this part of the alien’s predictions:
I still expect ice cream would win a blind taste test, but I didn’t predict these survey results.
What if people are required to try a tiny bit of each before deciding which one they want a full helping of? In that setup I’m still extremely confident the ice cream wins—it would be crazy imo for anyone to update meaningfully due to this survey.
Of course, as we dive more into the nitty gritty of the setup it becomes relevant how the product/stunt is positioned etc. - but the fact that there are all these considerations that need to be made serves to further reinforce the point that it’s hard to predict human preferences!