I can immediately hear the objections to my thesis from the previous article.
What if closer scrutiny would reveal a serious problem with one of the choices? Well, if that were likely, people wouldn’t be bickering back and forth. It would be obvious that one choice is flawed, dangerous or whatever, and everybody would avoid it. But if it’s one of the most frequently bought options, and the most serious concerns with it are in the order of “I’m not sure I like the sound better than the other one”, be assured you’re not going to die from the consequences of a wrong choice.
But what if you are? I mean, going to die from the consequences? What if it’s actually serious, like choosing inadequate climbing equipment, or even worse, choosing inadequate mountaineering guides who get you killed? I don’t think the equation changes. If there are red flags, warnings, bad feeling about something, then by all means, heed those. If there’s no reason to assume something is wrong either way, then you simply don’t have enough information to make a choice, and the safest choice would probably be to do nothing until you are actually knowledgeable enough to be able to tell the difference between safe and dangerous. The choice, in this case, is to become more informed, because the current choice, where you can’t tell the difference, and the cost of choosing wrong is high, is a trap. It’s a situation you don’t want to be in.
So, we are introducing another element: experience, and how to attain it. The general advice would be to attain experience by doing something that has very small cost of choosing wrong, but allows you the opportunity of trial and error. An example of this is when you are a new driver, and you need to choose a car, but you don’t know anything about cars, except that they cost lots of money, and you’re not sure what you should buy, because you don’t want to either waste money or choose a car that’s bad for you.
My advice would be to choose the most common model in the price range you can afford, and then try it and see if there’s anything wrong with it that you can immediately notice. If there is, your experimentation already yielded a datapoint for you, so you’re no longer at the starting position where you don’t know anything. At some point, you need to pick an option based on imperfect knowledge, and just gain more experience, and that will allow you to make a more informed choice.
It’s common for total beginners to be unreasonable with their demands, because they don’t know what they’re doing. For instance, they want a car that can do anything, because they have no idea about what they are going to use it for, and they don’t want to reduce their options. It’s the same with photography – the total beginners want a camera/lens that can do “everything”, and they end up putting a 14-500mm f/1.4 lens on their wish list, because who knows what they’ll end up taking pictures of. The experienced photographers, on the other hand, will know what they are doing and how it’s done, and their choices will be much more narrowed down – for instance, between a 50mm and a 35mm lens for street photography. So, basically, experience with doing a thing gives you enough knowledge to make more informed choices, which, on the other hand, means that you by definition have to make initial choices based on insufficient experience, and gather experience from errors. But if those errors are expensive, it might be a bad idea to make them at all; it means you’re probably going in over your head too quickly and you should revise your approach. For instance, if you think about taking up mountaineering, trying Mt. Everest or K2 as your first ascent is definitely a bad idea and you’re likely to be killed. Try something easy, and with an expert guide. Then, as you know more, increase difficulty. I’ve seen all sorts of cases where people get killed by going cave diving or climbing mountains when their experience level is insufficient for the task, and honestly, insufficient for assessing what the problems will be.
So, understand that my previous article relates to the simple choices where the worst outcome is a waste of time and energy spent in considering it. For instance, if you choose a laptop that’s not ideal for you, what’s going to be the cost of that decision? You’ll have a laptop that’s too big, too small, too slow or looks like a toy. The price of that choice is very small, and you can afford to make mistakes in order to learn. Buy based on what you know, because wasting time reading other people’s opinions without any experience isn’t going to help at that point. You need to buy something and live with it for a while. If it’s good, great. if it’s not good, it will slightly suck but you’re not going to die. It’s not like choosing a shitty car that’s going to get you killed, or choosing to go SCUBA diving in a cave. If you’re choosing headphones, the worst outcome is going to be that they will have an inferior sound, or break too easily. It’s not like you’re going hitchhiking in some wasteland and end up with your throat slit and in a ditch. So, if the cost of choosing wrong is small, treat it as a learning opportunity – if you choose wrong, based on that experience the next time you’ll know better. If, however, the cost of choosing wrong is high, you are probably pushing yourself into something too soon, and you need to learn more gradually in order to avoid really serious consequences.
Also, sometimes choices make themselves, and the way you frame the dilemma is indicative. For instance, if your question is “why would I waste all that money on a camera when a smartphone takes great pictures”, the answer is to stick to the smartphone, because if you don’t see why you should buy a system camera, you likely shouldn’t. If you know exactly what a system camera will do for you, and the question is between Canon, Nikon and Sony, the choice also makes itself – you know enough to narrow down your choice, and whichever of the three you end up choosing, it will likely be fine, and if not, you will get more experience to be able to tell why something else would be better, as a future choice.
It’s similar with other matters – if you don’t know which of the five good looking girls is right for you, the answer is that you need to find out more. Maybe none of them, and maybe the answer will become obvious when you talk to them. In any case, there’s only so much you can do at a certain level of experience, and you need to change it.
The problem remains the same with the most serious issues, like religion. If your question is why even bother with religion when there’s so many interesting things in the world, the question itself already defines what your answer is going to be. On the other hand, if the question is why waste time with the worldly things when they are ephemeral and illusory and God is the only thing that matters, the question already implies the answer.
Choice paralysis indicates that either you don’t have enough information to make the right choice, or that there isn’t a right choice to make, for instance between hazelnut and chocolate ice cream. In essence, if you don’t know which one you’d like, pick any, and the next time pick the other one. Sometimes you just have to make mistakes, and sometimes you need to make the costly ones, but agonizing over choice when you obviously don’t have any rational or experiential basis for making it doesn’t in itself improve your position.
There is another issue because of which I tend to agonise when choosing something even if the cost is seemingly small, but turns into annoyance, eventually discarding a thing and wasting a lot of money.
It's purposeful dilution of quality information in today's online world.
It is becoming extremely hard to push through pure marketing and propaganda and find actual issues with specific thing and even comments and ratings does not help because people tend to minimise issues after they spend money and want to convince themselves that choice was correct one and not wasted money.
I had several such examples where I went online, do a quick survey, determine price range and simply picked one of the options, only to find out some crucial annoyance later on and then when you ask about it, people actually confirm but did not report on it.
My latest purchase was also interesting one – I wanted to get more into making better coffee only to realise coffee industry is something like Hi-Fi industry selling gold-plated power cables for 15.000$.
Ok, I cut through the bullshit, asked a friend who has espresso machine and made a decision and ordered locally available machine with good support and also asked a guy to recommend a coffee to start with, so he did and also sent me couple of "how to start" videos.
I followed his videos and also many others where everyone is using scales and rituals to make a process as consistent as possible – except, coffee was absolutely awful. I followed everything to a letter, ordered additional tools recommended online trying to eliminate any possible mistakes, but espresso was constantly in range from awful to very awful.
So, I contacted the guy who sold me the machine and asked – what the fuck?!
He responded: Oh, well … I make Instagram videos following espresso "religion" so that people don't shit on me telling me this isn't real espresso, but I don't actually like it, when I drink, I do it completely different which is not considered proper espresso in coffee lunatic asylum 🙂
So, I tried non-espresso way (in "religious" terms) and result was much better, but still I did not like it and called him again and he says – well, it's probably you don't like dark roasted coffee, but it's considered best which is why I offered it as "beginner" coffee.
I did not agonise too much when ordering, but lack of experience resulted in lots of agony after purchase – and not because I ordered wrong machine (I did not), but because internet is so full of bullshit about everything that it became impossible to make any informed decision just about anything.
Another example, night vision ocular attachment. I did not agonise a lot, ordered it because everyone did, only to find out I can get either sharp image or sharp reticle, but not both.
Asked in store and online – well, that is normal, you can't get both.
How the fuck is that normal?!
I did my own research and realised you actually need day scope with parallax setting (basically manual focusing ring) and then you can use parallax to sharpen the image and night vision attachment to focus the reticle – I wrote articles about it and preached like maniac and then after two years sales people started asking customers if they have parallax setting on their day scope …
It was a trivial thing, but everyone seem to just accepted that you can either get sharp image or sharp reticle, but not both and in practice you have to go little blurry on both since on perfectly sharp image reticle is so blurred that you can barely see it.
Anyway, people lie, pretend, rationalise their choices especially bad ones which resulted in lots of falsely-informed agony 🙂
Pro tip: Meinl Praesident, Jura coffee machine. 🙂
I already got Gaggia Classic Up with MDF55 grinder, but I will try Meinl President. I just ordered three different flavours from https://shop.quahwa.hr , I am trying to figure out what I like the most from espresso and learn what matters in brewing and what is snake oil.
We are almost exclusively making cappuccino. Espresso is too concentrated, but there's a "coffee" mode which works great with Ledo frozen cream.
Dark roast coffee is terrible crud; we prefer it on the light side of medium. Also, we reduced the amount of coffee used from factory settings, because it was way too much; also, switching from instant to this was a caffeine overload.
Agree, dark roast is waay too much – it only works as cappuccino and only with light extraction.
I honestly can't imagine who truly enjoys that taste – I am almost certain vast majority of people simply pretend "to be cool" or whatever shit.
I was (still am) on Turkish coffee for a long time (interestingly, same coffee I hate in espresso is actually quite tasty as Turkish coffee with freshly grinded beans) and this espresso journey started rather recently after I tried fresh coffee from Vietnam (long story short, step daughter was there and met a tourist guide with coffee farm, so … 🙂 ).
I gifted one pack to a friend who loves coffee and already had espresso machine – so we tried it.
And it was brilliant. It was waaaay beyond anything I ever tried, anywhere. Very nice smelling fruit and a bit of sweetness in taste, but rich and very enjoyable taste. So I went down the espresso rabbit hole 🙂
First I started brewing some random coffee to figure out important stuff – I am still in the process and then I intend to brew remaining coffee from Vietnam farm.
After that, my goal is to find most similar coffee available here.
It took us a while to find the kind of coffee that we like, so it's going to be a thing. But why not just order more from that guy in Vietnam, if his coffee is great and you have a contact? Sounds like the best idea.
Because I need to hire a lawyer to figure out how to do that without ending in prison 🙂
Well, Biljana did a little research.
If the coffee is roasted, you can import it just fine if you have an invoice and there's a special tax on coffee, but other than that it's normal procedure. It would help if it's packaged in normal retail packaging but I don't think it's a prerequisite.
If it's green coffee, that's a complete mess but I have a solution for that, too. Find one of the small private coffee roasters like the one you already bought coffee from, create a contact and ask them to buy coffe from that source and roast it for you. Then they add their markup and sell it to you in retail, and additionally they have another good source of coffee.
Yeah, I spent some time with ChatGPT on this and reached same conclusion. Beans are roasted and packaged in retail aluminium bags, so it's best option and I could probably get an invoice.
However, delivery cost + tariffs + VAT … rough calculation is around 100$ as cheapest option (and slowest, around 2-3 weeks delivery time) for 2kg coffee plus coffee price itself.
Fedex is 200$+ for delivery only and delivery goes into VAT as well.
And it does not make sense to order much more than that as coffee will just go stale since it's roasted.
I need to find people who like this coffee and share delivery cost which would also warrant a bit larger order.
Or just try and find something similar available here.
There's another simple solution that might work. Take a sample of that vietnamese coffee to that small roaster, tell them your problem and ask whether they have something similar. They are experts in coffee and if anyone will know, it's them. Best case, they have something and it solves your problem in a simple way.
Do you maybe know someone good or had experience with any of them?
Nor really; we buy either online, or in the local DM store; their "cafe crema" is very good.