More important than “same”, you don’t want any weird shit going on.
I travel 300 days a year work for and stay in hotel apartments, and I still miss the Hyatt I stayed in Manchester in 2021… last place I stayed that had gotten everything right.
I think on average, outside perspectives are less well-informed than inside ones. It's a decent first-pass filter for quality, despite its inaccuracy.
I see this frequently as an engineer: my pet peeve is the "can't we just..." from someone who has no idea how the system works. Occasionally they're correct that we could make a trivial change to make something work... But most times, that "just" is hand-waving away days/weeks of effort. On the other hand, when "can't we just ..." is uttered by someone else on the same team, they're usually correct that the change is indeed trivial.
In this case, "outside" vs "inside" is actually a good proxy for how informed or accurate the opinion actually is.
Another good example is the stereotypical "expert in a field who thinks their expertise trivially transfers to unrelated fields".
To put it more simply: the distinction exists because outsiders are very frequently blind to the internal complexity of something (a system, an idea, etc), but are still willing to confidently assert their ideas anyway, leading to a frequent association of "outsider" with "poorly-formed opinions".
People used to study the items they were buying, not look at the brand.
You (probably) live in a hyper capitalistic society where many corporations promote their brands through lies and deception. That is a very strong filter already - avoid the (mostly American) transnational giant corporations and buy from companies that are mostly local and aren’t hyperscaling.
Sure the mainstream brands are shit but there are dozens, hundreds of brands for a fair price point that aren’t for every shitty corporation.
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