I’m new to car ownership and I wrestled my bike into the back of my low-roofed saloon car to cycle back. I didn’t really buy the car with cycling in mind but it beat paying them £25 for a courtesy car (I expected not to have to pay for that is this was to fix a recall issue)

Shh!

I got a chef’s knife as a gift. I was a bit put out that came from Wilko (a very budget brand) and it turned out to be absolutely excellent. I think it won’t have cost any more than £20. I am astounded that anyone apart from professionals pays more than £100 for a knife, never mind the even more insane prices you can pay

I have come to like more pop music over time too. What I found though is that I don’t tend to attach much to music unless it has something unique to it, so have found myself going for bands like Pixie Paris which is very poppy but still a bit different.

I’ve heard this, but I’d like to know what I’ve been eating over time. I never hated sprouts - I had them boiled (briefly!) as a kid in the 90s, when I guess this variety hadn’t yet proliferated? I like sprouts more now but have always attributed this to cooking them differently - fried or roasted, but occasionally simmered in a curry.

Yep, it’s a big problem in audio and other subjective areas, because you have no way of knowing what the anonymous reviewer’s point of reference is, and most professional reviewers’ reference points are not suitable. It’s worse too, because purchaser-reviewers self-select into their category, so you expect most people to be satisfied with the subjective aspects of a product they’ve purchased, even though most people would not be satisfied with a random cheap product. This is all not helped by the fact that, in audio when differences are so minute, virtually no-one is conducting blind reviews so confirmation bias probably accounts for huge amounts of the final score. Sure, any professional reviewer is going to be able to identify a bum product that costs thousands, but I bet most of them will rate an identical product more highly if they’re told it costs 10x as much and comes from a fancier brand.

I’ve ended up crowdsourcing my recommendations from places like reddit where people tend to make tiered recommendation lists so you at least know they have the goal of producing the best products at each price level.