Nah. You misunderstood OP about photography. There's a level in photography, as is in many other fields, where it's good enough to be used in print or on the Web without it being a major disaster. Anything beyond that will only speak to professional photographers, and not to all of them at that.
In other words: yes, there's a bar you need to pass, but it's low. Anything beyond that is not accessible to the general public, it will never know the difference. There are very few areas of expertise where anyone can easily measure / understand the quality. In most areas the only way to know is to rely on experts, subconsciousness isn't going to help you there, just like you wouldn't be able to divine the composition of the concrete with which the house was built prior to it possibly collapsing (if the concrete was low quality) without knowing how to use the tools necessary to measure that (subconscious level isn't going to help you here).
Even for professionals, testing for quality is very hard because of how many factors come into play, and how to weight those factors against each other, and often the impossibility or expense associated with testing. It's beyond naive to think that subconsciousness will somehow solve this problem...
I've spent most of my software career in the Medical Devices industry. One point that stands out to me is when a previous employer released an instrument and Marketing focused on its high quality, only to find out that customers (large hospitals and medical labs) didn't care about quality.
Made no sense: it's a medical instrument. Who doesn't care about quality?
Well, digging deeper, they found that the customers simply assumed that by virtue of being FDA approved, pretty much everything had a similar quality level (pro-tip: no!) so us providing them with White Papers attesting to high quality didn't move the needle on their purchase decisions.
Yeah, there's a bar and often it's much lower than you think it is.
> pretty much everything had a similar quality level (pro-tip: no!)
But presumably they all had adequate quality level. As in they all met strict requirements.
> so us providing them with White Papers attesting to high quality didn't move the needle on their purchase decisions.
This is not that surprising to me. How does quality translate to profit is always the question. Sometimes there is a direct relationship (better quality requires less maintenance, or the number of adverse events is lover) but sometimes it doesn't.
Imagine if you are a company CEO and I come to you proposing that I can supply the same computers your workers already use but with a solid gold case instead of the aluminium one. I could even provide you with white papers saying that the new solid gold cases are much much more resistant to corrosion. And that is true. Gold in that sense is better than aluminium. Higher quality! Would you buy my laptops? Does that sound like a good deal? I don't think you would, unless you have significant laptop case corrosion problems.
> But presumably they all had adequate quality level.
They all do what they claim in the sense that they set forth Safety and Efficacy goals and achieve them. From that perspective all Approved Medical Devices are essentially the same.
But as you say, translating quality to profit isn't obvious. Expressing quality aspects of speed, throughput, reliability, etc. was a clearer benefit to the customer than, e.g., showing that our fluid handling had a Coefficient of Variation of under 5%.
The problem is that all of the qualia that can only bee seen and articulated by a professional practitioner aren't necessarily stacked in a heap. It's more of a Jenga tower of mutually reinforcing practices. Maybe some of the blocks lost to cost cutting weren't load bearing, but as each one comes out the structure gets more fragile.
There's the lure towards disruption and cutting the right thing to win big. Everyone already knows that strategy though, and the market is full of different stratifications of disruption - streamers disrupt the networks, creator economy sites disrupt the streamers, short form socials disrupt the creators. Any new thing needs a real reason to exist in that ecosystem beyond just being worse.
I'm talking from a perspective of someone working with QA in my day job. And I do have to answer questions about the quality. Like, "did the quality of the product increase in the last release?" or "is our quality higher than the competition?" or "will this drop in quality be acceptable for the majority of our customers?"
And, really, every time I'm called to answer questions like these, I know full well that no matter how much time I spend analyzing the test results, coverage, test strategies, dissecting JIRA etc. my answers will be based on little more than a guess (and no, it's not the subconsciousness, it just means that I'll be probably wrong!)
I wish I could just "let it go" and observe the gestalt of the product and say lgtm! (or not). Just because my subconsciousness told me it's so. :)
No, it's not like Jenga. It doesn't reinforce each other. There's always a possibility to drill down to details, which makes the discussion and comparison easy (or easier), but the more complex the thing I'm trying to assess the quality of, the worse it gets.
Is ZFS better than Ext4?
Is MariaDB good enough, or should we switch to a more "high quality" PostgreSQL? How about Oracle?
Is Python 3.13 objectively better than Python 3.10?
What about Ethernet vs IB?
Answering any of these questions would get experts twisted in a knot of endless arguments precisely because quality is very hard to assess. It has too many faces, too many metrics...
Everything in the first post are very obvious errors that anyone can avoid if they think about it for a few minutes. You can take decent photos with a phone either by learning a bit or just by accident with enough attempts.
The issue with dating apps has more to do with women being able to be incredibly picky. Better photos let’s a average looking guy get a chance. The top 1-5% that all women want to match with don’t need to bother with this at all.
Maybe OP didn't describe the intricacies of photography well enough, but I had to take photography in an art college... but I have a better story to tell.
So, my father is a somewhat famous persona in the world of animation. When I was little, he used to take me to the festivals. And that being the time when movies were distributed on film, in anti-tank mine shaped containers... the editing was done with glue and scissors.
We were friends with the editor who usually worked with him on his films. I remember leaving the screening with her once, and she was talking to my dad, and in excitement she said: "Oh, had you seen the cuts? Such an amazing job!" And by that she meant the few frames between shots that the editors used to leave for their own navigation and other conveniences in the film they edited. Like, you may remember random letters and geometric shapes flashing for a split second on the screen? -- She was super excited to see that! Not the movie itself.
When it comes to photographs: you need to speak the language. Same things done deliberately or accidentally will mean different things. Overexposure? -- perhaps done deliberately for dramatic effect, or perhaps just an accident. Choosing a more grainy film over a finer one? -- Maybe just a lens with not enough light, or maybe the author was going for a special feeling of an older photographs. The main character in the portrait not in focus? -- you cannot tell if that's intentional or not, unless you can tell why.
There was a fashion movement in fashion where high-end clothes were photographed with extremely bright flash mounted on the camera (as opposed to more typical studio setting with diffused light from multiple sources). An artistic adaptation of amateur style. Go figure! It was hip like 20 years ago. But, to read it, you need to know the history. You need to know that it was the style at the time, and through that lens you can look at it and find other things the author had to tell you (whereas w/o the background you might just dismiss it as poorly lit picture).
In other words: yes, there's a bar you need to pass, but it's low. Anything beyond that is not accessible to the general public, it will never know the difference. There are very few areas of expertise where anyone can easily measure / understand the quality. In most areas the only way to know is to rely on experts, subconsciousness isn't going to help you there, just like you wouldn't be able to divine the composition of the concrete with which the house was built prior to it possibly collapsing (if the concrete was low quality) without knowing how to use the tools necessary to measure that (subconscious level isn't going to help you here).
Even for professionals, testing for quality is very hard because of how many factors come into play, and how to weight those factors against each other, and often the impossibility or expense associated with testing. It's beyond naive to think that subconsciousness will somehow solve this problem...