TurboJ wrote:But then we could of course say that any science that includes human subjects will immediately lose all validity.
To nitpick: I wouldn't go so far as to say
that. After all, if we are mindful with what it is we are attempting to quantify and how, and we pay due attention to the methods by which we derive our assessment of the reliability and power of a study, then we can establish a reasonable status of validity of studies
but only for ones based on tangible, reproducible observations. Mortality is the clearest measure we have. Morbidity, to an extent, though the further you get away from such binary outcomes such as dead/alive, the murkier it does get.
Anyway, without getting into it too much, not least because a) it's not directly relevant to this forum b) I have zero formal background in psychology so most of my thoughts come from other disciplines, I would actually like to think that behaviours of individuals and in populations
can be
modelled should one use sensible premises on which to establish the drivers of our behaviour (noting that I'm not making any arguments in favour of pure determinism or even, to extrapolate, a physical reductionist interpretation of consciousness). The corollary to that is that I do think that there is plenty of scope for psychology as a field to continue to describe our behaviours (only exactly what that scope is, and how we assess it by our standard scientific yardsticks, becomes the devil in the details).
If I didn't believe in any of that, after all, I would have completely disregarded anything and everything about the Markets tab in Automation, and possibly gone so far as to deny that there was any use in dividing the automotive market into discrete or distinct markets with distinct consumer groups. In fact one would wonder why I'd even bother with a game like Automation in the first place given its vision as stated from the get go! Even by anecdotal observation, this is absurd, so my earlier post was at least in part playing Devil's advocate. In fact I'm very interested in the relationship between the Automation metric and our personal takes on how desirable a car is, hence the existence of The Car Shopping Round.
More importantly, IMHO the reason why the supercar market is so hotly debated with so many differing opinions is due to a) the premise of a supercar and b) the rarefied sample space. Supercars are, I think you inferred already, by definition distinctive, unique, outlandish, ephemeral, out of this world, and assessments are therefore governed by the world of emotion and evocation. Unlike say, the city or family segments, they do relate significantly less strongly to our common, utilitarian requirements, and are also far less affordable, so we don't have a pool of experience of millions of units over decades to compare a Mazda3 to a Toyota Corolla. We probably don't even have a forum user who has actually driven or ridden in most of the supercars we're talking about. It's also worth noting that I do think the calculations regarding market competitiveness in Hypercar, Supercar etc. etc. are less useful than in most other segments, again for the same reasons.
With that in mind, the simple truth is that heated arguments about which supercar is better than another is mainly hot air, blown directly from your ass. Now, I'm a flatulent guy who enjoys a good toot now and then, but everybody would do well to remember not to stink up the room too much