Have you ever been contacted by a supplier on Amazon and offering to pay you for a review?

Oh, it's rare to get useful consensus from them. But I do notice if they're scattered across different sorts of complaints, and none of them are really that convincing or definitive. Basically, yeah, you look for patterns. For some items, there's sources you can go to that rigorously test and document their testing. Like rtings for audio (and visual, too, now? I think?) or how not 2 on YouTube for climbing. But for a lot of items, its hard to find any trustworthy sources. And everyone you see talking about it you have to wonder how informed or smart they are, and what they're not telling you. It's tough with items where it does matter that you get one that works well, but if you can at all help it, then you don't want to learn much about it. Well, thesw days there's little alternative. Like for cleaning stuff. Consider just how ubiquotous the advice to use baking soda and vinegar combined to clean things is. Do you know why? I promise you I do. It's because when you combine them, they do this cool fizzy thing. It looks like magic. That's really honestly the reason. But adults feel embarrassed to admit this, so they leave that out when they recommend it. They don't quite admit that's why they think it's doing something. Because they know enough to know that's not logical. But they also for whatever reason(s) are afraid or unwilling to try to understand for themselves. So they try it, it doesn't really work, but they see the fizz, and so they repeat the advice to somebody else. That's the most true most common representation of people interacting. This level of extreme nonsense and bullshit and lying. This is the regular day to day. It's what even aerospace industries run on. They just iron out this ugliness away from certain areas. But NASA has gone about things in just as stupid and non-thinking of a way. You can't get rid of this human propensity to bullshit. If we're not sure what to do, then our strength and our weakness is we can do anything, and then what we conclude from it, is our choice afterwards. And yet, this advice to combine baking soda and vinegar is EVERYWHERE. It's probably the most common ubiquotous advice you find anywhere people are talking about cleaning things. And yet any way you go about testing this idea, you'd find it's extremely stupid. That all you're doing is making slightly salty water. That if you want salt water for cleaning, you should measure it so you can recreate your results again in the future. And every subject is like this. I can only avoid the very worst advice. I can't tell who makes more sense between two people who both have a much more nuanced understanding than me. Usually to make an informed choice I'd have to grasp some quite nuanced and convoluted train of thought.