LogFAQs > #972881877

ParanoidObsessive posted...

For instance, if you are discussing whether or not a specific comic book is good, the opinions of someone who has spent the last 40 years reading thousands and thousands of comics are probably slightly more valuable than the opinions of someone who has literally never seen a comic book at all.

Depends entirely on the context. Saying that categorically is a textbook Appeal to Authority fallacy: the belief that somebody who has studied a subject has opinions that are automatically more valid than somebody who hasn't. Now, that's a fallacy that gets mis-cited to hell and back (see the response of much of the public to public health professionals' directions throughout Covid), typically stopping at "they don't know more just because they're experts" instead of actually appraising how well those experts are substantiating their opinions, but beyond that you also have to assess the context in which opinions are being sought. If somebody is new to comics and is looking for a place to start, somebody who's read 5 recently and can speak to how well the starting place they ended up with worked out is actually going to have a more useful opinion than somebody whose first comic was 40 years ago and therefore can't remember a time when they didn't have any sort of background to support whatever they were currently reading. Conversely, if somebody's been a long-time comic fan and is looking for opinions on modern stuff, somebody who's also been a long-time comic fan and can draw comparisons to older things the opinion-seeker has read is going to be more useful than somebody who can't be expected to realize that the one comic they've read was just a reprint of an old one with a new name.

I'd actually go do far as to say that, for opinions on purely subjective matters like entertainment (that is, where there are no particular objective consequences to the opinion beyond "I enjoyed/didn't enjoy this"), there's no such thing as "validity." Only "usefulness," which is a metric that's heavily dictated by the context in which opinions are being shared.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

People have a bad habit of confusing their personal experience with objective reality, which sets off a chain of reasoning where opinion leads to "fact" - "I dislike this thing, therefore this thing is bad, therefore no one should like it, therefore anyone who likes it is wrong, therefore there is something wrong with them."

Objectively speaking, disliking any piece of entertainment should be considered a failure. You've spent money, time, and effort on it, so if your opinion has prevented you from enjoying it (using the term "enjoy" loosely so as to avoid getting into the question of whether things like sad movies are "enjoyable" in a stricter sense), you have an inferior opinion to anyone whose opinion allowed them to see a better return on that investment.

Of course, opinions aren't exactly voluntary (not entirely, at least), so that's a largely pointless distinction to make. I do enjoy falling back on it whenever people try to give others a hard time for liking things, though.