Poll of the Day > Not everyone is the same.

(+) Yeah! (+)

The opinion of the majority doesn't apply to everyone.
There seems to be some common mistake where people believe the opinion of the majority is the "correct answer" and the people who do not fall in line are somehow wrong / bad.

And if you really wanted to know this is the context (lmao):
https://www.reddit.com/r/BattleNetwork/comments/12odhrp/anyone_elsenot_playing_every_game_to_completion/jghqko0/

Judgmenl posted...

common mistake

I'm almost certain that you are talking about something very similar to "argumentum ad populum".

Never heard of that before, thanks.

That said, if everyone likes something and you don't, it's very possible that that's because you're somehow approaching it wrong or could otherwise change something to have a better time. While simply being more common doesn't automatically make an opinion "right," it's often worth making an effort to understand why it's so common as part of the process by which you evaluate it.

A quote from Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: "Sanity is not statistical".

Judgmenl posted...

The opinion of the majority doesn't apply to everyone.

There seems to be some common mistake where people believe the opinion of the majority is the "correct answer" and the people who do not fall in line are somehow wrong / bad.

The opinion of the majority doesn't apply to everyone, but my personal opinions are objectively correct and anyone who disagrees with them is wrong. And bad. Badong.

You should all strive to be the opposite of badong. Gnodab.



Vampire_Chicken posted...

A quote from Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: "Sanity is not statistical".

"Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought."



adjl posted...

That said, if everyone likes something and you don't, it's very possible that that's because you're somehow approaching it wrong or could otherwise change something to have a better time.

The trick that everyone misses - mainly because people online love to shout "ALL OPINIONS ARE EQUAL AND YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO INVALIDATE THEM!" - is that there are different types of opinions.

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. One of those opinions is based on an in-depth understanding of the medium and comparison to tons of other examples, the other is rooted in complete ignorance and knee-jerk assumptions. From there, "misinformed" opinions (based on factually incorrect knowledge) are potentially even worse than uninformed ones.

What blurs the line is that a discussion over whether or not something is good is NOT the same as whether or not you personally enjoy it. 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."

The other problem is that any discussion of opinion at all starts to shade into the linguistic problems of general semantics and the "is-of-identity", where language shapes perception and actually warps our view of reality. A LOT of our issues might be negated entirely if most of us got into the habit of clarifying our thoughts better. "I don't feel like I personally enjoyed this movie" has radically different connotations than "That movie was bad", even if we tend to use both to mean the same thing.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

The other problem is that any discussion of opinion at all starts to shade into the linguistic problems of general semantics and the "is-of-identity", where language shapes perception and actually warps our view of reality. A LOT of our issues might be negated entirely if most of us got into the habit of clarifying our thoughts better. "I don't feel like I personally enjoyed this movie" has radically different connotations than "That movie was bad", even if we tend to use both to mean the same thing.

This is why I go into details as to why I do or don't like things. (or why I do or don't do things).
People usually completely ignore the details as it's not part of the narrative they want to tell (they're just trolling the details don't actually matter because the people don't actually care).

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.

Sound like the title of a childrens book to tell kids the obvious

Conform or else outsider, there is no in between

"Everybody is unique."

Yes and no

adjl posted...

That said, if everyone likes something and you don't, it's very possible that that's because you're somehow approaching it wrong or could otherwise change something to have a better time.

Strongly disagree, since there's almost no universally-beloved things in the world. Even if something has mass appeal, it's more likely that somebody just doesn't like it than it is a matter of trying to find out how to appreciate it. American Dad did a whole episode about sports, but I still don't like them.

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. One of those opinions is based on an in-depth understanding of the medium and comparison to tons of other examples, the other is rooted in complete ignorance and knee-jerk assumptions. From there, "misinformed" opinions (based on factually incorrect knowledge) are potentially even worse than uninformed ones.

Given the nature of meta, I don't feel that's necessarily true. There comes a certain point where audiences get insular and weird, which is sometimes known as the AEW Effect.

Count_Drachma posted...

Strongly disagree, since there's almost no universally-beloved things in the world. Even if something has mass appeal, it's more likely that somebody just doesn't like it than it is a matter of trying to find out how to appreciate it. American Dad did a whole episode about sports, but I still don't like them.

"More likely" is not "guaranteed." I'm not saying that not liking something always means you're approaching it wrong, but it's a possibility you should at least consider (especially for new things), if only for the sake of helping you like more things. It's just good to keep an open mind and avoid settling into the trap of feeling superior for having less fun.