Why Does Everyone Have an Opinion about Everything?

I’m really thankful for postmodernism. If you grew up in the 50’s there was a hierarchy to society and you just followed it. You didn’t get to have an opinion, you weren’t encouraged to think outside the box you were supposed to be a preidentified set of characteristics. Postmodernism squashed that hierarchy into a flat line and I’m happy we’re free to be you and me and etc but it also has the annoying side effect of giving people the impression that their opinion is “just as valid” as anyone elses. No.

The major fault with almost everything before postmodernism is that it succombed to traditionalism and the is/ought problem. The wisdom was that if something was a certain way already, that must be the right way of thinking. But just because we are past that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a way to differentiate good thinking from bad thinking. Think about conversations you have about politics and religion. Most of the time people repeat pop sophistry when they talk about these and insist that they are allowed to have their opinion. This is true but having an opinion doesn’t make it good. Your opinion is good if the conclusion follows from the premises.

For instance, saying that people shouldn’t be allowed to gay marry because it’s “against the Bible” is not a very good opinion because not everything that’s against he bible is illegal in the first place and you aren’t asking it to be in the second place. It’s a cherry picking opinion that isn’t true to what you claim your values to be. Next.

I’m reading a nutrition book right now, because I am trying to learn about nutrition and it’s something every person on the planet has an opinion about but no one seems to actually know what they are talking about. So I am suffering through 700 pages of American nutritional history so I can actually learn something real. It’s just, really weird to learn about how many things in our culture are based on misinformation, not science. I guess its just like any other field- religion, gender studies, etc but the standard American diet (the “old” food pyramid with grains at the bottom) are based on a hypothesis that a high fat diet led to heart disease. But in the 30 years of adopting the low fat, high grain diet, heart disease has just gotten more prominent. So we went 30 years without questioning that the first thing people thought of doing when heart disease started being a problem was going to work? I had more faith in scientists than that before.

When is popular wisdom going to stop being based on magical thinking and repetition and start being based on what we really see? Are we really that blinded by predisposition and fear of change? Seems bleak.

BTW the book I am reading is called Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes if you’re interested