[mattgreenrocks]

This gets to my biggest issue with social media: the primacy of the collective opinion.

As the article states, nuance has no place, nor does the idea that we should evaluate something based on its intrinsic qualities. Instead, the most important thing about everything is what We think about it in this instant. And that is highly mutable: We will change that whenever we wish, and you need to keep up.

The very notion that something can be evaluated based on intrinsic qualities (such as a person's character, a thing's aesthetics, the efficacy of a policy) is devalued because they do not serve the ultimate goal of a collective opinion. Science is a meme/religion we trot out to justify our already-formed beliefs.

The reason this is such a problem is that you cannot develop any sort of taste if you are constantly out-sourcing it to a constantly-shifting collective opinion. And taste is a requisite for skill.

[poslathian]

Interesting comment, I might have thought it was the other way around.

[mattgreenrocks]

That's the impression I get. The opinions are certainly originally formed from some sort of objective-ish basis, but then it seems to be more important to propagate the meme than it is for others to individually assess the subject or the validity of the original judgment.

Similar dynamics happen among VC investors ("no one else is investing, it can't be that good"). My issue is that end up people taking the meme propagation as ground truth.