[coldtea]

>These first three examples are awful examples. A ton of people love all of those things.

So what? A ton of people loved smoking cigarettes, segregation, creationism, and tons of other BS stuff too.

The idea about culture is also making value judgements, not just bending over to whatever "people like" as if mere enjoyment is the be all end all of arguments.

Especially since what people "like" is not the objective, "own choice", we make it to be, but can be manipulated by advertising, conditioning, lack (or less coverage) of alternatives and finally lack of education.

[icebraining]

The idea about culture is also making value judgements, not just bending over to whatever "people like" as if mere enjoyment is the be all end all of arguments.

But isn't that what the article is about? The song it points as the thing to strive for is Bohemian Rapsody (and not, say, Enter, Evening) exactly because people loved it.

[coldtea]

While not Enter, Evening, Bohemian Rapsody has a musical sofistication quite above the examples of statistics and crowd-research driven stuff mentioned above.