Comments on: In it for the Money: For Economy of Opinion

By: Alan Benard

Alan Benard — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 06:27:14 +0000

Thanks for this, it certainly is food for thought. Vivienne is correct about the importance of signing and owning one’s opinions. It is a strong deterrent to casually hitting the reply button. And we have no excuse of youth or inexperience with a a new technology, as did your students at the Hippie School for Troubled Youth a decade ago, when you reminded them on a daily basis to avoid admitting to crimes in Web postings.

The advent of the Facebook Timeline makes the ongoing, careful curation of one’s own digital spoutings even more critical. Reading your column this month — especially because you personally do take me to task when my opinions appear to wander far from a reasonable basis — made me very uncomfortable, which I presume was the desired affect for the general readership.

By: Tom Teague

Tom Teague — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 22:20:08 +0000

David – Interesting and thoughtful column. The risk of commenting on it is that the discussion can get pretty meta, but here goes:

I’ve been thinking for some time that we are quickly losing the concept of “preference” and replacing it with the notion that our opinions are richly supported by facts. In this universe, different preferences are really a sign of ignorance. People no longer just prefer the schnitzel at Restaurant A, they order the schnitzel because it’s been made with premium ingredients, or has been voted the best schnitzel in the Great Lakes region, or because the schnitzel at restaurants B through Z is known to be made with imported . . . umm . . . well, in truth, I don’t know what goes into schnitzel.

I respect folks with strong opinions backed by fact but, as I get older, I find myself giving more credence to ideas when people express them as preferences. When I hear all those facts propping up an opinion, my immediate suspicion is that people really just don’t want to say that they prefer the schnitzel at Restaurant A because it’s saltier and cooked with more fat.

By: paul hickman

paul hickman — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 02:37:52 +0000

I commend you, Mr. Nelson, for this finely crafted and well thought article of opinions about the world’s opinions. A great read.

By: Trek Glowacki

Trek Glowacki — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 16:52:41 +0000

Sir,

I have made an appointment on my calendar to return 550 days hence and specifically not share my opinion with you regarding this matter.

By: Vivienne Armentrout

Vivienne Armentrout — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 12:13:37 +0000

You are on to something here. As someone whose Karmic debt due to opinions is so large that it could erase the national deficit if I could only change its sign, I naturally have an opinion on this. It is not just that we have too much uninformed chatter, but also that much news and analysis in the “legitimate” media has also devolved to opinion.

A signal example of this is that the New York Times recently changed its Weekly Review to the Sunday Review, with a stated purpose of emphasizing opinion over news analysis. (“News analysis” implies taking factual sources and trying to make some sense of them; “opinion” is your basic bloviating.) Apparently opinion is what sells newspapers, these days.

Now just to increase my KD to the max, I’ll state that (in my opinion) much of the really useless chatter is the result of anonymous commenting. Back in the day, when you had to sign your name to a letter to the editor, there were still silly comments, but fewer of them.