"Stop liking what I don't like!" - Why is this a thing?

[Meatspinner]

dey be jelly.

dey be jelly cuz dey haf gaem dats wurs den my gaem (i.e. I don't know and i don't give a shit)

 

[Something Amyss]

Cause people are people even over the internet?

Or, more appropriately, people are more themselves on the internet.

I swear, an internet connection increases someone's false sense of entitlement.

 

[NightmareExpress]

Because to hell with your opinion(s), MINE is correct.
Agree with me or be wrong. If we were countries, I would go to war with you so hard.

/Humanity in a nutshell

 

[Angie7F]

I also think that the internet amplifies a persons personality especially when it is antonymous.
But I also think that is what makes it much more interesting.

 

[Fluffythepoo]

The existence of other conceptions of reality leaves the open the possibility that one's own conceptions are wrong. By derogating or rejecting alternate views we restore our own peace of mind (the other guy was wrong, so im right).

This is illustrated here:

I blame moral and epistemological objectivism. The idea that there is only one objective truth, that certain things are always right and others are always wrong. I also blame the society-wide dismissal of emotions and the irrational need to support inherently subjective things on "facts" (I also blame societal gender constructs, because that attitude is pushed onto men from birth). Combine all this and you end up with people who like things not because those things make them happy or elicit positive emotions in them, but because they are objectively better (as proven by "facts") and liking them is Right and True. If you disagree, you are Wrong and your opinions are False.

I am a relativist and a subjectivist, so I'm not afraid of saying "I like this because it features X, and X makes me feel good" or repeating that all opinions are inherently subjective and therefore are all equally valid. Some people, though, just plain don't get it.

I fundamentally disagree with this person. Not even even with their theory of cause for the OP's question, but with their views and perception of reality. If they're right then (according to my notions) I must be wrong. Therefore the only way to maintain peace of mind is to dismiss their ideas, which i will try to do here:

The scientific method does not accommodate emotion, only facts. It asserts that emotion is irrational and has no place in problem solving. The facts it produces contribute far more to the betterment of humanity than the ephemeral self-gratification offered by emotions. It is on this basis that facts are lauded over emotions. The misappropriation of facts with inherently subjective motivations isn't a basis for the dissolution of objectivism, it's a fantastic demonstration of the inherit fault in subjectivism: subjectively reality is variable and can be manipulated for subjective reasons. Objectively it is concrete and nonnegotiable allowing for a unified and consistent experience for all. This in turn means that one's relative experience can still be drastically different from another's (reality being quite arbitrary), but that relative experience is still subjected to an objectively determined reality; meaning they can hold varying perceptions of reality, but those perceptions all hold the potential to be wrong.


I just tried to dismiss that person's view. I didn't do it to better that person or myself, I simply did it to validate my own perception of reality. By doing so restoring my own equanimity. It's not about actually trying to change the other people, but rather it's about trying to convince yourself that you're right.

 

[Mikeyfell]

Cue another thread of me being unable to comprehend or understand the essential nature of people and the internet.

But seriously? Why is it a thing? And I'm not talking about that meme image with the kid playing chess; if anything that's surprisingly accurate; rather, I'm talking about the phenomena it represents.

Thoughts?

I think it's a thing, now stay with me here,
Because the people who like the things in question don't want to recognize that some people may hate something for perfectly valid reasons.
SOOOOOOOO
Instead of expanding their own horizons by trying to understand why some people may not like something they do
They use memetic phraseology to make dissenters of things they like seem immature.

 

[TheVampwizimp_v1legacy]

Stop not letting me not like when you like what I don't like.

In all seriousness, people are just like this. There are psychological reasons for it and all that, but what's more important is coming to accept that people do it. Everyone. No exceptions. The only variables are about what, and whether you can get over yourself long enough to at least accept that you can't force people to change what they like.

As long as we're talking about personal preferences, and not something actually harmful like the opinion that shooting your parents is cool, then no one has anything on anyone else. The only way to really be better than people who act like this is to let it go.

 

[In Search of Username]

Cue another thread of me being unable to comprehend or understand the essential nature of people and the internet.

But seriously? Why is it a thing? And I'm not talking about that meme image with the kid playing chess; if anything that's surprisingly accurate; rather, I'm talking about the phenomena it represents.

Thoughts?

You're asking why people are bothered by others liking things they don't? Well, why are you bothered by that? That's just them enjoying something you don't enjoy - the thing in question this time being judging others for their taste. And you're judging them for that; you are not better than others because you pretend not to have opinions.

Of course there's such a thing as taking this judgement too far (i.e. actually hating people for liking one thing you don't like/disliking one thing you do like), but if you're really trying to tell me you have absolutely no reaction to millions of people liking something you really hate, I simply don't believe you, because that's exactly what you're doing by posting this thread, just in a different way.

 

[Frankster]

There's quite a few possible answers here but ill go with one i believe is a motivating factor when it comes to gamers:

We feel threatened when our tastes are in the minority/deemed less profitable and tastes that we don't like which are seen as popular are viewed as a threat to us getting the things we would rather want.

To give an example, i think thats a big motivation for a lot of people disliking Call of Duty or World of Warcraft. Or heck to use a personal example, its why i dislike the new xcom to a degree even though i enjoyed my first playthrough, cos everyone is on about how the new xcom is the tits and now i dont see it likely that ill ever get the updated xcom sequel i want that hasnt been streamlined as hell to please modern audiences and how the complexity and randomness that made the original so replayable was gutted.


I like this explanation as gives the dislike a grain of truth beyond "people are dumb and can only like things they agree with", but its just one explanation of several that can cause this reaction.

 

[Kopikatsu]

Prooobably because everything you do actually isn't self-contained?

I'll give you a random example. Someone mixed some sounds, thought it sounded rad, and then sent it on the air. And so dubstep came to be. Then it became a thing and more and more artists, composers, and producers turned towards the newest, greatest thing. Now, I fucking hate dubstep, but it's impossible to get away from it. Turn the radio on? Dubstep marathon on everything but the Country channel. Try to watch some new video game trailers? Dubstep! Go to listen to a few old groups that I used to like? Nope, they're into dubstep now!

Thus where my hatred of dubstep and all who enjoy it stems from.

 

[Callate]

Admittedly, in some cases it's ridiculous. But sometimes, it's also an awareness that there's a limited amount of money to go round in most entertainment fields. If the book store is full of swoony supernatural teen Stephanie Meyer-wannabes, there are probably a hundred good novels languishing in the publisher's slush pile because it's easier and cheaper to ride the wave. Likewise Transformer movies and Call of Duty games. Even if you think the original is a worthwhile product, its influence creates a score of knock-offs.

And while I recognize it's not the noblest human impulse, I sometimes genuinely think we're dumber as a species that certain things are encouraged to flourish. I commented to a friend on Facebook that reality TV is the only thing that could have made me nostalgic for the era of soap operas. At least the wretched and reprehensible antics in those were scripted.

 

[Darken12]

*snip*

An excellent illustration of my point. I, as a subjectivist/relativist, can easily agree to disagree. I am not threatened by your views out of fear they might be right and mine might be wrong. I am fully confident in the subjectiveness of reality and therefore I can accept that we are both right.

Also, LOL @ the scientific method bit. Science isn't based on objectivity (as true objectivity is epistemologically impossible by virtue of the people doing the observations being fallible subjects), it's based on intersubjectivity (the notion that by combining different subjective viewpoints that perceive the same things, you approach objectivity asymptotically). That's the entire point of peer-reviewing and reproducible experiments.

The thing is, I consider myself an objectivist, and even I get the concept of "not all brains respond to stimuli the same way".

A more likely candidate, I think, is that people have difficulty with empathy, or "seeing through someone else's eyes". I've told people about my love for Myst, only for them to tell me how boring and non-actiony it sounds, missing the point of "playing to relax".

That's very true, I had neglected to mention empathy.

Ninja'd, though I kind of disagree with the conclusion.

See; it kind of represents a whole "everyone has won and all must have prizes" attitude, only applied to concepts and values which makes it even more sketchy. I'd assert that it is possible for one thing, concept or experience to be superior to another. For instance if we were sat in a cafe and I refused to stop playing Venom on my ghetto blaster, carried on my shoulder naturally, then the experience would be objectively terrible for all of us. If I didn't have the ghetto blaster, or even if I just played something less dire than Venom, then the experience would be irrefutably superior.

In addition there is also the problem of contradiction. If I state that human rights are inviolate and you state that a woman is property of her father till she is sold to another family and becomes property of a husband then our positions are anathema to one another. If you practice your position it undermines mine and vice versa. It is difficult to conceive of a compromise that can be reached between these two positions.

These are extreme examples, to be sure, but I'm just saying that sometimes there are situations where subjectivity doesn't cut it.

Actually, that's intersubjectivity at work. You think that blasting music in a cafe would make the experience objectively worse because practically everyone you know would agree with you. But that's not enough. In order for things to be truly objective, everyone must agree, no exceptions. Find one person who finds their experience unchanged (like a deaf person) or improved (like a Venom fan) and it's not objective.

As for the "uncompromising positions" thing: that was basically the entire point of my Bioethics class in college. How to work together with people who think abortion is a right and people who think abortion is a crime is a fundamental part of my professions (both current and future). And not only in the healthcare area, it becomes fundamentally important to find compromise in legislation and politics. The concept of "moral strangers" and accepting that you live in a society with people you will find morally disgusting and yet you still have to work with them and find an equitable compromise between your views and theirs is something I think should be taught to everyone. Until society doesn't get that message, we're going to keep bitterly fighting with each other while technological progress continues undaunted but social progress stagnates.

The entire point of subjectivity/relativity is to recognise that no matter how much you may loathe another person's views, they are just as much a person as you, and their views are worth exactly the same as yours, and therefore they deserve to be considered just as much as yours, no matter how stark raving mad or harmful to society you think they are. And that's your guarantee to ensure that YOUR views get the same treatment. Do you think I enjoy living in a society with people who support hate crimes against me? No, I don't. But I have to deal with that fact. If I want my views to be heard and respected, I have to do the same with theirs. I don't have to like them, I don't have to change my mind and consider them anything less but morally repugnant, but the only way we're ever going to make progress as a society is by establishing compromise and finding non-adversarial ways to deal with our differences.

 

[Vegosiux]

Hype aversion [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HypeAversion] is a very real thing, and a thing that I often fall victim to. In my case though, it's less a case of "Stop liking what I don't like", and more a case of "Would you just shut the hell up about it already and let me decide if I like it or not" and sometimes "Listen, I don't like it, could we maybe talk about something else?"

But basically, I hate people gushing on and on about something. Not because I'd hate the something, but because I hate the gushing.

 

[wizzy555]

Moral and epistemological objectivism does not need to be applied across the board, we can categorise different epistemological issues separately. For instance, math and beauty, no one is required to say that these follow the same epistemology (I think most would agree they do not).

The mistake is when when this is forgotten, ignored and simply not understood.

 

[wizzy555]

Also, LOL @ the scientific method bit. Science isn't based on objectivity (as true objectivity is epistemologically impossible by virtue of the people doing the observations being fallible subjects), it's based on intersubjectivity (the notion that by combining different subjective viewpoints that perceive the same things, you approach objectivity asymptotically). That's the entire point of peer-reviewing and reproducible experiments.

That's not what peer-review is about. Peer-review is reviewing a paper to make sure the conclusions derived follow appropriately from the methods used. This is not a purely objective process and grey areas and varying standards are abound, but there is a definite "no, this is nonsense" that can be applied. Indeed if there wasn't there would be no need for peer-review, everyone would get published.

 

[Darken12]

That's not what peer-review is about. Peer-review is reviewing a paper to make sure the conclusions derived follow appropriately from the methods used. This is not a purely objective process and grey areas and varying standards are abound, but there is a definite "no, this is nonsense" that can be applied. Indeed if there wasn't there would be no need for peer-review, everyone would get published.

Actually, the process of peer-reviewing often involves (at least in theory, practice might differ) the reproducibility of the experiment/study and a formal analysis to ensure that the logical argumentation used to derive conclusions is indeed valid. This doesn't always happen, for obvious reasons, but in theory, every published study needs to be reproducible and repeated experiments need to arrive to similar results. That's the entire basis of intersubjectivity. Peer-reviewing is based on the notion that if several peers agree with the findings, observe the same events and arrive to the same conclusions, it's safe to accept the study/experiment (and its conclusions) as facts, from which to make scientific decisions or base further conclusions.

If we followed objectivism instead of intersubjectivity, we could never admit we were wrong. Everything we had accepted as a fact would have to be perpetuated unto eternity because it was objective truth and any findings that contradicted it would be dismissed as wrong. Science could never progress. Part of being a scientist is learning to acknowledge that what you consider true today can be proven wrong tomorrow, and what has been proven right tomorrow can be disproven the day after. That is not an excuse to be sloppy (on the contrary, one aims to minimise errors and the chances of being proven wrong), but we must accept the possibility of the things we consider facts disproven in the future.

 

[OmniscientOstrich]

See; it kind of represents a whole "everyone has won and all must have prizes" attitude, only applied to concepts and values which makes it even more sketchy. I'd assert that it is possible for one thing, concept or experience to be superior to another. For instance if we were sat in a cafe and I refused to stop playing Venom on my ghetto blaster, carried on my shoulder naturally, then the experience would be objectively terrible for all of us. If I didn't have the ghetto blaster, or even if I just played something less dire than Venom, then the experience would be irrefutably superior.

If you did that at this cafe, I don't think the patrons would mind:

Spoiler

Also, I'm pretty sure that if I hijacked the speakers at my local Costa and started blasting Ride of the Valkyries at full volume or started vociferously singing off key to [Insert latest pop music hate figure here] at a Metal festival it would piss a lot of people off too, so I'm not really sure what you're point is other than inadvertently making some argumentum ad populum gesture (I know, I know, I just used a logical fallacy term, feel free to deduct 10 points from Gryffindor). Or that playing something outside of an appropriate setting will likely incur a hostile reaction from most people in attendance, which I suppose is largely true but then I'd argue the reason we congregate in different social circles, establishments and events in the first place is due to our subjective tastes.

OT: As for the 'stop liking what I don't like' phenomenon, I wouldn't really know how to explain it other than just attributing it to arrogance and confirmation bias. All I know is that it's a mentality that really grinds my gears; you wouldn't think it would be so difficult or outlandish to accept that the world don't move to the beat of just one drum, but then perhaps my inimical reactions to such attitudes aren't really helping to steer the dialogue in a constructive way and that I might need to work on being more tempered and patient in future.

 

[wizzy555]

That's not what peer-review is about. Peer-review is reviewing a paper to make sure the conclusions derived follow appropriately from the methods used. This is not a purely objective process and grey areas and varying standards are abound, but there is a definite "no, this is nonsense" that can be applied. Indeed if there wasn't there would be no need for peer-review, everyone would get published.

Actually, the process of peer-reviewing often involves (at least in theory, practice might differ) the reproducibility of the experiment/study and a formal analysis to ensure that the logical argumentation used to derive conclusions is indeed valid. This doesn't always happen, for obvious reasons, but in theory, every published study needs to be reproducible and repeated experiments need to arrive to similar results. That's the entire basis of intersubjectivity. Peer-reviewing is based on the notion that if several peers agree with the findings, observe the same events and arrive to the same conclusions, it's safe to accept the study/experiment (and its conclusions) as facts, from which to make scientific decisions or base further conclusions.

If we followed objectivism instead of intersubjectivity, we could never admit we were wrong. Everything we had accepted as a fact would have to be perpetuated unto eternity because it was objective truth and any findings that contradicted it would be dismissed as wrong. Science could never progress. Part of being a scientist is learning to acknowledge that what you consider true today can be proven wrong tomorrow, and what has been proven right tomorrow can be disproven the day after. That is not an excuse to be sloppy (on the contrary, one aims to minimise errors and the chances of being proven wrong), but we must accept the possibility of the things we consider facts disproven in the future.

Peer review and the repeating of an experiment are different things. Peer reviewing is the reading of a paper before it enters into publication, it is a basic quality check, not the confirmation of the truth of the paper, just that is contains no obvious flaws. It isn't even a guarantee against fraud. Repeatability of the experiment comes after (or sometimes at the same time by someone else). You can have teams of ten scientists with millions of dollars of equipment peer-reviewed by one man on his arm-chair.

Objectivism is the philosophical notion that the truth condition you are assessing is in the object you are assessing - i.e. outside your mind. It does not mean that everyone has to agree (someone could just be wrong). As I said one does not need to apply the same to every issue. For instance, if I look at object X and conclude that object X exists and is beautiful I would say that the existence of the object is objective (it exists outside my mind) while the beauty of the object is subjective (the beauty is in my head).

I'm not going to post on a forum asking who else thinks this exists.