This is a personal pet peeve of mine, but I really hate when you get into an argument on something, and you get a response like 'you got to know more about (whatever)'. Here, I'm not talking about things that are factual, like if we're trying to calculate the orbit of the moon and I don't enough about it to calculate it so I probably shouldn't be telling an astrophysicist that his calculations are wrong. I'm even willing to ignore stuff like politics, even though that's mostly an opinion thing but you can argue some of the argument can be entirely boil down to a lack of knowledge. Here, I'm talking a topic that is purely an opinion, like whether your favorite football team sucks, or if this kind of food is good, or why this movie is dumb. For example I happen to believe that Spurs are overrated and lucked out by drafting Duncan. This is an opinion and there's no way to actually disprove this. Now that doesn't mean opinions can't be debated, but this isn't something that can be solved if I go watch more Spurs game or learn more about basketball. Since I obviously do not like Spurs, I don't think the burden of proof is me. It's not like I'm trying to prove a hypothetical event whose answer nobody can possibly know for sure is the truth of the universe. To me, finding out more about topic is akin to asking me to waste more time on something I don't like when my opinion is pretty much made up. It's particularly insulting because the usual 'your opinion is dumb' or variants at least doesn't suggest I need to subject myself to an undesirable activity. Realistically, very few people would even care if you have a fully formed opinion on the history of the San Antonio Spurs when you declare the organization is dumb. It's invariably one of those issue where you're either with us or against us. If someone does want to have an intellectual discussion on this hypothetical event, it would hardly be necessary for them to be an expert in the history of the Spurs since anything you knew about the existing world doesn't apply in this hypothetical situation anyway.
I see plenty of statistics saying there's just way too much stuff to consume in modern era. For example you can argue that we have a hit a point where you'll never be able to watch all the good TV series because as long as you define it in a way that somewhat makes sense, even if you spent the rest of your life watching TV there will be more 'good TV' produced to the point that you'll never catch up. Yet for some reason people expect someone to waste their time and money on something they already formed an opinion (likely negative). I'm not arguing about who's right or wrong here. If something I like that you don't enjoy, I sure wouldn't want to waste your time by suggesting all the possible resources you can use to educate yourself on a topic you obviously don't like in the first place. Yes, I get that it's usually a straw man argument as it's basically saying 'if you didn't waste X hours of your time on this topic you shouldn't comment on it', but we're in an age of short attention span with way too much of even pretty good stuff. So why would anyone even suggest that someone should waste time on whatever they find to be uninteresting when people don't have enough time for even all the interesting stuff they want to do/see? For example, a game has to be pretty interesting for me to even have a cursory look at it and decide that it sucks, since there are way more games where I can't even be bothered to look at it as I can't possibly have the time for that. If I have to play a game in any reasonable detail before forming an opinion, there will be very little to discuss. And again, outside of pure factual stuff, if I play a game for the first hour and uninstalled it, there's probably a problem with that game. In fact I'd bet whoever made that game will be quite interested in knowing why it failed to capture any attention since that's useful to know for trying to improve your product.
I see plenty of statistics saying there's just way too much stuff to consume in modern era. For example you can argue that we have a hit a point where you'll never be able to watch all the good TV series because as long as you define it in a way that somewhat makes sense, even if you spent the rest of your life watching TV there will be more 'good TV' produced to the point that you'll never catch up. Yet for some reason people expect someone to waste their time and money on something they already formed an opinion (likely negative). I'm not arguing about who's right or wrong here. If something I like that you don't enjoy, I sure wouldn't want to waste your time by suggesting all the possible resources you can use to educate yourself on a topic you obviously don't like in the first place. Yes, I get that it's usually a straw man argument as it's basically saying 'if you didn't waste X hours of your time on this topic you shouldn't comment on it', but we're in an age of short attention span with way too much of even pretty good stuff. So why would anyone even suggest that someone should waste time on whatever they find to be uninteresting when people don't have enough time for even all the interesting stuff they want to do/see? For example, a game has to be pretty interesting for me to even have a cursory look at it and decide that it sucks, since there are way more games where I can't even be bothered to look at it as I can't possibly have the time for that. If I have to play a game in any reasonable detail before forming an opinion, there will be very little to discuss. And again, outside of pure factual stuff, if I play a game for the first hour and uninstalled it, there's probably a problem with that game. In fact I'd bet whoever made that game will be quite interested in knowing why it failed to capture any attention since that's useful to know for trying to improve your product.
