Consensus... (Gaming)

by Claude Errera , Friday, January 17, 2014, 14:35 (3966 days ago) @ Cody Miller

People regularly call you out on your absolutist statements ("That game is bad"). Your most common response is "come on, of COURSE what I say is my opinion, so why should I waste space qualifying the statement?"

The answer is actually rather simple, and I just keep forgetting to throw it into a reply. You should qualify statements that are your opinion so that they can be distinguished from actual facts. When you say "This game is bad" and "It is raining" - you are telling us that you believe those two facts are equally verifiable. If you leave out any qualifiers, ever, you're requiring your READERS to guess which 'facts' are really facts, and which are just your opinions.

This is insane. BAD and GOOD are value judgements based on opinions. OF COURSE they are not facts! When I say "This game is bad", there is NO POSSIBLE WAY that can be a statement of anything other than opinion. They shouldn't have to guess, because there's no way it can be anything else!.

That's why I don't waste time qualifying statements as opinion or fact.

No, instead you waste time by generating this precise conversation over and over and over and over and over again.

"The sky is blue."

Fact, or opinion?

(I can get you any number of experts - qualified, smart, not-sloppy experts - to argue that question. They won't all agree. Or at least, they won't all agree until you provide context for the distinction.)

You say "I know whether what I'm saying is fact or opinion, and everyone else should, too." And I'm telling you that 1) NOT everyone else does, and 2) people don't even know if YOU know.