For some reason, there exists a Twitter meme called “1 Like = 1 Unpopular Opinion.” I don’t really understand what this means, but the result is obvious enough: a long list of tweets spelling out your unpopular opinions.
I don’t feel like using Twitter for this, and I don’t claim that all of these opinions are unpopular. That said, here are some pearls of wisdom presented old-school listicle style.
NOTE: I have no intention of explaning any of these no matter how much you ask. Take ’em for what they’re worth.
- Execution is more important than strategy.
- Return of the Jedi is the best Star Wars movie. Just tune out the Ewoks.
- Good parenting is worth the trouble, but not because it produces great kids.
- The internet makes dumb people dumber.
- Southern California is the best place in the US to live.
- Preventing mistakes is a more important part of management than most people think.
- Path dependence explains a helluva lot.
- “Correlation is not causation” is a lazy shibboleth too often used by people trying to sound smart.
- Everyone should give up on hamburger arguments. Most fast-food burgers are basically the same. Except for McDonald’s which is bad.
- The trampoline picture used to illustrate gravity in General Relativity is a terrible metaphor and should be banned.
- Spam is kinda tasty.
- Jimmy Carter is both overrated and underrated.
- There’s no real reason that evolution needs to be taught in high school.
- “Veep” is an aggressively unfunny show.
- Hillary Clinton’s biggest problem is that she’s compulsively honest but sounds compulsively devious.
- Obama was absolutely right to do nothing in Syria.
- Del Taco makes great fries.
- Airline seats have gotten smaller because 90% of their customers aren’t very big and don’t care.
- Kids should probably be restricted in their social media use.
- Central banks cannot effectively raise inflation rates.
- Go ahead and salt your food. It’s not that big a deal for most of us.
- Artificial intelligence is going to start causing mass unemployment in a decade or two.
- Woke culture is doing a lot of damage to the ability of progressives to talk about race.
- Donald Trump is largely right about NATO.
- We should ban semi-automatic weapons.
- Movies are better than live theater in almost every respect.
- IQ is real and it matters.
- Saturated fat isn’t really that bad for you.
- Most magazine articles over 3,000 words are overwritten.
- Acting is almost all about voice control: pitch, timbre, rhythm, speed, resonance, etc.
- The Krell were not a very advanced race.
- We are too obsessed with Shakespeare at the expense of other classical playwrights.
- It’s OK for the y-axis not to start at zero. What matters is displaying the data honestly and clearly.
- We should ditch the trust funds and pay for Social Security and Medicare out of the general fund.
- Sleeping pills are a terrific way of overcoming jet lag.
- African-Americans are not underrepresented in the Oscar acting categories.
- White-collar hiring managers should worry less about finding someone with specific previous job experience.
- The permanent income hypothesis is absurd.
- Carpeting is better than hardwood.
- Wearing socks to bed is a good idea.
- Windows is a pretty good operating system.
- C.P. Snow was right.
- Managers should worry less about making workers happy and worry more about giving them the tools they need to succeed.
- Tom Cruise is a good actor.
- If something is important enough to be worth arguing about, it’s nearly always complicated enough that both liberals and conservatives have good points to make.
- Full-on driverless cars will be in widespread use by 2025.
- Lists are often a very good way to structure a story.
- Dostoevsky is better than Tolstoy.
- We don’t need either a wall or stepped up ICE raids against Mexican immigrants, but borders do matter and we should take reasonable steps to secure ours.
- Quantum mechanics: WTF?
