50 (Un)popular Opinions

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.

1. Execution is more important than strategy.
2. Return of the Jedi is the best Star Wars movie. Just tune out the Ewoks.
3. Good parenting is worth the trouble, but not because it produces great kids.
4. The internet makes dumb people dumber.
5. Southern California is the best place in the US to live.
6. Preventing mistakes is a more important part of management than most people think.
7. Path dependence explains a helluva lot.
8. “Correlation is not causation” is a lazy shibboleth too often used by people trying to sound smart.
9. Everyone should give up on hamburger arguments. Most fast-food burgers are basically the same. Except for McDonald’s which is bad.
10. The trampoline picture used to illustrate gravity in General Relativity is a terrible metaphor and should be banned.
    

    

11. Spam is kinda tasty.
12. Jimmy Carter is both overrated and underrated.
13. There’s no real reason that evolution needs to be taught in high school.
14. “Veep” is an aggressively unfunny show.
15. Hillary Clinton’s biggest problem is that she’s compulsively honest but sounds compulsively devious.
16. Obama was absolutely right to do nothing in Syria.
17. Del Taco makes great fries.
18. Airline seats have gotten smaller because 90% of their customers aren’t very big and don’t care.
19. Kids should probably be restricted in their social media use.
20. Central banks cannot effectively raise inflation rates.
21. Go ahead and salt your food. It’s not that big a deal for most of us.
22. Artificial intelligence is going to start causing mass unemployment in a decade or two.
23. Woke culture is doing a lot of damage to the ability of progressives to talk about race.
24. Donald Trump is largely right about NATO.
25. We should ban semi-automatic weapons.
26. Movies are better than live theater in almost every respect.
27. IQ is real and it matters.
28. Saturated fat isn’t really that bad for you.
29. Most magazine articles over 3,000 words are overwritten.
30. Acting is almost all about voice control: pitch, timbre, rhythm, speed, resonance, etc.
31. The Krell were not a very advanced race.
32. We are too obsessed with Shakespeare at the expense of other classical playwrights.
33. It’s OK for the y-axis not to start at zero. What matters is displaying the data honestly and clearly.
34. We should ditch the trust funds and pay for Social Security and Medicare out of the general fund.
35. Sleeping pills are a terrific way of overcoming jet lag.
36. African-Americans are not underrepresented in the Oscar acting categories.
37. White-collar hiring managers should worry less about finding someone with specific previous job experience.
38. The permanent income hypothesis is absurd.
39. Carpeting is better than hardwood.
40. Wearing socks to bed is a good idea.
41. Windows is a pretty good operating system.
42. C.P. Snow was right.
43. Managers should worry less about making workers happy and worry more about giving them the tools they need to succeed.
44. Tom Cruise is a good actor.
45. 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.
46. Full-on driverless cars will be in widespread use by 2025.
47. Lists are often a very good way to structure a story.
48. Dostoevsky is better than Tolstoy.
49. 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.
50. Quantum mechanics: WTF?