To anyone who wants to try this sort of thing, my suggestion is to not do it halfway. A lot of people do it halfway in that they watch something or read something they otherwise would have thought was lame or stupid, and then they go around saying they "actually enjoyed it", except they add something like "it was so bad it was good". This isn't useful. It's just arrogance.
The best way to do this sort of thing is choose things that passed the market test for something relevant to you. If you're a guy in your 30s, reading something with 5,000 reviews on Amazon that's marketed toward teenage girls is not exactly going to be the most relevant choice. What would be better would be for example trying to learn how to appreciate music you think is "shallow and superficial", but you see a lot of people similar to you in other ways having a lot of fun with their friends listening to this music.
The goal is to change your mindset so you actually enjoy it, and actually appreciate it as useful and entertaining, rather than 'appreciate' it in some fake way, such as the whole 'it's so bad it's good' thing.
A lot of people do it halfway in that they watch something or read something they otherwise would have thought was lame or stupid, and then they go around saying they "actually enjoyed it", except they add something like "it was so bad it was good". This isn't useful.
The consumption of most articles of 'culture' is inherently motivated by signalling. There are entire industries and academic departments dedicated to people expressing opinions about which things suck. If someone finds that their desired signal in response to a given cu...
I think it would be a useful rationality exercise to take something that millions of people love, that you have contempt for, and sincerely try to appreciate it. The purpose would be to get practice imagining a different point of view, and to see whether you're able to do so.
50 Shades of Grey might not be the best choice for this exercise. I haven't read it. Maybe a better choice would be The da Vinci Code, NASCAR, or professional wrestling. But a book has a definite length that you have to get through to be allowed to say that you honestly tried.
The idea is to start a thread for people to discuss 50 Shades, or something else perceived as trashy, and try--not to find what you might like in it, but to get inside someone else's head and imagine why they might like it. (Of course it could backfire, and leave you less open-minded than before, if you always conclude that your contempt was simply right in the first place.)
I think the biggest problem is that if people succeed at finding something to appreciate in it, they would feel terribly embarrassed to say so. So this can be done with alternate accounts.
Anyone interested? What do you hold in contempt that you might be willing to take a closer look at?