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 cultural article is that of familiarity with condescension rather than familiarity with approval then the same open-mindedness that leads me to tolerate the unappealing-to-me cultural work prompts me to tolerate the various ways of using work in the social dance.
(My own observation is that "it was so bad it was good" tends to be a moderate-to-low status signal except in special cases. Unless there is inherent enjoyment to the task there are likely more socially optimized tactics.)
It's just arrogance.
Frequent use of declarations of the form "<people doing something I don't like> is just arrogance" is itself rather arrogant.
...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 cultural article is that of familiarity with condescension rather than familiarity with approval then the same open-mindedness that leads me to tolerate the unappealing-to-me cultural work prompts me to tolerate the various ways of using work in the social dance.
(My own observation is that &
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?