If someone arrives at opinion X by epistemologically faulty observations of the world or by eating up logical fallacies do you still think their opinion cannot be said to be invalid?
Opinions are not facts and facts are not opinions. But it truly does get hard to distinguish.
Lets take an examples.
> The world is flat.
That isn't an opinion, that is a "factual statement" that is wrong. No matter how they want to phrase it or look at it, there is evidence that the earth indeed is not flat.
> A UFO crashed at Roswell.
This is claiming a fact, but we can't know for sure because we don't have reliable evidence either way.
> Green is better than blue.
This is an opinion, because it's based on personal preference.
A good way to try and distinguish is "can this claim be verified." Opinions cannot be verified, as they are based on personal experience / feelings / thoughts. Facts can have measurable data that will support / deny them.
>This is an opinion, because it's based on personal preference.
"I consider Mr. X a bad person" is also an opinion (notice it's not "Mr. X is a bad person"), but most people would have that opinion due to previous observations about Mr. X, not due to some immaterial thing going on inside their heads that has nothing to do with the world as it is.
That opinion is/should be changeable based on further evidence.
Experience/feelings/thoughts are based in the mind's interaction with reality. Sure some opinions are just a reflection of whatever internal mechanism is going on inside their heads, but lots of other opinions are not.
No, it's a fact (claim).
“Mr. X is a bad person” is an opinion, but “I consider...” is a fact claim about an opinion.
> but most people would have that opinion due to previous observations about Mr. X, not due to some immaterial thing going on inside their heads that has nothing to do with the world as it is.
No, they think that (or not) because of the interaction between experience and lower-level value functions, not experience alone.
Thinking "Mr. X is a bad person" is still subject to external experiences and should be re-evaluated if given further evidence.
If it can be re-evaluated if given further evidence, surely the initial opinion was invalid?
> they think that (or not) because of the interaction between experience and lower-level value functions, not experience alone.
"Experience" entails an interaction with inner values for humans - you can't really separate experience from the inner values without cutting off the nervous system from it... at which point you can't call it experiencing something anymore.
You can go down the rabbit hole with logical arguments and fallacies trying to neatly categorize things into "facts" and "opinions", but it's not that easy IMO :)
For example, I could say "The world is flat" and you could provide all the evidence you want and I could simply say I don't trust the evidence, or your data or your measurement devices. After all there certainly have been "facts" with "evidence" that have been disproven over time as new measurable data was uncovered. I could choose to not believe your evidence while I wait for more sufficient evidence in infinitum. Even 99.9999% confidence still leaves room for doubt.
"I think therefor I am" or simply "it thinks" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum), is the closest thing to a "fact" that I've heard. Beyond that statement you have to make a leap of faith somewhere, even to believe the Earth is round.
> A UFO crashed at Roswell.
> This is claiming a fact, but we can't know for sure because we don't have reliable evidence either way.
Russell's teapot is an interesting counter argument to these assertions made without evidence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
> He wrote that if he were to assert, without offering proof, that a teapot, too small to be seen by telescopes, orbits the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, he could not expect anyone to believe him solely because his assertion could not be proven wrong.
So, wether a UFO crashed at Roswell or not isn't really that interesting unless someone somewhere has evidence.
But practically, I think it's possible to organize content into "productive theories" and "unproductive theories", which is again still subjective. But a "productive theory" would mean that I have enough confidence where I can use the theory to get a useful or expected result.
For example, I don't care if the Earth is "factually" round or not, but I have enough confidence from my interpretation and trust in the collected data about the shape of the Earth that I can build a large-scale reflecting pool that doesn't overflow and program a satellite to not crash back down to the ground. I think a lot of people call these things "facts", but it doesn't mean I have 100% confidence or claim to understand the entire situation, it just means I have enough information to be successful.
An "opinion" that is clearly in opposition to a fact certainly has very little value, and I would consider it invalid. I'm not saying someone doesn't have the right to a useless, proven-wrong opinion, but the value of any of their words will be near-zero in my eyes.
Not all opinions are equal, not all opinions are valid or represent truth.
Some opinions may be purely subjective and not even involve any kind of truth or fact statement ("X tastes good") but those opinions have very little value overall. Not completely useless, but not far from it
I personally feel we're accelerating towards a future where little thought, time, effort, or trust is given to anything factual and opinion somehow is the holy grail (especially the tragic idea that all opinions are somehow on equal footing) and I think we'll be worse off for it
Facts and opinions are indeed mutually exclusive.
A fact is a statement that can be supported to be true or false by data or evidence. An opinion is a personal expression of a person’s feelings or thoughts that may or may not be based in data.
> An "opinion" that is clearly in opposition to a fact certainly has very little value, and I would consider it invalid.
Opinions cannot be wrong/right as they are personal to everyone. Opinions can indeed have value, but that again would be your opinion of their opinion. It's not your fact of their opinion. Now if they are claiming something that can or can't be proven such as "the world is flat" that isn't an opinion, that is them trying to claim a fact, and that's a personal failing to not differentiate.
> I personally feel we're accelerating towards a future where little thought, time, effort, or trust is given to anything factual and opinion somehow is the holy grail (especially the tragic idea that all opinions are somehow on equal footing) and I think we'll be worse off for it
I think we are worse off for judging opinions as facts as well. But here's the thing.... that's my opinion not my fact. I can't myself produce measurable data that says we are or aren't worse off, so it's an opinion. Personally I also think that news media / trusted sources for information should properly label opinion vs fact and be able to back up their facts with data.
An opinion from a stranger on the internet, is of fairly low value, because you can't determine what weight to put behind that individuals opinion. You don't know if they've been thinking about this problem for months, or if they just clanged together an opinion right then and there, or if their opinion was fed to them via some youtuber they watch, or any other number of ways people come to an opinion.
Whereas with books and even people within your community, it's usually a lot easier to discern or research whether or not their opinion was derived from great thought, facts and experience. I will value the opinions in a book about engineering from the chief mechanic of an F1 team for example, there's reason to think they've given the topic a great deal of attention.
Fully agree.
I just get tired of seeing people claim that someone's opinion is wrong because they have some other view point that contradicts their opinion. People also intentionally blur the lines to try and get support for their argument, to me claiming valid/invalid on an opinion is one of the methods I see fairly often.
I think a good point to make regarding this is that no opinion can ever be valid or invalid. Facts can be valid or invalid, and must be supported by evidence to be valid, but opinions just exist. One can be proven, the other can't.
You can personally think someone's opinion is stupid, or amazing, or whatever adjective you want to throw in, but it can never be "valid" or "invalid." Saying someone has an "invalid" opinion is just joining into the tribalism that people so love.
I personally try to ignore most people's opinions just to "filter out the noise" as you said. I try to drill into the facts, but that can be very challenging, because even factually accurate data can be misrepresented into an opposite opinion.