And if you have one person saying the Holocaust happened and 299 saying it didn't?
Then you still fall back to the evidence that is available. Like I said, you get a "more accurate picture", or maybe "you have a higher chance of getting an accurate picture" would fit better. You shouldn't believe a billion people if the evidence available points in a different direction.
Although, thinking about it... at that point you probably shouldn't rely on the evidence either I guess, more likely that there's something wrong with it than 1 Billion people being wrong, but you still don't believe the people, you take an agnostic stance until you can figure out what's going on.
Ask a group of people in my generation about the fashions and music and other popular culture of the 1970s. Some will say, "OMG, what the hell were we thinking? It was AWFUL!!!".
Others will say the '70s were a great decade, the fashions were fun, and in general they will say positive things.
Good luck finding that "average person."
I'm sure I don't actually have to explain this, but I'm not sure how else to respond to this part, so... the "average person" does not actually exist, it's a metaphor for what people in a particular group
generally think, a theoretical person built out of majority opinions.
If your goal is to just get some impressions from people who don't make up that majority opinion, or in other words, if you don't want "the essence" of that time, then yeah, asking that random elderly person you know is perfectly reasonable, but the chance that that person actually tells you what that time was like for most people is slim. And again, if that's not even what you're looking for, fine. I personally don't find it all that useful.
As for me? I liked '70s fashion for the most part, I'm one of the many people who experienced standing in blocks-long lineups to see Star Wars in the theatre, and tolerated '70s music (I was raised on music from earlier decades). Mind you, it was a stressful decade in some ways, too.
Oh, and there was no internet. We had to read real newspapers, and if we wanted to look something up, we went to the library (or, as my grandfather did, bought a set of Encyclopedia Britannica). The closest thing anybody could imagine to Wikipedia was the library computer on Star Trek.
Well... great.
WHOOSH! and the point of my post just flew over your head, there it goes!
It's not what advice was given. It's who gave it. Yes, it's sensible advice... but not what you'd expect from somebody born in the early 1920s. It's more like I'd expect from my mother, since she only married her second husband after several years of living with him (24 years later he finally admitted he was cheating on her with a woman 20 years younger than she was, and said he wanted a divorce). But my mother kept nagging me about when was I getting married. Even a casual date to see a movie with someone got blown all out of proportion ("Is it SERIOUS?!").
Okay, then we have established that people of all ages are individuals I guess?
The point of the thread isn't to upset other posters. It's to talk about things that consistently make us very angry.
Jeez...
Also, Ryika, if you want to make a silly trollish jab, generally, you indicate that by something like an emotocon when somebody pushes back on it instead of "well, isn't it true?" I'm finding your "why are we even talking about this?" Mea culpa a bit insincere when you feel obliged to lay out argumentation in support of your broad claim of people being useless "because internet." Yikes.
I don't know, I think that sort of humor only works if you don't make it too obvious and people have to think for a moment whether it's meant to be serious or not. But like I said, this probably wasn't the right audience for such a joke.
