It's not all as cut and dried as most of the writers would have us believe.
SRH
Exactly.........!........
... 4. What one reads in sporting publications is far from gospel, experience is a far better teacher.
...
Or, as John Gierach wrote (I paraphrase) on "Expertising", over twenty years back in
Sex, Death and Flyfishing:
When someone says, "it must be true - I read it in a book", remember that the guy writing the book probably knows more about writing (and getting paid for it) than he does about what he's writing about. ... That, and the three cardinal rules of experitising are "be vague, so all eventualities can be accomodated in your opinion, leave the car door open, and leave the motor running."
Those are useful precepts to apply to any expertising and opinion. To them, I will add that there is no such thing as a
provably false opinion. Every opinion is equally true. The difference is that some opinions are more widely accepted than others. This flows from the nature of opinion: an opinion is the product of a person taking his selection from a set of facts and giving those facts varying weights as he runs them through a black box inside his head, whence comes the product known as his opinion.
