I think I tend to follow what the data presents because I’m very data driven and focused. For me, stats are the objective truth and that’s what you need to present as evidence before you claim something.
I have a friend that’s the exact opposite; he holds whatever he personally experiences as the objective truth and nothing can sway him – even though what he’s experiencing is by definition, subjective to his preferences and experiences – and he uses his (oftentimes very biased) experiences and knowledge to make massive overgeneralizations about a subject that annoy me sometimes. I also think he’s kind of snobbish, very high brow and a contrarian at times, although he explicitly would deny this.
-He says that German made products are shoddy, overrated and engineered to fail – and the evidence he gives are the fact that his BMW breaks down all the time, his Montblanc pen ink runs dry without him using it and his Sennheiser HD800 headphone pads deteriorated by themselves within a couple years.
-He thinks most modern Hollywood movies suck because there’s too much focus on CGI, fancy explosions and action instead of writing and plot. He prefers movies that are pre-1990s.
-He says most Hollywood action movies like Terminator 2, Die Hard, Rambo, etc are overrated because there’s not really much action in them and it’s just somebody holding a gun and praises 80s Hong Kong action films because they are far superior in terms of action and depth
-He says most 1990s horror movies suck because they focus too much on slasher films and not enough on traditional horror like Fright Night and Dawn of the Dead and don’t have the depth of those movies. He says Blair Witch Project is one of the most overrated movies ever.
-He says post 1980s Disney animation is too mainstream and predictable and prefers the older Disney films like Sword in the Stone
-He says post 1980s Japanese anime is too polished and mainstream and prefers the experimental nature of 1970s and 1980s Japanese anime like Lupin the 3rd and Maison Ikkoku.
-His favorite Ghibli films are NOT the popular ones like Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke; he prefers Takahata films like Only Yesterday and My Neighbor Yamadas
-He says Quentin Tarantino is the most overrated director ever because he just rips off other films frame by frame (Reservoir Dogs a ripoff of City on Fire, Kill Bill ripoff of Lady Snowblood etc)
-He says JK Rowling is an overrated author because Urusula Le Guin is much better. Also, Ernest Hemingway is overrated too.
-He says modern video games have too much hand holding and older retro games from the 80s and 90s were the best because of their higher difficulty
-He is a HUGE arcade and Street Fighter 2 fan and believes that was the golden age of gaming and that no game could ever top Street Fighter 2. He didn’t like Street Fighter 3 because of the parry mechanic and Street Fighter 4 relied too much on spamming attacks. He did like Street Fighter 5 but then didn’t like Street Fighter 6 because the drive gauge is too easy to pull off.
-He thinks Mortal Kombat and Super Smash Bros are for casuals (probably because he’s biased to SF2)
-He thinks beat em ups are the ‘evolution’ to platformers because of the extra movement plane they added to move up and down and he says this is what everyone his age thought at the time in arcades
-He thinks arcade games were the gold standard in video games back then because of their difficulty and graphics compared to home consoles back then
-He judges a video game based solely on the combat and it’s difficulty level. If it’s too easy and/or isn’t well balanced in difficulty, then the game sucks. His gold standard for video games are Dynasty Warriors 3, Street Fighter 2, Dungeons & Dragons Shadows over Mystara and Romance of the Three Kingdoms 8. He uses these games as the bar for which all other video games are judged. They have to meet the criteria of having challenging yet balanced combat, depth and complexity in gameplay and high replay ability value.
-He says dpads are superior to analog sticks because of the faster response times of a dpad – even in 3D games. Because he said he can play Dynasty Warriors 3 well using a dpad and if that game is good enough for a dpad then every 3D game is good enough for a dpad (his logic).
-He judges headphones and speakers based solely on how much detail it resolves and how much soundstage it has – hence why he prefers the Hifiman HE1000 Unveiled and Sennheiser HD800 (the original 800 not the 800s version because the 800s has ‘a touch less’ soundstage) out of all headphones cause that’s the headphone with the most detail and soundstage he’s heard.
-He judges DACs based solely on if it’s flagship level or not – and it has to be desktop level flagship. A ‘mobile’ flagship ES9038Q2M will be dismissed by him because the ES9038Pro is available and better. But that said, he generally prefers AKM chips to Sabre chips because he says Sabre chips are ‘too harsh sounding’.
-He judges amplifiers solely on their power output – in RMS. He raves about Emotiva because they are the only amplifiers that output a large amount of power for relatively affordable cost. He claims the Emotiva preamps are the only ones with sufficient voltage and power to properly drive his high end esoteric ASW tower speakers. Other amplifiers that output lower amount of power that costs more are scams to him.
-All things Japanese are the best to him. The Japanese can do no wrong. Everything they make are the most reliable, best quality, best value, best craftsmanship etc he even goes so far as to say that Japanese fruits and candy (Japanese fruits taste like candy and Japanese candy taste like fruit) and potato chips (the Hokkaido potato chips in particular) are superior to Western fruits and snacks.
-Most modern music sucks to him because he says it’s overproduced and the artists aren’t writing the music themselves. He only listens to music from before the 1990s when artists all wrote their own music.
-He finds Queen, Nirvana and AC/DC overrated. Queen because the Bohemian Rhapsody movie caused everyone to overrate and talk about them, Nirvana because they have just one style (the depressing grunge kind) and AC/DC because they are just ‘one style of Led Zeppelin repeated’.
-The 1980s were the best decade to him (probably because he grew up in that decade…) music, movies, toys, cartoons to him were at their peak in the 1980s.
-He says the only good things about the 1990s were the drama movies (like Shawshank Redemption), sitcoms (like Friends and Seinfeld) and video games (fighting games especially). He laments the decline in non drama movies, pop music, and children’s cartoons (he says 80s children’s cartoons were much grittier and darker).
-He prefers Friends over Seinfeld (because Seinfeld is just situational comedy and carried by George and Kramer while Friends has equal talent spread out amongst the cast and has more variety in comedy and drama)
-He thinks Penny Hardaway before injuries was just as good as Magic Johnson
-He thinks Brandon Roy before injuries was just as good as Kobe. He also thinks Devin Booker and many modern stars are better than Kobe was.
-He thinks Wilt is overrated because he wasn’t good in the post and didn’t take good shots with his fadeaways and his only good points came from dunks and finger rolls and Kareem was far superior to him
-He thinks KG is overrated because he relied too much on turnaround fadeaways similar to Wilt and that Duncan was far superior to him
-He thinks Kobe is overrated because he was a shot chucker that was far inferior to Jordan in every way and that most modern NBA guards are better than Kobe just on the basis on being more efficient
-He says Mario Lemieux is the GOAT of hockey, not Wayne Gretzky because Gretzky played with a stacked team in the 80s and Lemieux achieved more with less and was more skilled and unique.
-He says that Korean movies are overrated and have simple twists (like Parasite) and Korean dramas are just ripoffs of other shows (Squid Games ripoff of Battle Royale, Itaewon class ripoff of a Hong Kong drama etc)
-Korean electronics like LG and Samsung have failed for him in the past whereas Japanese electronics like Panasonic have never failed thus Japanese electronics are superior and Korean electronics over-rely on marketing useless features (like peak brightness on TVs which he says doesn’t reflect the typical usage) or claim that Samsung and LG would intentionally deceive consumers with their HDR optimizer feature which ‘purposely dims the entire display to get more detail on the brightest parts which makes the whole picture less accurate’
-He doesn’t trust game reviewers because he says they are casuals who only play the game on easiest difficulty which isn’t ‘truly’ experiencing the game
-He doesn’t trust movie reviewers because they haven’t watched as many international films as he did and thus doesn’t have the full perspective on films
-He doesn’t trust basketball analysts because he says they are for entertainment and don’t know as much basketball as he does
-He doesn’t trust audio reviewers because he says that they use the Harman curve as reference even though it’s not a neutral reference or flat reference curve and his ears are better than other people’s anyways
Needless to say, we have some disagreements about some of these points, but he remains adamant in thinking that whatever he thinks is the objective truth and if others disagree then that’s because they didn’t truly experience something as deeply as he did and/or they don’t have enough knowledge as him. He basically makes massive generalizations about something based on his personal experience and acts condescending to most people who don’t agree with him.
But I do find his takes interesting as he always tries his best to come up with some logical explanation for all of them. He does have a vast knowledge of many different topics including history, hockey, basketball, arcade games, movies, music, books etc
To give some examples of the type of person he is…
-He has a massive book collection (he owns limited edition bound reproductions of old books). He especially is a big fan of the Chinese novelist Jin Yong who wrote a lot of wuxia books – and he claims Jin Yong is ‘the perfect blend of Charles Dickens and JRR Tolkien’.
-He has a massive movie collection (he owns multiple copies of movies if they are different editions because the transfers, audio mix, coloring etc could be different). He claims to have watched movies like The Godfather and Citizen Kane when he was just 6 years old. And he regularly stocks up on 70s and 80s HK movies released from boutique labels and releases from independent foreign filmmakers. He says he regularly attends film festivals and has watched more movies than even Tarantino.
-He has massive toy figure collection (he keeps them the box of course)
-He claims he has watched every Jordan, Kobe and Lebron game – along with many old NBA games pre-1990s because he had ESPN Hardwood Classics available as a kid.
-He also claims to have played almost every SNES and PS1 game because he had this accessory called the ‘Disc Doctor’ that let him play Japanese SFC games on his SNES and his PS1 was modded to play pirated discs. He says that he knew some Japanese as a kid and he and his childhood friends who knew kanji would piece together the untranslated Japanese text to play those games back then
-he claimed to have more knowledge about Jordan sneakers (he owns a collection of that too) than authenticators so he doesn’t trust independent authenticators to authenticate shoes; he will buy the shoe and verify it himself to see if it’s real or fake. He also claims to be able to distinguish real and fake shoes in youtube videos
-he travels to Japan every year, and on his latest travel he went to this underground arcade where he claimed to have fought the best Street Fighter 2 Ken player in Japan to a standstill and the player was so impressed with him that he bought my friend a gift (lol)
-he claims to have been the world #2 in Street Fighter 2 at one point and good enough to challenge Daigo. He claims to have beaten the top North American player at the time (AfroLegends) with a shitty Xbox controller dpad
-he claims to have been making ‘impossible shots’ like Efren Reyes in pool because he used a snooker cue (which have smaller tips) in pool to create large amounts of spin that wouldn’t normally have been possible on a regular pool cue
-he claims to have been good enough in basketball (before his knee injuries) to play Olympic level players at the local gyms around Vancouver
-he claims he needs a wooden baseball bat to play baseball because ‘someday he might enter the minor leagues where metal bats are not allowed’ and apparently he throws pitches with such speed it injured his catcher’s shoulder when he caught it (lol)
-he claimed that he could immediately tell the difference between when his buddy’s home theater setup was using compressed Dolby Digital and not lossless Dolby TrueHD
-he could immediately tell the music files that he was playing on my DAP were ‘only’ CD quality but not high res FLACs
-he could immediately tell the TV we watched movies on were using ‘game mode’ vs ‘cinema mode’ because the colors were off
-he claimed his Nintendo Switch had a ‘hidden’ revision (which of course is the one that he had) that produced better and more accurate colors even superior to the OLED version
-he ‘needs’ the UAC2 function in dac dongles to be supported ‘in case’ he needs to play the Nintendo Switch in bed wearing his Sennheiser HD800 headphones
So I think in his head, he has such a vast wealth of knowledge that he rarely ever trusts reviewers online and he basically only trusts himself as the only source for truth. He literally is the embodiment of ‘I don’t care if everyone else disagrees, I am right’.