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Comment by halayli | Hacker News Reader

Not taking sides but this is argument from authority fallacy. Whether she is a Nobel Prize winner or not is irrelevant to answering OP's comment and whether her books are page turners or majority find them uninteresting.

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All you have to do is go on Rotten Tomatoes and compare the professional critic's rating with the audience rating.

If your preferences generally align with professional critics, you are in the minority as far as I can tell - at least for movies.

I wouldn't be surprised if the same is true for books, vindicating OP, but I don't know of an appropriate data source that could settle this.

I thought it was considered "well known" that the Rotten Tomatoes audience rating is not trustworthy because of ballot stuffing by the film studios.

I find that it’s fairly reliable unless there is a ton of money involved. A marvel movie with a giant budget that the studio needs to do ok? Probably gets a 10-20% curve. But a cryptic indie film? Generally pretty close. Basically usi

I think there were news of an agency doing the work to favor good critics reviews among the 50 first ones on the release of smaller budget movies.

The two groups looks for very different things in the media. One care deeply about it and appreciates many different aspects of it, and sometimes the intellectual challenge is part of it. They are utterly bored by most books and films.

The other group wants to relax and be entertained, not solve an intellectual puzzle.

Many are somewhere in between. I don’t care about an odyssey through some neo-Marxist mystery, but are utterly bored by Marvel iteration 25.

Not necessarily authority fallacy. Toni Morrison books had two big booms in sales. One after winning the Nobel Prizes and other, actually others, when Oprah Winfrey included her books in her book club.

I would categorize those readers to be reading her willingly.

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