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Something as inherently subjective as personal preference doesn't seem like an ideal example to make that point. How could you expect to objectively evaluate something like "I enjoy songs in a minor scale" or "I hate country"?


The point is to illustrate the disconnect between stated reasoning and proximate cause.

Consider your typical country music enjoyer. Their fondness of the art, as it were, is far more a function of cultural coding during their formative years than a deliberate personal choice to savor the melodic twangs of a corncob banjo. The same goes for people who like classic rock, rap, etc. The people who `hate' country are likewise far more likely to do so out of oppositional cultural contempt, same as people who hate rap or those in the not so distant past who couldn't stand rock & roll.

This of course fails to account for higher-agency individuals who have developed their musical tastes, but that's a relatively small subset of the population at large.




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