I’m not embarrassed. I occasionally explore contrarian interpretations of events in order to Cunningham a reasonable argument against them into existence. It’s a good exercise in reevaluating one’s internal implicit biases: if no argument exists against hypothesis H, one should reject that hypothesis in favor of the null.

In this case the only argument is “I read a book that says X is good”, which isn’t much of an argument at all. Null hypothesis is looking strong.

You however should be embarrassed for suggesting folks opinions don’t matter if they haven’t read the same books as you.