In these episodes, the characters' interdependent narcissism generally becomes unwieldy: the four of them go to the North Fork with competing ideas of a good weekend, and their trivial preferences become statements of purpose — ammunition for a fight about who they are.
This was all part of the unity project, Desmond and Moore argue: Darwin saw sexual selection, in which basically trivial preferences shaped the appearances of populations over time, as a means by which races with a common origin could have acquired their visible differences.
In Dad, it had more trivial consequences: a strong preference for Euthymol over Colgate, Amundsen over Scott, Anadin over Aspro.
So what happened then was that important forces that had not been used, because they fell outside the new scale of national life (which was the life of television), began to find a home in the exercise of preference concerning trivial matters, so that attention, aspiration, even affection came to adhere to shimmers thrown up by the demography in trivial matters.
On the contrary, much less trivial distributions (with remarkable preference of large fitness values) emerge as a consequence of inherent nonlinearity.
However, the determination of farmers' preferences is not trivial because of its large heterogeneity.
Whether or not this is a good idea, we should at least acknowledge that our desire to eat meat is not a trivial matter, no mere "gastronomic preference".
A natural response to these suggestions is to say that abortion is a morally serious business and that the health service is justified in supporting screening and abortion only where the woman has a very good reason for ending a pregnancy, such as the detection of serious fetal abnormality, as opposed to a trivial reason, such as a preference about sex or cosmetic features.
Making group recommendations relevant to the joint interests of a group, however, is not a trivial task due to the diversity in preferences among group members.
In a recent comment, Koonin and Wolf (K&W) claim that the model preference for UCA is "a trivial consequence of significant sequence similarity".
Preference utilitarianism is also often criticized on the grounds that some preferences are misinformed, crazy, horrendous, or trivial.
