Does popular = good?

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by Alex

In the area of literature, however, I think broad population popularity is a very bad indicator (at least for me) of quality. In fact, the more people who have read a book (in the population at large) the more certain I am in predicting it is awful.

See, that's my point. There my be a strong correlation for movies between "highly rated" (which I probably should have used in my thread title rather than "popular") and "good", but it does not serve as "proof" of good, particularly since there is no such thing as truly "proving" something so subjective.