I'm having a little trouble grokking your last point. Would you please elaborate?

Top tier criticism, well done. Thank you for enriching the topic.

It made me wonder, however: SI instead of AI brands you a follower of Trump. Does Grokking/Drinking instead of Understanding mark you as a follower of Heinlein?

I'd much rather follow Heinlein's free thinking instead of Trump's dictatorialism, and Heinlein never requested followers, but there is a similar mechanism going on nevertheless.

It marks you as wanting to belong to a certain tribe for sure, even if the definition of that tribe has been excised from the originator of the term: people use it because they see people that they admire or want to be like using it. In trump's case the tribe is about trump, in Heinlein's case the tribe isn't about Heinlein.

Like people walk around with their pants around their knees because they see that thugs wear them like that and they dream about being thugs. Or people who call each other "bro".

These are also normally people who weight the style more than the substance.

I wouldn't call myself a Heinlein fan. He was sometimes interesting, but was all over the map and had some pretty messed up ideas. I can't think of any particular tribe or style I'd like to adhere to, and I'm not about to change myself to fit in.

Save reactions like this for users of incel-speak like *maxxing.

I found Heinlein's works to be the full gamut of interesting and disgusting. That one word was amusing enough for me to use, and somehow that paints my entire character? It was one of the more innocuous things that could be lifted from his writing. You're trying to extrapolate far too much from that.

No you see this is my entire point. It's not that you read Heilein and you liked this word and so you started using it, that's bullshit. People very very rarely do something unusual like this, like using a weird word that they know nobody will understand.

In reality what happened is that you saw other people, people that you like and admire, saying grok and you copied them. You're copying the superficialities thinking that makes you closer in substance. It's cargo cult science for people.

Sure, buddy. Give yourself another pat on the back.

> In reality what happened is that you saw other people, people that you like and admire, saying grok and you copied them.

You have absolutely no way of knowing this.

> You're copying the superficialities thinking that makes you closer in substance.

Classic strawman.

> It's cargo cult science for people.

It could be, but it very well might not be.

I wasn't criticizing the thing you said, I was pointing to others in the room that you're brainless.

We've banned this account.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50013882.