Re:Smart people can rationalize anything
by DanielBMarkham on Monday May 11, 2009 @11:42PM
(#604831)
I especially like it when you're making a case for something and make some generalization as part of it, like so "And just as the sky is blue, we know that X"
Then somebody replies with something like "But at night time the sky is black"
So you're either playing "let's find the nit" or ignoring the troll.
If you ignore, they feel vindicated (!) that they've corrected you. After all, critical parts of your argument are based on falsehoods!
I'm getting better at ignoring.
I can deal with long posts, as long as the tone is "Is this what you said? If so, I don't understand how you would account for X"
Amen. This is something that I see rear its ugly head most often in the political and economic philosophy threads here, to my chagrin. Those exchanges become incredibly tedious and dogmatic in short order. In an almost inverse heuristic, the longer the posts in these arguments, the less informative, and dare I sare, more idiotic, they tend to be.
Oddly, it seems the younger posters seem to be the most completely convinced that their vision of the planet and how it should be run from those perspectives is perfect, which feeds into the point-scoring sagas.