mercredi 22 mars 2017

Pedantics and Anti-intellectualism.

I'm gonna run a little test here. Read the following:

Bob: A turtle is a mammal.
Ted: No it isn't Bob, a turtle lays eggs. Mammals give birth to live young.


When reading that was your first instinct to run into the conversation and remind Ted that members of the monotrome order (echidnas and the platypus) lay eggs and are mammals?

If so please stop.

Pedantics really has become it's own subcategory of anti-intellectualism in argumentatives, an almost fetishized obsessive need to take the side that is 99% correct to task for the 1% they got wrong (and even "got wrong" is too strong a term for simply not being more linguistically precise then the discussion requires) while ignoring the 100% the other side got wrong and I'm rapidly losing patience for it and the subtext is always the same "If you're not 100% correct it's somehow wrong to tell other side they are incorrect even if their incorrectness is on a scale far beyond yours."

A long time ago I lost all patience with the "Every discussion must be fair and balanced! All strong opinions must be equally wrong!" crowd and this is the newest version of it. I just accepted a long time ago that there is a not insignificant number of people out there that are just... set off when they see a discussion where one side is obviously arguing from a much stronger intellectual position, I don't know I guess I've always got the impression they see it as bullying or something, and for some unfathomable to me reason just can't not run into the discussion to nitpick something the "winning" side is doing to give a coded cooing reassurance to the other side and I'm really tired of it.


via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/2mU2aSg

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