Next time that happens just take a half empty fifth of old crow out of your trench coat pocket and throw it, shattering it against the wall behind her while crudely and loudly explaining how you down 2 of these every day and you’re diabetic but your doctor who is an actual doctor told you it was because of it’s toxicology not because it’s a sugar. Follow with expletives and vomiting.
She won’t do it again.
Yes. 
So my esoteric knowlege won out this evening watching University Challenge.
The main question and follow ups were posters from Roger Corman’s Poe films with the titles removed. Who got them all on the first guess not the students. Well they got The Pit And The Pendulum but that’s a gimmie.
I came across this thread on Reddit, and feel like it’s a great question:
What do you ask someone to know if they have a clue about your field?
For me, as an “expert” retail drone it’s, “How would you pitch a printer to someone who hates technology?”
The answer: You don’t. You ask what kind of things they print, listen very attentively, and if they said “pictures” (which they will) point to an Epson XP for under $100 and with complete confidence say, “This is the best printer we have for what you need.” If they say it’s too expensive, they’re not buying and nothing you say matters anymore. On the off chance they say “cheap ink” point to the HP 8610 or 8100. If I hear you say the “Ecotank” to someone not claiming to run a business, I will find you and cut you.
For chemistry this gets surprisingly easy. Pretty much anything basic from P-Chem or inorganic does the trick. People who’ve passed those classes are all too often clueless anyway.
My issue is that those subjects for me are all of the kind where there is so much general prejudice that opening my mouth at all is a mistake.
The older I’ve gotten, the less and less I speak – other than banal chitchat – unless I’m with close friends.
I guess I ask what view they hold of historical events and if that’s informed by historians or popular culture/media.
I don’t like talking to people that much about beliefs. Or stuff I’m an expert in. Only very superficially. Unless they are friends, like you said.
Even on here. Sometimes when I try to explain something, not even because I believe it or I’m advocating anything -I’m just describing something because I know how it works, regardless of how I feel about it- and so often just the act of explaining something turns into an attack on me. Followed by the “it’s not all about you” bullshit, which is just not true because an ad hom is all about who you’re attacking! Doh!
I just chalk it up to people’s immaturity. You can’t tell how old people are on the Internet. And even if you vaguely suspect, you still don’t know people’s emotional development.
And people don’t truly want to hear information that doesn’t confirm their prior beliefs. The smarter people are, the harder it is to simply provide information to them.
So I shrug, walk away. People can be so stupid and petty. And they are not worth the time. Friends are worth the time. Random attack-prone internet warpath types aren’t worth the time. You know who you are. Here’s a bag of hammers for you: you know what to do to yourselves with them.
Isn’t it sometimes worth airing things out in public? If we can’t hash things out collectively, as they get more complicated, then what are we supposed to do? Retreat into small social enclaves? What do we gain from that?
(BTW, have you seen my smoked habs?)
I know a little bit about everything, so I can have fun talking about a variety of subjects. Comes in handy with a pretentious ex-cousin-in-law who likes to talk about fancy things, and I actually know WTF he is talking about.
On the internet the two “people are wrong on the internet” that I feel compelled to defend the most are evolution and gun control. Though in polite company I rarely push either issue too much.
Sometimes there’s gain. More often, it turns into a public gnashing of teeth. And because the true objects of derision so rarely show their faces here, we turn it against each other and use each other as proxy objects for our ire. There’s no gain in that. It replays again and again in every insane gun debate / misogyny / racism / etc thread on here, every week. If you can explain the gain from that, I’ll listen. But I really don’t think there is.
Well, I rank those differently on the objectivity scale. You can be wrong about evolution, but you can only be self-inconsistent about gun control. Social issues are necessarily hard to convert to facts. There are facts about social issues, but it comes down subjective ideas about what we want.
You and I create the facts about what we want, then we have to invent policy from the nexus of the real world evidence and our priorities for society (which can be different.) If I don’t care how many people get sick, I can be very consistently antivax without there being a factual basis to dispute my view that vaccination should not be government mandated. I might not be convincing, but I’m not wrong the same way someone arguing against evolution is wrong.
Well I guess you can’t be “wrong” with your opinion (Unless it happens to be racist, sexist, able-ist, etc) But the problem I have is many people’s option’s are not based on fact, or the facts they think they know are incorrect.
I mean there is some head-slapping - where-do-they-come-up-with-this sort of misinformation out there. Most recently example was that a “bullet button” on an AR-15 makes it fully automatic. This was actually said by a news host. It’s like they had just heard of the term and didn’t even bother googling the definition, they just went with what it sounded like. Or some one told them that was what it was, and they were like, “Good enough research for cable news.”
So in a casual setting if I heard something, I will usually start with asking what they mean by that, because most of the time they are starting out on wrong information.
“How do you feel about variable length subnet masking?”
“Do you think that guy in Carolina’s hillbilly wootz is worth the effort, or would he be better off pattern-welding?”
“Do you think Rosch’s work on prototyping invalidates the POSIX group mapping mechanism of RFC2307?”
“Do you think Augustine’s trinitarianism was just a political expediency that grew horns, and hooked?”
“Something something specific impulse something something?”
“How 'bout them sedges, uh huh?”
Mind-altering drugs. I hold a PhD in neuroscience/psychopharmacology, focussed on the behavioural and neurological impact of illicit drug use. Before that, I spent a decade as a fairly serious IV amphetamine user, and had at least a brief introduction to pretty much every other recreational drug along the way.
There isn’t actually that much “correction” to be done on the drug stuff. People either accept the evidence that prohibition is massively harmful, or they ignore it (or, worse, assert that the harms are directed at “deserving” targets). The positions are tribal and faith-based rather than anything subject to empiricism.
What “correction” I do indulge in tends to be more related to science in general. “No, there is no grand conspiracy of all scientists to pretend that climate change is a thing; science does not work that way”.
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