"Bruce C. Miller" <bm3...@gmail.com> writes: > On Mar 7, 6:52 pm, Xah Lee <xah...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Of interest: >> >> • Why Can't You Be Normal? > > Though I doubt this will do any good, I'll offer some advice that > hasn't been mentioned here and solved a lot of the problems I've had > early in life with resistance to overly-emotional negative reactions > to my opinions. > > Say a person spends a great deal of time and energy researching some > topic and, based upon the evidence uncovered, comes to a conclusion > about it that is contrary to the established position within a > community, like, that RMS is a crackpot, as a simple example, which is > something I happen to agree with but that won't win many friends in > #emacs. Now, you could go in #emacs and declare your discovery of this > important fact (and, if true, it is important, since RMS is > influential), but what do you suppose will happen?
People will think about it a lot and decide that our society could greatly benefit from increasing the number of crackpots. The non-crackpots come and go without leaving much of a trace. However, being a crackpot is not sufficient in itself (this probably being more of a side effect rather than the main gist), so the message might not actually be helpful. So what is there to gain? -- David Kastrup -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list