Smasharoo wrote:
It's just *exceptionally clear to everyone* that you haven't read the Culture books.
No. Just in your own imagination. I guess what I find interesting is your choice of response. It's not the rational and logical: "That's incorrect because <A, B, C...>", but the illogical and useless: "you obviously have never read the books". You could use that response in any situation and it would have equal weight. So basically a useless response. I just don't get it. Does this sort of thing actually work in your daily or professional life?
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Keep pretending, I guess? I've given up caring.
For me, it's about studying human behavior. I have a theory that people tend to use the same argument methodology on others that worked on them when they formed their own opinions/positions. So if "Because god says so" worked to form some position in your mind, you're going to tend to think it'll work to form the same position in someone else. If "because facts A, B, and C, combined with logic methods 1, and 2, derive conclusion alpha" is how you learned something, you'll tend to use that instead.
In your case (and you're not unique in this), I suspect you spent a lot of time in classrooms being taught by teachers/professors who used the "anyone who disagrees with me didn't read or understand the study material" method of instruction. Your dogmatic need for an authority to tell you what is true or false, coupled with your own methodology of dismissing rather than addressing anyone who disagrees with you, strongly suggests this. I don't think I've *ever* seen you actually engage in an argument style discussion of anything. It's always "you're wrong", followed by "because you're an idiot, uneducated, etc".
Dunno. I find that interesting. Or I'm just bored whilst in the midst of a mind numbing computer image development process that basically requires me to make a change and then wait 10+ minutes to see if it has the desired effect. Repeat a few hundred times...
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Of course, I'm a cynic. Literally the first thought that goes through my head when someone presents a new idea, especially tech related is "where's the cost/catch?". I look for flaws in ideas, so when writers gush over something, it strikes me more as naive than compelling
Nah, you just aren't bright enough to understand the subtext.
And once again, you go for the attack on the other person's intelligence rather than address the issue itself. And in this case (as per usual), you've gotten it backwards. You've mistaken "so intelligent that concepts that take most people repeated explanations to grasp are predicted before the author gets halfway through building up the story for it" for "aren't bright enough to understand the subtext". What part of "he takes way too long to get to the point" in my post did you not get? For me, I tend to get impatient with stories where it's obvious the author has latched onto some scientific concept or technology and wants to highlight it in his plot, because the very fact that he's starting with that methodology makes the plot (and twists) pretty obvious.
For the record, I have the same problem with Crichton's books. The saving grace there is that they tend to be shorter. The negative is that his books all have the same plot, so there's that too. Not sure which author is "worse", actually.