Subject: Re: Difference between LISP and C++
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 28 Oct 2002 15:08:44 +0000
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3244806524199432@naggum.no>

* Pascal Costanza <costanza@web.de>
| I have learned from the past few months that c.l.l consists of (at least)
| three groups of people.

  And typically, you have managed to misrepresent your opposition.

| The "professional" people think that making strong statements about other
| people's arguments is ok because it's only the counter-argument that
| counts (or rather the exchange of arguments).  To them, saying things
| like "your argument is fucked up" is ok, and they ask people to recognize
| that they don't simultaneously mean that "you are fucked up".

  Nobody says "your argument is fucked up", you dimwit.  The argument is
  countered calmly and cleanly without undue emotions either way.  Then, if
  some feel-good jerk has never learned to deal with technical arguments,
  goes bananas and attacks people for not helping him feel good about his
  mistake.  That you have to invent this position so you can argue against
  something that is easy to argue against is just the kind of evidence that
  I use to conclude that you are unable to remember events accurately.

| The professional people think that people who are nice to each other risk
| that the truth may not be spoken, because the truth can sometimes be
| brutal.  The feel-good people don't think so.

  You never speak the truth when it would not be nice, yet you feel free to
  speak lies when you feel that that would hurt people you do not like.
  The fact is that you feel-good jerks disregard truth because your feelings
  weigh more than facts and truth.

  The distinction between the two groups are better described as follows:

A People whose personal feelings are fragile and of primary importance and
  who attack others (or defend such attacks) when their personal feelings
  are hurt.  These people care mostly about their personal feelings, even
  when they are out in public.  Many of these are profoundly egoistic and
  self-absorbed, to the point where nobody else's feelings could possibly
  matter.  It is therefore OK to people in this group to attack those who
  they think have hurt their feelings.

B People who regard the truth as fragile and in need of constant vigilance
  to protect and maintain because we will always be presented with barrages
  of falsehoods and outright lies, and who therefore try to educate people
  and correct mistakes.  These people care mostly about not spreading more
  mistakes and to the extent it is definitely known, avoiding re-opening
  long debates on why things are so.  Now, the kicker: These people /feel/
  a great concern for truth and knowledge, a passion for what the community
  knows and agrees to.  When you post falsehoods to such a person, you have
  hurt /his/ feelings.  This fact is incomprehensible to people in group A
  because their feelings have never been about anything but their very own
  selves.

  Now, the result of the immature A meeting the mature B is that when B
  corrects a mistake made by an A, the A whines that B has hurts his
  feelings.  A is unable to grasp that his posting a falsehood has hurt B's
  feelings, and therefore does not understand that B could say anything to
  correct him.  Who are correct, anyway, thinks the A, and why does B not
  get a life?  It was only a mistake/lie/misrepresentation, and not like
  anybody got hurt.  The A's are so unable to grasp that people can be
  concerned with more than their personal selves that very few A's /ever/
  understand why B's react in ways that they associated with hurt pride or
  something when they think they have not hurt anyone.  The A's are so damn
  sure that they have not hurt anyone that they will defend themselves from
  any claim to the contrary, even lashing out at those who say so.  The B's
  read this as "yes, /of course/ my lies and misrepresentations and posting
  inflammatory falsehoods was intentional".

  The person in group A will therefore launch a personal attack on the
  person who corrected his mistake.  What the people in group A do not
  understand is that there never were any personal attacks in the factual
  correction.  (Again, nobody says "your argument is fucked up".  This is
  the kind of thing that people who feel too much have to invent to make
  their feelings feel reasonable and just when in fact they are not.)

  Some people do not care very much about anything and cannot for the life
  of them figure out why anyone would get so worked up about truth or
  knowledge.  Some people do not understand how so emotionally immature
  people as those in group A ever got out of kindergarten, but there is
  some reason to believe that the A's were overly encouraged to protect
  their own feelings, and were never encouraged to feel a passion for any
  field of knowledge.

  In any case, the feel-good people in group A do not actually consider
  feelings to be the most important thing to protect.  If they did, they
  would be able to understand the feelings of others.  The only thing that
  matters to the feel-good people is their /personal/ feelings.  Truth does
  not even enter the picture, as the fact that nobody says "your argument
  is fucked up" does not /register/ with the feel-good jerks.

-- 
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway

Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder.
Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.