Subject: Re: CLOS is hard. Let's go shopping (Was Re: Lisp in Python) From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 04 Oct 2002 11:53:16 +0000 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3242721196423218@naggum.no> * Raffael Cavallaro | But your entire post, to which I'm replying, is just *your* emotional | response. This is your view. It is wrong. | Why is *your* emotional response the topic of this newsgroup? You attack me, you dumbfuck. What do you expect? | How is asking people to kill themselves the legitimate topic of | comp.lang.lisp? How is context irrelevant in your life? I have come to conclude after many years of informal study, there are two kinds of people¹: Those who think, learn, speak contextually, and those who think, learn, speak absolutely. There is no middle ground between these two kinds of people. If you do not understand the importance of context in human learning, there is no evidence of it /anywhere/, and you approach other people's statements as either true or not true and you /accept/ them as replacements of other statements if they are true. If you do understand the importance of context in human learning, it is /everywhere/, and you approach other people's statements as valid in context, and you expend some effort to understand the context in which it is valid, and judge that more than the surface "truth" of the statement. Thus a person of the absolute persuasion will only believe one thing at a time in a given area, while a person of the contextual persuasion will be able to believe many different things in different contexts, pending a unifying context. When a person of the absolute persuasion reads the statements of a person of the contextual persuasion, they are usually unable to understand anything that goes on, and prefer the stupidest of all possible reactions: they count words. If people use words from so-and-so list of words, they are knowledgeable, kind, gentle, etc, and if they use words from so-and-so list of words, they are idiots, mean, harsh, etc. Conceptual, contextual understanding of human communication is unavailable to people of the absolute persuasion and they will ask out-of-context questions and harrass people for their choice of words completely regardless of anything that happened surrounding their use. Needless to say, I consider people of the absolute persuasion to be useless wastes of resources that could be better spent elsewhere and favor recycling of the wasted resources that did not achieve contextual understanding in its lifetime. Others tend to think that it can be taught, but I see no evidence of success. Children exhibit these traits long before they are able to verbalize their conceptualization process. -- 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.