Undermining (was: Curiosity – Caffeine Is Bad)

Suggesting that becoming rational and skilled is unfun and (even more ridiculously) unrewarding is absurd. It’s more fun and rewarding to go through life so irrational and incompetent that you can’t hold a productive discussion? Readers are going to come away thinking you don’t mean what you said.

What could you mean? Perhaps that you don’t really regard yourself as unable to have a productive conversation due to lack of skills, and don’t regard our conversation as an example of that. Or the clearest thing you seem to be hinting at is that CF’s learning materials and philosophical ideas are unfun and unrewarding. But instead of saying that and giving reasons or examples which could lead to progress, you hint at it with no details, and with deniability that you said it, so it’s an undermining attack rather than feedback suitable for engaging with.

I tried to end the discussion (unless there was a productive response or I had a new idea) and you tried to bait additional responses (from me, ET, or any CF fan) by saying something especially nasty, which is an especially bad, misleading comment for the discussion to end on. That is a pretty typical action in our society – it’s part of the personality type I was trying to explain in this topic that you have. It fits a standard pattern of how people behave. You were losing my attention so you lashed out and behaved extra badly to try to get more attention. That’s a way of trying to pressure and control people, (you want me to behave differently than I want to behave) and the chance it happens later is a downside of speaking to you at all in the first place. There’s ambiguity (as usual) because perhaps you’d actually rather you didn’t receive a reply, and your goal was more about ending in a way that raises your social status while lowering the status of your opponents.