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The "I am eccentric" thread

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Case:

--- Quote from: Tova on 23 Jan 2018, 22:14 ---
--- Quote from: Case on 23 Jan 2018, 19:21 ---
--- Quote from: Tova on 23 Jan 2018, 15:59 ---I tend to assume I'm normal, and am surprised whenever I discover other people not thinking the same way I do about something. Is that weird? I don't know.  :-D

--- End quote ---
What do you mean? Other people having different opinions, or other people arriving at theirs in fundamentally different ways?

--- End quote ---

The latter. How even people who arrived at the same opinion got there via completely different reasoning, or by interpreting something we both saw in an entirely different way.

--- End quote ---

Uhuh ... Nowadays, I mostly just get angry - I guess two decades in a hard science and years of TAing & grading have thoroughly convinced me that "sometimes, when people think different from me it's because they're wrong".

I remember agonizing a lot when I started grading students (chronic self-doubt and OCD added to that), but I also remember that my shyness to tell people that they made a booboo related inversely to the time I spent with their ... mentations. As much fun as the whole "RaRaRah We're theoretical physicists and love being obsessive & underpaid!"-thingy is, you do want to go home at some point in the night ...

What sort of surprises me is when people don't care - even when they're shown they're wrong, even when they finally, after hours of discussion and stonewalling, acknowledge to you they were wrong - they don't care that they embarrassed themselves, they don't care what being "sloppy thinkers, but adamant about their results" means for their reputation, they don't care they wasted significant amounts of your time & energy. That's where I start feeling contempt and ... wariness. I only met three people of that sort past the Masters-level, but the experiences, as well as some of the reactions from other colleagues to such antics, were ... memorable (*).


(*) Which is part of why I still have faith in organized science - I have this pet theory that the whole outfit sort of selects for people who really dislike cognitive dissonance on the one hand, but just have to know on the other. And by construction, science tries to minimize the number of times where correctness can be regarded as a matter of opinion - there's a significant risk that "talking your way out of it" not only won't work, but will have serious repercussions. That you'll be shown to have been wrong, without any possible doubt, in full view of everybody, including your closest friends, most vicious enemies and the most important people in your profession (Also: Those circles are small. Tens of thousands per subfield, several hundreds to some thousands per specialisation, about 20-100 "people you have to know" per 'sect' - there's cliques of people who prefer the one or other 'method' - the "Luttinger liquid people", "The DMRG-mafia" etc.etc. I'd dined with five or so 'world-leading experts' in my specialisation already as an undergrad, and that's not anything unusual). Not a perfect protection against malcognitions, pig-headedness, poisonous hierarchies or plain cheating ... but the sort of people who enjoy playing that weird game are generally ill-suited to enjoy 'winning it for the wrong reasons'. Physicists at least, can get really nasty about people not admitting they're wrong, in an unrestrained, petty Lord-of-the-Flies way - "Was it really necessary to make fun of him in front of an international audience?" "I don't think I understand your question - He is wrong!". I once witnessed a conversation between my advisors (Masters and PhD, respectively) about an "incident" at a conference, and Ale's profound satisfaction of being proven right after the fact. I asked what the incident was and got the answer that someone had doubted a conclusion of his in a ... hurtful way. I pressed a bit further, and was told that what the offender had asked was "Are you serious about this?". Now imagine people who regard that kind of innocuous remark as a memorable slight getting ... explicit.

LTK:
Not talking to your pets is weird. Talking to your pets a hell of a lot is maybe a little weird.

You're an eccentric when your pets talk to you. I want to get a pet bird one day, teach it how to speak, and be the eccentric.

jwhouk:

--- Quote from: Castlerook on 24 Jan 2018, 08:28 ---
--- Quote from: jwhouk on 24 Jan 2018, 07:45 ---I'm so weird, I bought a place just because it had one of THESE in the backyard!

--- End quote ---
...Gravel?

--- End quote ---

Ha ha. That's a grapefruit tree. There's an orange tree behind it, but it's on life support at the moment.

pwhodges:
When my brother went, with his wife, on his first sabbatical in California, he particularly liked that he could lean out of his kitchen window and pick a grapefruit for breakfast.

Tova:

--- Quote from: Case on 24 Jan 2018, 08:41 ---What sort of surprises me is when people don't care - even when they're shown they're wrong, even when they finally, after hours of discussion and stonewalling, acknowledge to you they were wrong - they don't care that they embarrassed themselves, they don't care what being "sloppy thinkers, but adamant about their results" means for their reputation, they don't care they wasted significant amounts of your time & energy. That's where I start feeling contempt and ... wariness. I only met three people of that sort past the Masters-level, but the experiences, as well as some of the reactions from other colleagues to such antics, were ... memorable (*).

--- End quote ---

Yeah, I hear ya.

I was the opposite of this growing up. I was so afraid of saying something wrongheaded or idiotic that I almost never expressed my opinion at all. It took me a lot of time, and some counseling, for me to realise that I was more often (although not always) better off expressing my opinion, being wrong, acknowledging that I was wrong, and learning thereby. I am also still learning that even when I am 100% convinced that the other person is wrong, it can be good to at least acknowledge some common ground, so that some form of discussion may continue.

If I can just get my ego to pipe down a bit more often, then maybe I'll get somewhere.


--- Quote from: pwhodges on 24 Jan 2018, 15:22 ---When my brother went, with his wife, on his first sabbatical in California, he particularly liked that he could lean out of his kitchen window and pick a grapefruit for breakfast.

--- End quote ---

I am officially jealous of this.

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