intellectual discussion

[piranha]

"The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder" (Ralph W. Sockman).

cakmpls just introduced me to that quote, and it's as perfect a representation of my mindset in one sentence as i've seen yet.

i love knowledge, not just for what i can do with it, but just in and of itself. i'm always learning new things, without caring much whether i'll ever be able to use them. why japanese? i don't have a good reason, but why not? a new language, a new culture, it's interesting, it's stimulating, it's fun.

it's fun.

the more knowledge the better. the further refined that knowledge, the more complex the incidences it can handle, the more amazement it sparks, and the more intricate the fun becomes.

i get most of my knowledge from reading (and a fair bit in certain areas from observation). but directly engaging with other people in refining knowledge is fun too; other viewpoints expand the roads i can see from any given vantage. i don't particularly like being asked to justify myself, and i don't like my ideas to be picked on; that approach tends to annoy me. but i love being asked questions about my thought processes, i love explaining them, i love hearing other people's thoughts in response, and i especially like to hear from those who disagree (if the disagreement isn't knee-jerk, and if it is focussed on their experiences and knowledge). i don't much care for validation, i am much happier with questioning of assumptions, and lively tangents. but it does depend on how it's done; if somebody challenges me as if i were an idiot, i tend to just walk away instead of justifying myself. and i am completely uninterested in debate, where debate is defined as either party being mostly interested in winning the argument; i view that as a form of public masturbation, and hey, i prefer to wank in private.

i tend shake my head at people who make pronouncements like "nobody ever changed their mind in an online discussion" -- i've changed my mind countless times, if "change" includes "adjustment" rather than just referring to a 180 degree reversal. but it does require a certain atmosphere for that change to happen right then and there; otherwise it might still happen, but independently, when i recast the argument on my own later, trying to find whether there was actually something worthwhile among all the noisy dross.

[most of this copied over from a comment.]

Comments

[zxhrue.livejournal.com]

And this is why I read you. And what we have in common. Beyond my own never ending quest to learn all that is learnable, no matter how ultimately unacheivable that may be, it helps me to keep tabs on others who do what appears to me to be much the same thing. Widens the search parameters as it were. Does tend to make people find me difficult to talk to sometimes, when I forget to turn off that part of being in the course of daily interaction.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

yes, a lot of people on my reading list are people who write about their thought processes in detail, and that's my favourite kind of reading / thinking material.

i think part of why i do a lot less daily interaction now than ever before is that i have such limited energy now, and i really don't want to piss it away on smalltalk. i rather read what somebody thoughtful half a world away has written about something completely unrelated to my own life. i've wondered whether that's a form of escapism, but i don't really think so -- i do mostly live in the world of ideas, and "real life" is just something the outer layers of myself engage in to survive. (in truth it's more complicated than that, but it'll do for now.)

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

oh, and hi. i have no idea who you are. :) (which is perfectly fine, especially if we don't know each other from elsewhere, i'm just wondering whether we do.)

but i am glad you still get something out of reading my LJ, being as it's been a bit obsessive about anime/manga lately, and the vast majority of people who read me couldn't care less about that. i do get a lot more mono-maniacal these days (which also is a function of the much-reduced energy; i've always been into the immersion thing, but i used to be able to immerse myself in several things at once), but it's either that or total frazzle.

[zxhrue.livejournal.com]

Bulk reply, two for the space of one! In no particular order.

Nope. You don't know me. Posted to alt.poly sporadically in the late 90's and early oughts (google posts from mbm2@duke.edu). Bounced a few emails off of you. 'rue' was taken by the time I was assimilated to lj (resistance _was_ futile), and have used zxhrue other places for other things. Its a silent zxh btw; well actually its a tamil zxh which is a kind of an "r". Anyway.

I can't really conceive of not living in the world of ideas, no matter how downwardly mobile I become. lj is one way of doing that, now that usenet has been overrun. While I certainly miss some aspects of the free-wheeling discussions one could encounter on various newsgroups, the comments salons of various peoples journals are often almost as good. Between that and the semi-random surfing much is pondered. Discussion, when I can bring myself to do it in a timely fashion, and the exchange of different impressions of the elephant is what its all about. Argument and other dominance games are not only boring, it takes away time from the good stuff. I think more like lorres, delightful laughter is part of teh sense of wonder for me.

Love the manga/anime obsession. If I hadn't gone to India, would've gone to Japan. Wish I had your facility for languages.

[lorres.livejournal.com]

it's fun.

I agree! I realized recently that I don't physically laugh much. But I think of myself laughing virtually all the time over the delight of discovering things and learning things. I guess it doesn't actually get to my face.

And I'm glad you share a lot of what you learn.

internal laughter

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

oh, you have the laughter thing too! yes, people offline tend to think i am very serious. and i am, but like you said, i frequently feel an inner smile about something or another, and i actually think of myself as laughing a lot more than others see me do.

[daev.livejournal.com]

"The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder" (Ralph W. Sockman).

This nails something related that I've been thinking about. When you study historical linguistics, you see a lot of amateur enthusiasts who like to speculate about the origins of words, the connections between apparently unrelated languages, and the historical meanings of names. They throw all caution to the wind and let their emotions guide them to appealing conclusions.

When you point out that they're not being rigorous enough for real philology, they get upset. Why are you denying the wonder of imagination? Why do you want the world to be so prosaic? And I feel torn, because I sympathize; I know people who believe in paganism and old magic, who see naiads in pools and fairies in trees. It's appealing to me too, and it's part of why I like reading comparitive linguistics and religion and folklore.

But it's vital to be rigorous about getting the knowledge right before you start your imagination. Because if you are absolutely scientific, meticulously careful, scrupulously fair, and comprehensive about the material you study, there is something you can get from historical linguistics that nothing else in the world can give: a clear and accurate view of prehistory. Somehow from studying the noises people in Europe and South Asia make when they want someone to pass the salt, you can know the political structure, theology, and worldview of our ancestors 12,000 years ago.

This is incredible, and it's a better source for dreaming than a hundred fantasy authors could ever provide. Because of prosiac scholarship we know about Odin and the Tuatha De Danann, the desperate decades after the fall of Roman Britain and the forgotten centuries when the Hindus were a wandering band of Central Asian horse-masters. If you let your enthusiastic prejudices cloud the crystal ball, you might get something more superficially wonderful -- but it'll just be modern imagination, same as anyone else can do.

And that's my spiel for why letting science be science brings more enchantment into the world than replacing it with flights of fancy: if it succeeds, it gives you better wings with which to soar.

linguistics

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

So Well Said. :)

i feel i know a lot more about the world of the past from such science than i know from reading most history books. because the latter were written by people with an agenda. (though i am careful about presuming i end up with absolute clarity and accuracy :).

aside from science, i want to noodle more in a later entry about the preference so many people have for "magic" over knowledge (frex in romantic relationships), and why i'm the opposite.

the shoreline of wonder

[eagle]

That's a fantastic quote.

Yeah, I rarely change my mind right in the middle of the discussion (although it's been known to happen), but I frequently change my position later after I've had a chance to reprocess the conversation. I keep thinking about discussions again and again, in different contexts, and do a lot of subconscious processing, and I think all that goes into future changes in my opinions that are frequently quite subtle and which can't be easily traced back to a single discussion.

I've changed in some dramatic and very deep ways as a result of on-line discussion, both specific arguments and more generally from tone and watching how other people behave. And thinking about how I behave, and what behaviors I appreciate and which ones I don't. I think what's changed me the most is not any specific individual discussion but seeing behavior that I respect and learning how to emulate it. Sometimes individual behavior, sometimes group behavior (and that's one of the things that I love about Usenet that I think is missing in a lot of other online fora -- group behavior, in a context where it can be observed and learned from).

[nolly.livejournal.com]

A much more pithy phrasing of one of the more memorable things I learned in college. (My prof's explanation included the phrases "what you know", "what you know that you don't know", and "what you don't know that you don't know".)

[huashan.livejournal.com]

I've often thought that wanting knowledge for knowledges sake alone is one of the big indicators of the geek mind.

For me, the more information I can pile into my mind, the more likely I am to solve a particular puzzle or problem. Even if the information doesn't seem to be related. After they've dealt with me for a while people get used to me kinda looking spacey for a minute during a long complex problem and then suddenly going "Uh...what do we get when X happens? Cause if it's Y, then the problem might be Z." or just "Could this be because of W?" and when asked how I thought of it I have no idea...the rest of my brain occasionally just walks up to my conscious brain and says "Package for you, sir." and then wanders off.

I'm actually somewhat unhappy with my current mental involvement with politics. I have arrived at a situation where certain attitudes and opinions provoke nothing but anger and dismay from me. I don't like that, I'd rather be able to look at them and see them as alternative ways of seeing the world, and then apply some logic to them to see if they are reasonable and if not, explain why they aren't. Yet another thing to add to the ever evolving list of things I'm trying to modify.

politics

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

*nod*. i feel very similar to you about my mental state as regards politics. i've lost the objective distance i used to have for that, and in consequence i am no longer learning much from people at the other end of the political spectrum (this is fortunately limited to US politics); i have no patience for them anymore and basically just want them gone (magically, of course, *snrk*). that is a reactionary attitude, and it's not good for me; i let other people's narrowness and hatred polarize my own views over the years.

i've removed myself from all political discussions for the time being to see whether with some distance i can recover my equanimity.

Re: politics

[zxhrue.livejournal.com]

Oh my oh yes.

It not argument, its contradiction and stupidities.

Makes me want to be God Emperor, which would be bad.