Ban Xah Lee

[David Kastrup]

"Bruce C. Miller" <bm3719 at gmail.com> writes:

> On Mar 7, 6:52 pm, Xah Lee <xah... at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Of interest:
>>
>> • Why Can't You Be Normal?
>
> Though I doubt this will do any good, I'll offer some advice that
> hasn't been mentioned here and solved a lot of the problems I've had
> early in life with resistance to overly-emotional negative reactions
> to my opinions.
>
> Say a person spends a great deal of time and energy researching some
> topic and, based upon the evidence uncovered, comes to a conclusion
> about it that is contrary to the established position within a
> community, like, that RMS is a crackpot, as a simple example, which is
> something I happen to agree with but that won't win many friends in
> #emacs. Now, you could go in #emacs and declare your discovery of this
> important fact (and, if true, it is important, since RMS is
> influential), but what do you suppose will happen?

People will think about it a lot and decide that our society could
greatly benefit from increasing the number of crackpots.  The
non-crackpots come and go without leaving much of a trace.  However,
being a crackpot is not sufficient in itself (this probably being more
of a side effect rather than the main gist), so the message might not
actually be helpful.

So what is there to gain?

-- 
David Kastrup