Give me one example

[bunrab]

You know what drives me nuts? People who have a position on something - say, something political - and who state their position, and then say something like "if you give me just one example of someone doing X instead of Y to show they're not a hypocrite, I'll change my mind" and you give them a concrete, factual example and they keep right on talking as if you had never said a word. And you repeat your example, and maybe throw in a couple more, with citations, and they keep right on talking, louder and faster, and waving their arms, and maybe even repeating the nonsense about "just tell me one example of someone...!"

Drives me nuts.

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Recent reading: How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman. Great book. Useful for the medical consumer. Fascinating examples, and good thinking on what kinds of general cognitive and logical errors intelligent people are prone to making, sometimes because of their intelligence.

ETA: I should make it clear that the gripe in par. 1 is unrelated to the book; those are two separate topics. The discussion that spurred the gripe was at lunch with an Old Farts lunch bunch we go to periodically.

Comments

[avanta7.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah. That happened in ChitChat recently in a thread about "the new atheists." Joseki asked for three examples of well-known religous individuals speaking out against fundamentalism. I gave him six: four Americans and two globally-known individuals. He ignored me.

[bunrab.livejournal.com]

Oh hey, speaking of religious individuals speaking out against fundamentalism, Price's The Reason-Driven Life is a wonderful retort to Rick Warren's stuff; I'd send it to you but I got it from the library... so you'll need to find it at your library. I guarantee you'll like it; Price is an Episcopalian theologist, was for a while a member of the "Jesus Seminar" group, and it's a really coherent statement of why, whether one believes in God or not, one should (a) read religious scriptures, but (b) not devote one's life to an in-your-face "personal relationship with Jesus" a la evangelical fundamentalism.

Ohh yeah.

[the-gwenzilliad.livejournal.com]

And to think, I used to be married to that.

Life is so much better now. :)

[elfbiter.livejournal.com]

Intelligence is a tool; it can also be used to invent plausibly-sounding excuses or full-blown obfuscations or to disregard those who disagree with you. Some of the holocaust deniers are hardly stupid but they also use that "just give me one piece of evidence"-rhetoric when there are multitude of those...