Give me one example

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.

---

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.

it's time to ward for wallabies again

You Are 78% Tortured Genius

You are smart. Brilliant in fact. And while it's a blessing, it's also a curse. Your head is filled with everything - grand ideas, insufferable worries, and a good deal of angst.

Are You a Tortured Genius?

gacked from avanta7