From Scott Adams, author of the Dilbert comic strip.
1. The more dangerous or inappropriate the conversation, the more interesting it is.
2. Conversations about how people have or will interact are interesting, and conversations about objects are dull.
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Every Scientific Field
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[image: Conveniently for everyone, it turns out that dark energy is
produced by subterranean parasitoid wasps.]
Dangerous and inappropriate conversations creep me out. The speaker often projects their perceptions and feelings about the topic onto their perception of me, after they walk away. I so want to go take a shower when these speakers finally leave!
ReplyDeleteWhy don't we talk about ideas and concepts more often? Yes, doing so often requires the speaker to modify their speech so it accommodates the listeners knowledge bank. Why shouldn't we spend more time doing this?
Ideas and concepts might be in something of a middle ground -- some people take ideas and concepts and abstract them into objects, while others personalize them and think of particular people when discussing them. They end up being something of a Rorschach test.
ReplyDeleteI don't know that ideas and concepts are a middle ground. Depending on what it is and how it's expressed, an idea or a concept can be the most dangerous thing you will ever encounter in a civil conversation.
ReplyDeleteL.
Is this discussion steering toward the land of Inception, by Christopher Nolan, where the seed of an idea can grow into an obsession or can even just damage us unexpectedly like in "The Kiss," by Anton Chekov? "I am my own worst enemy."
ReplyDelete