Another reader responds to an earlier remark:
Sounds like your reader works at a corporate entity filled with Twits. Are business types more likely to be twits? Perhaps. In general, I’m mostly appalled at how incredibly ignorant and stupid most (i.e. > 50%) people are, everywhere. The older I get, the more I observer that even people I’ve known and somewhat liked for decades are actually short-sighted blowhards who don’t significantly examine their own beliefs and motivations to any great extent. Without rationally and continually challenging one’s own preconceived notions or even what one remembers as established facts (since science and general knowledge continue to move forward at a rapid pace), one ends up being ignorant. And that tends to lead to becoming a Twit as well, although being a Twit seems to involve a certain amount of over-confidence egotism. 🙂
I try to pick away at foundational assumptions of all sorts of things; I’m not sure how much time I’m wasting vs how much of value I’m learning when I do that. But as my correspondent mentions, knowledge continues to expand at a rapid rate, and even though much of it is not of importance to the general public (how many need to know the nature of a NAND gate?), the simple balloon of knowledge where the important stuff is on the surface will continue to expand at an exponential rate.
There are days when I’m convinced people are not … stupid, not devotedly ignorant, but simply unable to keep up. Tired. Other days, I’m convinced the smarter, more socially awkward people aren’t socially awkward for some inborn reason, but simply because they didn’t have the time to learn and practice the social graces – being smart takes a tremendous amount of time in just keeping up with that little bit of the balloon that interests you the most.
