Posted to tcl by colin at Fri Jul 24 03:21:29 GMT 2009view raw
- Futher to my previous email,
-
- I'll tell you what you remind me of, Robert. You act like people I've seen at parties and similar social functions who have absolutely no idea of how little they know, and they hold forth to impress the people around them who know even less.
-
- I have an imaginative picture of you, sitting in Eli's office or something, desperately trying to impress an old man who knows absolutely nothing about computing or information systems with the depth of your knowledge and the expansive breadth of your wisdom. And he buys it. He's lapping it up. "That's my boy!" he thinks to himself, and "Oh, I am so lucky to have such a genius as the fruit of my loins!" Or so you tell yourself, as you pontificate to him.
-
- But where you fail, and persistently, repeatedly, pig-headedly fail is when you meet someone who actually does know the field.
-
- And the reason you have maintained your vast ignorance is simple - you are the worst student possible. You are so arrogant you are impermeable to new ideas. You haven't changed your thinking in far *far* too long.
-
- So anyway, you take your silly little show of ignorance on the road, and everyone you meet tells you it stinks. It stinks on ice. But because of your overweening arrogance, and your commanding ignorance, and your complete security in your father's love and respect (or *do* you? was it your mother who thought you might just be the messiah?) you can't hear any word of criticism, instruction, assistance except as an attack on your overvalued (only by you) stupidity.
-
- I'm a student of the persistently stupid, Robert, and you are my current case study. <the rest is elided as it's too foul for publication>