altariel | Telling it like it is

From Lucas Kovar's In Praise of Closed-Mindedness:

"What can we do to combat this evil movement against closed-mindedness? The solution is to aggressively, assiduously ignore the slack-jawed hordes. This requires developing rules of thumb for identifying those who are likely to be wastes of time - psychiatrists, goateed self-described philosophers, Bush voters, and so on. Some people have a hard time accepting this. They point out that such generalizations may fail when applied to a specific individual, thereby revealing their need to bone up on the definition of "generalization". "How can you say that all sociologists are fatuous blowhards?" they say. "That's a sweeping generalization - surely there's some sociologist who conducts useful research". This is not the point. While it turns out that in this particular example the general rule is never violated - all sociologists truly are fatuous blowhards - the idea is that even if this were sometimes false, probabilistically speaking one would still come out ahead by tuning out whenever a sociologist opens his or her mouth."

Courtesy of Mr Happy, for whom I am apparently an arch-nemesis. Coo!