I agree with many of your points. Note that we’ve moved some distance afield from the question of whether my post and comments were initially misread.
A large part of my thinking here is that if something that I write seems obviously wrong, there’s probably been a miscommunication—if it were so obvious that a commenter could notice a major flaw in ~30 minutes when I’ve thought about it for hundreds of hours, I would have caught it already! :-)
if it were so obvious that a commenter could notice a major flaw in ~30 minutes when I’ve thought about it for hundreds of hours, I would have caught it already!
I don’t think this is a good approach to take.
Consider that “if it were so obvious that an outside reviewer could notice a major bug in ~30 minutes when I’ve spent hundreds of hours writing this code, I would have caught it already” is widely held as false in programming.
See my comment here. I’ve vetted my ideas in the course of conversations with many good thinkers. By now you’ve seen enough instances in which I’ve appeared to be saying something different from what I was intending to communicate so that you should give substantial weight to that possibility when I say something that seems obviously wrong.
if it were so obvious that a commenter could notice a major flaw in ~30 minutes when I’ve thought about it for hundreds of hours, I would have caught it already! :-)
I have a lot more than 30 minutes of thinking about the term “unconditional love”.
Imagine a math freshman comes to you. He spend 100 hours thinking that he has found a way to prove P=NP. After all the famous mathematicians are also only human. Will it take you 30 minutes to find the flaw in his argument?
Likely not because you spent a lot of time thinking about math and how to do mathematical proofs while the freshman hasn’t.
It’s also not only thinking time. You likely would be less good at math if you wouldn’t have learned from capable teachers about how math works.
What I meant was in part that what I appeared to be saying to you is not what I believe. There are semantic issued involved (what do the words “universal love and compassion mean?”). I was in fact talking specifically about being able to overcome knee jerk negative reactions to apparent hostility.
I agree with many of your points. Note that we’ve moved some distance afield from the question of whether my post and comments were initially misread.
A large part of my thinking here is that if something that I write seems obviously wrong, there’s probably been a miscommunication—if it were so obvious that a commenter could notice a major flaw in ~30 minutes when I’ve thought about it for hundreds of hours, I would have caught it already! :-)
I don’t think this is a good approach to take.
Consider that “if it were so obvious that an outside reviewer could notice a major bug in ~30 minutes when I’ve spent hundreds of hours writing this code, I would have caught it already” is widely held as false in programming.
See my comment here. I’ve vetted my ideas in the course of conversations with many good thinkers. By now you’ve seen enough instances in which I’ve appeared to be saying something different from what I was intending to communicate so that you should give substantial weight to that possibility when I say something that seems obviously wrong.
I have a lot more than 30 minutes of thinking about the term “unconditional love”.
Imagine a math freshman comes to you. He spend 100 hours thinking that he has found a way to prove P=NP. After all the famous mathematicians are also only human. Will it take you 30 minutes to find the flaw in his argument? Likely not because you spent a lot of time thinking about math and how to do mathematical proofs while the freshman hasn’t.
It’s also not only thinking time. You likely would be less good at math if you wouldn’t have learned from capable teachers about how math works.
What I meant was in part that what I appeared to be saying to you is not what I believe. There are semantic issued involved (what do the words “universal love and compassion mean?”). I was in fact talking specifically about being able to overcome knee jerk negative reactions to apparent hostility.