Talking with Vassar feels very intellectually alive. Maybe, like a high density of insight porn. I imagine that the people Ben talks about wouldn’t get much enjoyment out of insight porn either, so that emotional impact isn’t there.
There’s probably also an element that plenty of people who can normally follow an intellectual conversation can’t keep up a conversation with Vassar and then are filled after a conversation with a bunch of different ideas that lack order in their mind. I imagine that sometimes there’s an idea overload that prevents people from critically thinking through some of the ideas.
If you have a person who hasn’t gone to college, they are used to encountering people who make intellectual arguments that go over their head and have a way to deal with that.
From meeting Vassar, I don’t feel like he has the kind of charisma that someone like Valentine has (which I guess Valentine has downstream of doing a lot of bodywork stuff).
This seems mostly right; they’re more likely to think “I don’t understand a lot of these ideas, I’ll have to think about this for a while” or “I don’t understand a lot of these ideas, he must be pretty smart and that’s kinda cool” than to feel invalidated by this and try to submit to him in lieu of understanding.
Talking with Vassar feels very intellectually alive. Maybe, like a high density of insight porn. I imagine that the people Ben talks about wouldn’t get much enjoyment out of insight porn either, so that emotional impact isn’t there.
There’s probably also an element that plenty of people who can normally follow an intellectual conversation can’t keep up a conversation with Vassar and then are filled after a conversation with a bunch of different ideas that lack order in their mind. I imagine that sometimes there’s an idea overload that prevents people from critically thinking through some of the ideas.
If you have a person who hasn’t gone to college, they are used to encountering people who make intellectual arguments that go over their head and have a way to deal with that.
From meeting Vassar, I don’t feel like he has the kind of charisma that someone like Valentine has (which I guess Valentine has downstream of doing a lot of bodywork stuff).
This seems mostly right; they’re more likely to think “I don’t understand a lot of these ideas, I’ll have to think about this for a while” or “I don’t understand a lot of these ideas, he must be pretty smart and that’s kinda cool” than to feel invalidated by this and try to submit to him in lieu of understanding.