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I honestly believe we live our lives for the moments that aren't spent learning.

Facts are facts, and that's just about it.

This behavior is "fun" because their bullshitting about Steven Tyler led to them meeting up with some girls, going to some bars, and having a good night out.

It's weird how all these advancements in technology that were supposed to free up our time have just taken up more of our time.

It's sad, really. Learning used to be an adventure, and sometimes you were wrong. It was a game, even if you knew the answer beforehand.

Now it's a chore, and I really don't see all these bullshit facts being removed from our society today, even though almost everything is a few taps of your iPhone away.




It baffles me how you can call this convoluted process "learning". It's not. It's rightfully called the art of trivia bullshitting and has nothing to do with learning.

It's a purely social process that seems foreign and awkward to a visible majority of the HN crowd. I happen to agree with that crowd, I don't see the fun in it. I don't see the point in it. I wasn't raised to respond positively to this specific situation.

Instead - and again I believe a majority of the people on HN are in the same boat - I get socially interested in people with whom I can have exchanges that have the potential to affect the way I work, I behave or I see the world.

I have a fairly arrogant (but not necessarily incorrect) theory about this. I suspect that when you work/live in an environment which constantly stimulates you intellectually, you have an easier time getting to the "rewarding" part of more intellectual exchanges (eg. the facts of a conversation) than someone who works 9-17 at Walmart, and whose curiosity in the world is not being constantly nurtured, might. Thus we see a large majority of people who do not get any satisfaction from talking about more in-depth subjects than, say, Steven Tyler and Mary Tyler Moore.

And that lack of satisfaction is present on both sides. Once you have tasted what it's like to fire pure knowledge and experience at each other in a conversation and having all parties enjoy it, it's very hard to find any pleasure in exchanging senseless, bullshit factoids that will only serve to be repeated to someone else in the same social situation later on.


I love learning. It's one of the things I spend my free time doing.

I love being able to hold conversations about things I like learning about or know a lot about -- politics, computer science, programming, whatever.

Still, I can't only have intellectually stimulating conversations all day. I'd lose my social skills.

Humans are remarkably social animals. In all reality, our socialness keeps our society flowing and from freezing. A lot of intellectuals like to think they're the ones who keep computers computing, robots robotting, etc., and rightfully so.

But had we all the social skills of some "intellectuals" I've worked with and gone to school with, our communication would be piss-poor and we'd never be able make it anywhere as a country or planet earth.

I say all that because those people, the farmers, politicians, small business owners, managers (even CEOs!), directors -- people who have to deal with the general public -- didn't grow up only seeking conversations where they "fire pure knowledge" at each other.

They went to bars, partied, made friends, bullshitted, watched some mind-numbing TV, played contact sports, read People magazine... you get the point.

Thing is, some of us enjoy the mundane. Ivory towers are a bad thing. Believing there's no joy the non-intellectual aspects of life leads to isolation.


You learn a lot while bullshitting, but probably not about what you're talking about.

Like in programming: a lot of "functions" don't return anything, they're ran for side-effects.


I wish you would go into details rather than give an absolutely meaningless analogy.


You learn about the people that you're bullshitting with. We're social animals, we live in groups, we solve problems in groups, we tackle adversity as groups. Our lives depend on our abilities to function within groups.

Bullshitting is a type of play. Play is important for developing as an individual and for a group developing a shared identity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play_(activity)




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