People Who Erroneously Think They're Smarter Than You

Considered using the "Brights" thread for this but maybe just maybe there are some belligerent douchebags out there not connected with Evangelical Atheism. Anyway I don't wanna go down that much churned-up track, I just wanna know why there are bell-ends out there who confuse pointless aggro rudeness with being well clever. Here is the blog of the guy who made me think about this:

http://goodreasonblog.blogspot.com/2006/04/communication-language-and-apes.html

And here is his strapline:

Computational linguistics. Progressive politics. Critical thinking. Persistent and willful skepticism.
I'm not calling you a name. I'm simply defining a word. The word is "asshole", and its definition is now "you".

WHAT THE FUCK IS YOUR PROBLEM, DOUCHE?

*link to Site New Answers*

isn't this just People Who Erroneously Think They're Smarter Than You?

People Who Erroneously Place An HTML Tag

Well yeah but I'm looking for that peculiarly confrontational tone of HEY LOOK AT MY BIG BRAIN YOU STUPID CAVEMAN YOU'RE STUPID

I get the feeling there must be a fuck bunch of blog straplines like this, I thought I might save the juicy ones here.

Atlas Shrugged

http://www.angryflower.com/atlass.gif

(oh, and people like the dude in that blog are ridiculous and basically insecure about their intelligence. if you need to pull out the 50-cent words in order to convince people NO FOR SERIOUS I'M SMART then you're probably not. you might be, in which case just chill out and trust that people will see it.)

supercilious troglodytes

My vocabulary pwns all your bases. I use it in the service of writing complaint letters to the hospitality industry.

Isn't this most of the internet?

http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/

Hahaha I was waiting for that.

"Their immense value this decade was to de-naturalise capitalist realism, and to expose the complicity of pomo sophistry and deconstructive indecision in the neoliberal reality picture"

This is pretty smart, though.

Three things bug me about this.

1) The link you posted is better written than 98% of blogs anywhere, and makes fine sense to boot. Just because it's obvious to you doesn't make it stupid.

2) There's nothing especially confrontational about the guy, it seems, except for his tagline. Granted the tagline is the verbal equivalent of photoshopping his cock to be to be twice as large and have naturally occurring French ticklers, but don't you adjust for that on the internet? What's the threat here?

3) This is key: it's from Monday, April 03, 2006.

i was saying that just the other day, though.

xpost

I wonder how many people have divorced, remarried, lost 50 pounds, had three children, or otherwise created a whole different life than they had on April 3, 2006.

I just wonder, is all.

To clarify. The link is misleading. I happened to arrive at the site via that entry but it's the strapline that's hateful, I should've linked to the front page.

The link you posted is better written than 98% of blogs anywhere, and makes fine sense to boot. Just because it's obvious to you doesn't make it stupid.

I don't think it's stupid. I think over-valuation of your own smarts at the expense of other people, especially random strangers is stupid.

His little Blogger description tag is a bit on the uppity side, I'll agree.

But still. Chill.

This thread is such a trap. There's no way to make any hard-n-fast statement without at least for a moment wondering how erroneously "smart" you're being.

Maybe this should be a list thread...

http://polydaidaloi.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/ben-stein1.jpg

Angus?

I have a Southern accent.

I think you want the gay thread, two doors down.

erroneous

Cool. You are smarter than me, because I don't have a clue what you mean. Southern accent?

lots people think they're smarter than just about anyone with a southern accent.

Atheists have always been at the forefront of rational thinking and beacons of enlightenment, and now you can share your idealism by being part of the OUT Campaign.

http://outcampaign.org/comeout.gif

Atheists are far more numerous than most people realize. COME OUT of the closet! You'll feel liberated, and your example will encourage others to COME OUT too. (Don't "out" anybody else, wait for them to OUT themselves when they are ready to do so).

http://outcampaign.org/reachout.gif

The OUT Campaign allows individuals to let others know they are not alone. It can also be a nice way of opening a conversation and help to demolish the negative stereotypes of atheists. Let the world know that we are not about to go away and that we are not going to allow those that would condemn us to push us into the shadows.

http://outcampaign.org/speakout.gif

As more and more people join the OUT Campaign, fewer and fewer people will feel intimidated by religion. We can help others understand that atheists come in all shapes, sizes, colours and personalities. We are labourers and professionals. We are mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, sisters, brothers and grandparents. We are human (we are primates) and we are good friends and good citizens. We are good people who have no need to cling to the supernatural.

A Southern accent makes you sound about as smart as a healthy tomato vine. I deliberately trained myself out of mine in about 5th grade. My accent was so bad that the other kids would ask me to talk for them like I was fucking Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins or some shit, except I was from 60 miles away. Southern accents are quaint at the very best.

Ah, it is like the Birmingham accent, over here.

I have healthy tomato vines too.

I met a guy the other day who kept answering simple, germane questions in a language that nobody else involved in the conversation spoke, which he knew, and wow that was annoying. The kicker though was that he was like a Top Scientist in a Very Complicated Field so he WAS smarter than me, by like a lot. So I guess this story goes in the "People Who Really Are Smarter Than You and Are Also Assholes" thread. But if he was not Cap'n Complicated Science, I would think that behavior would definitely herald someone who both thought he was smarter than everyone else while also being very concerned that he was not.

I guess when you grow up a supernerd, there's some things you never get over, even though you actually are smarter than everyone around you.

Yeah. He put me in mind of a scene in Cryptonomincon where the narrator makes a comment about some supernerd about how he is the kind of person that you cannot make any declarative statements around, because the supernerd will be compelled to say something to top your declarative statement resulting in a conversational dead end.

xxpost A friend of a friend of mine realized he was (or is) smug:"I used to correct my teacher in school.... Boy was I an arrogant prat."

A Southern accent makes you sound about as smart as a healthy tomato vine.

Never realized that a Sourthern accent make you seem smart. Or that the person seems to think so.

oh, and people like the dude in that blog are ridiculous and basically insecure about their intelligence. if you need to pull out the 50-cent words in order to convince people NO FOR SERIOUS I'M SMART then you're probably not.

I only find it silly when they use the long words in the wrong way.

Yeah. He put me in mind of a scene in Cryptonomincon

ok now really. People who erroneously think they're less of a nerd than the supernerd.

(joeks)

I don't have any problem with people who think they're smarter than me - maybe they are! A lot of people are just aggressively smart and don't realise it, or aggressively over-intellectual to the point where they don't really realise they're talking in a language that seems to mask substance in fancy verbiage (because to them it's transparent language).

But they're qualitatively different from the "belligerent douchebags" the internet seems to breed or at least make obvious, those strawmannish people who have tshirts and bumper stickers and signs in their cubicles that say "looks like your village is missing its idiot", etc. Or indeed the strain of alpha geeks who aren't exactly douchey but permanently belligerent, like fear-trained fighting dogs always expecting insult or underestimation, always eager to show you that right now they're smarter and happier and more well-adjusted than-- not exactly than you, but than someone else. That even if they grew up geeks and yet aren't right now ruling the world the way we thought we were going to, they're still in this position of permanent readiness, on a permanent approach to perfection, they're always in the right and doing things the right way, thinking the right way about things.

I used to internet-know and like quite a few people like this: rigorous, charismatic, self-righteous but never tipping over into hatefulness. I got tired of it after a while but I can still remember the appeal, these people, demonstrably clever and apparently unplagued by doubt.

Thanks that is much more the impulse that made me start this thread in the first place. That and mean-spiritedness. I guess partly I'm repulsed by the notion of smartness as a league table or a pissing contest. I still think that the mark of nearly all genuinely clever people is a degree of reticence or modesty, an awareness of all the things they don't know or all the knowledge that is always more or less tentative and subject to redefinition. Although now I think about it maybe that kind of attitude is how I'd define wisdom, and maybe wisdom and intelligence are 2 quite different things, like in D&D.

Still, one of my unexamined principles in life I guess is that people who don't doubt themselves often are dicks. Allowing for a sliding scale where you can go too far the other way and be some kind of perma-panicky Hamlet I suppose.

I always make fun of philosophy majors for this (that is, about 1/4 of my friends)...all the time in college, they'd jump into some random discussion and kill it for everyone else by throwing around so much jargon nobody outside the department could follow the conversation. Also, throwoff comments about the meaning of life would get "well, in philosophy I learned...." responses. Hey you took some classes, great, you're way more qualified to talk about life as a human being then the rest of us mere humans! (But that was college. They're much better now.)

It all comes down to basic friendliness, I think. If an expert in some field uses a lot of arcane lingo in their conversation, well, maybe they're just a little aspie, and I'll give them a pass if they're nice. But if they're all scornful and withering and shit, fuck 'em.

I think a lot of my college friends wereare just a little aspie. But you're right, friendliness does matter.

Sometimes jargon's this tool people need to use. There's a time and a place, right? I'd expect two surgeons discussing an operation to speak to each other differently than one surgeon trying to explain the procedure to a patient. The problem's only when you infer that the reason somebody is dropping jargon is to show off or browbeat or cover up the fact that they don't understand what they're talking about.

A landscaper/nurseryman/plant expert I used to know sold me a big dracaena tree at a yard sale. He said "I'll price it low because it's so (insert slightly curled lip here) common"

He has since refused to be my friend on facebook. Asshole.

And HE'S the one who owned the fucking common dracaena in the first place.
It looks way better as my plant than it did as his.

Specialized knowledge married to social retardation, shockah.

Jargon is useful in the context of its field! It's just really fucking annoying when it destroys a general interest social conversation, even if it's the result of obliviousness (not noticing you're taking the conversation somewhere 3 of the 5 people in the room can't follow) rather than boastfulness.

I think I've got a decent Asperger's detector and I'll always totally make allowances for that but let's be honest a lot of the time this is just a horrible value system on full display.

people who list 'critical thinking' and 'rigorous skepticism' among their interests (per the original post) are totally insufferable. congratulations on deluding yourself that you have no irrational opinions or behaviors, human person.

Ah people who use jargon to laypeople are the worst. Then again, I've sometimes had laypeople act all offended and patronized when I try to explain my jargon to them. What am I supposed to do there?

gabbneb thinks he's smarter than me

There's obviously a flipside to the whole "check out my critical thinking" trope in the "wooooh look at you Mr Three-Syllables" response.

I think what we realize here is that being a jerk is usually stupid, so when a person who is supposedly intelligent goes around being an asshole, we realize they lack a social intelligence.

That "Out" campaign mentioned above blows my mind, though. It's got to be a parody, right?

Had an ex who accused me of bein this person. Said whenever she asked me to repeat myself I'd edit out the big words, which I swear I didn't do. Or at least if I ever did it wasn't intentional.

Let's all post in words of one syllable (oops) from now on.

We hate big brain mean men!

Then again, I've sometimes had laypeople act all offended and patronized when I try to explain my jargon to them. What am I supposed to do there?

I actaully appreciate it when people try to explain their jargon to me!

There's obviously a flipside to the whole "check out my critical thinking" trope in the "wooooh look at you Mr Three-Syllables" response.

and the two feed so heavily on each other! I don't think it takes much of a leap to suggest that angry anti-intellectualism is one of the reasons why geeky people get defensively belligerent about being clever and turn 'being smarter than the common herd' into an end-in-itself; and that people who are 'all i am ETERNALLY SCEPTICAL and therefore BETTER THAN YOU sheep' just encourage other people to go 'yeah but god loves me and how does your so-called-science explain that eh? no it doesn't, nerrrr'. etc.

a capacity for critical thinking and healthy skepticism are virtuous attributes, no doubt -- but there is a tendency, when those qualities become so strongly bound up in a person's sense of identity, to over-value those qualities in oneself to the point where everyone else starts to look like provincial rubes laboring in the darkness of superstition and hysteria.

i was a teenager with parents once, i know what a burden it can be to know everything

Oh yeah this behaviour pains me because it reminds me of being 15. Not a good look when you're 25+ tho.

"a capacity for critical thinking and healthy skepticism are virtuous attributes, no doubt -- but there is a tendency, when those qualities become so strongly bound up in a person's sense of identity, to over-value those qualities in oneself to the point where everyone else starts to look like provincial rubes laboring in the darkness of superstition and hysteria."

jeez, know any more big words asshole?

Working at a nursery, esp on the weekend when there are fewer landscapers shopping and more housewives, I sometimes feel like screaming. I'm impatient with people who don't bother to do ANY self-educating, and then demand huge amounts of hand-holding. Urgh. But I behave myself. It IS my fucking job, after all.

Some people are so WHINY in their ignorance, you know? And others are just excited to be launching into a new field. It's largely generational. Younger people are more likely to be self-educators. Older women, not so much.

SAD BUT TRUE.

http://www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/man_use_big_word

I have to go. I'll be back with more data from the field.

people on blog comment threads who write a whole paragraph of fallacies and stereotypes and then polish it off with "if you used LOGIC and REASON you would understand!"

It's the "president-in-exile of the world" part of that guy's blog that is the problem here. As a joke I find it lame, and as a window into the middling male psyche its childishness and resentimment are all too indicative of garden variety academic bitterness. At this point Shelley's phrase about poets as "unacknowledged legislators" seems to get a very wide co-sign from people whose fundamentally critical orientation is perfectly suited to their disenfranchisement and in fact the two feed each other. Put him in power and he'd flail and blame others in a very articulate manner.

Truth. Also, not doing another "Ooh, get Mr Resentissement!" gag.

Uh, I'm still here.

Thinking about what I posted upthread, the flipside to the snot-ball big-word guys are the resolutely stupid people. The people who move through life learning NOTHING, who ask constant questions and stopper their ears as you unreel the answer for the umpteenth time.

FUCK THEM. They are more of a pain in my ass than the big-wordies.

They're studied in their feebleness, manipulators, forcing other people to wipe their ass for them.

I really have to go.

Specialized knowledge married to social retardation, shockah.

Well, no, your landscape EXfriend has been exposed to plants so much, so his taste has "evolved." It's the same with my taste in jewellery. Granted, I can still tell why my taste is the way it is and realize that most people see jewellery differently than I do. (In fact I have a bracelet that I used to love and now look at with my "new eyes" and compare it with my "old eyes". Does that make sense whatsoever?)

Today I was reading this paper on "internet love" seen through a psychoanalyst. Christ, I puked in my mouth. It showed why I dropped out of psychoanalysis: dressing up platitudes and horrible negative misconceptions in these "fancy ass" words made me want to rip Freud's penis off and shove it down the guy's throat.

I do think blogs need to be written by "arrogant prats". You need to be assured of your opinion. It'd be silly to end each entry with "gee, I'm not sure if that was right."

Beth it sounds like you should take a couple of deep breaths first ;-)

What get's me the most is when these dudes are filling you full of hot air on some assumption that since THEY don't know what they're talking about then obviously a dingleberry eating troglodyte like YOU could never pick up on their BS.

You need to be assured of your opinion. It'd be silly to end each entry with "gee, I'm not sure if that was right."

I feel like Wittgenstein does this a lot in Philosophical Investigations and it doesn't seem silly. I've been reading it over the last week and I think the contrast between his soft spoken genius and the original bloggers spiel was what riled me up.

It seems like there's a risk when you complain that people use big words to make themselves sound smarter... you'll eventually just be complaining that people use big words.

Just used the word troglodyte in a post, then read that Onion article...lol, I am big word mean man now.

http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/06/ny-times-mines-its-data-to-identify-words-that-readers-find-abstruse/

xxpost It's not ALWAYS easy to differentiate between the two but at times it's pretty clear what racket ppl are runnin.

everyone here, obv

I find the word "abtruse" kind of abtruse, if you know what I mean.

acknowledged the link between intellectual insecurities and deliberately talking over someone's head, it's the barely concealed need to intimidate that comes through that bothers me the most -- that if they use enough arcane vocabulary and drop enough obscure references to make a point, the less likely it is that someone will call them out on the substance of their argument.

i like getting knowledge dropped on me if i can ask someone to explain it in different terms. it's pretty easy to tell when someone is being generous with what they know and when someone is using that knowledge to avoid being challenged

fwiw i definitely engaged in that sort of behavior in high school as the discussion-dominating bully of my ap english class but i like to think i'm the more generous type these days

http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/

― FREE DOM AND ETHAN (special guest stars mark bronson), Monday, June 15, 2009 8:46 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

kinda funny, the article at the top right now is a description of the terminator movie that just kinda describes a bunch of really obvious things about it in really pompous language

pretty much that dude's s.o.p.

So you're saying the guy's a music critic? (xp)

"the scorched earth mythscape for our year zero" = good description of the k-punk blog!

That post just made me want to see the film!

yeah, you do seem to be a sucker for pompous verbiage.

anyone who describes "Critical thinking" as one of their interests or "fields of study" is more likely than not an incredible d-bag

Everything in ruins: a fictional diagram of Now. CGI finally codes for CyberGothic, the battered future returning as an infernal landscape bolted together out of Black Metal nightmares, Apocaplyse Now choppers, towering War Of The Worlds-like megacidal machines and videogame ballistics.

This sounds crazy amazing! I'm sure the film isn't that good and this dude is totally overselling it, but the language isn't "pompous verbiage" (LOLOLOLOL) so much as just fragmented writing with more attention paid to cool words than syntax. It's poor writing but I don't get the feeling the writer is trying to assert his intellect.

"a fictional diagram of Now"

nah, it is pompous verbiage, of the "post-humanist" variety.

xpost

i mean the key post on that page, the one that pulls back the curtain, is the one about callaghan.

As Andy Beckett points out in his enthralling and expansive study of the 70s, When The Lights Went Out, it was in 1976, that Callaghan - under pressure from the neoliberal IMF - first introduced the Labour Party to capitalist realism with that notorious Blackpool speech.

"As Andy Beckett points out..." -- you have to be quite ignorant to have this salient fact of modern british hihstory "pointed out" to you; but this doesn't stop the nonsense spilling out, or encourage an iota of self-consciousness. it does make you wonder what lies behind the confidently presented bullshit elsewhere -- probably very little. even then, even having read this, if we allow the concept "capitalist realism", which we don't because it's inane, can one really say that the labour party hadn't had to confront the reality of capitalism before 1976? thinking they may have had to do this on one or two occasions before...

idk, I don't know the blog or anything substantial about British political history. I just thought the Terminator post made the film seem kinda thrilling.

critics can be amazing con artists

i like k-punk! entertaining writer imo

critics can be amazing con artists

hardly ever least of all of themselves

Granted the tagline is the verbal equivalent of photoshopping his cock to be to be twice as large and have naturally occurring French ticklers, but don't you adjust for that on the internet? What's the threat here?

why on Earth would anyone photoshop their cock like that since most people would find it repellent/laughable, is the question (and one that translates across the metaphor and was likely the impetus for the thread)

i learned photoshop in order to photoshop my cock to be twice as large and it's quite impressive.

I won't post it tho, don't like to show-off.

^^^ v.v. smart

idk, I don't know the blog or anything substantial about British political history. I just thought the Terminator post made the film seem kinda thrilling.

― Mordy, Monday, June 15, 2009 5:30 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yes, that's the problem - you could describe any post-apocalyptic video game or movie or tv show like that and make it seem a lot more thrilling and important than it really is

why on Earth would anyone photoshop their cock like that since most people would find it repellent/laughable

The metaphor got out of hand. Mistakes were made.

http://www.ilxor.com

yeah you can take any aspect of any work and make it sound really interesting or conversely really shitty, and i think a lot of folks who write in this manner don't really actually get into why these aspects are good or bad, they just present them in a manner that sounds like they're one or the other.

i learned photoshop in order to photoshop my cock to be twice as large

pfft do it in-camera or gtfo

There are many pre-processing enhancement techniques... the yank, the twist, the analog slide...

TS: the analog slide vs the electric slide

The old ways never die

vs the cha-cha slide

The frenulum flip, the perineum polka...

the Bony Maronie...

Watch me now! Hey! work work...

the meatus mambo

So a while ago I would have email discussions with someone who seemed unable to believe I might know as much as her about stuff, and would offer condescending advice -- like one time I said something about communism, and she responded "I think you mean 'socialism'; most people say 'socialism' or 'Marxism' to refer to the ideologies and 'communism' more to refer to specific historical manifestations like like Soviet Union" ... and I was like yeah, I'm aware of that, and that's why I said communism, Ms. Condescendo Rice. She also once referred me to an academic essay making a particular argument, as if it were pointless for her to explain a position any fool knew was already codified as universally true in a minor four-page comment by Martha Nussbaum. She was still nice and all, but she would verge a little too often into that "I am charitably explaining something to a child" tone -- not even in an effort to break things down or be simple and clear about them, but seemingly just out of a habit of expecting everyone in the world to be significantly dumber than her.

^^ btw it's okay if you find that ironic/hypocritical for me to be annoyed by but be nice about it

Not at all, there's people you can take that kind of bullshit from, and people you can't.

You must pardon me, though, from assuming that she was kinda cute.

^^ yup, there are always ppl around who are bright but for some reason haven't interacted much with other smart or smarter people and like don't get how it's done. it's not always a fault of the person, since in a lot of burbs or small towns there's not much of a social infrastructure for talking about brainy stuff; by college if those experiences aren't there, you've got a kind of learned aspie-ism going on. these ppl need to be destroyed btw.

xps

hey kenan you're a creep shut up

I speak in that tone nabisco's talking about to a couple of really, really smart guys I know who seem to have trouble with common sense things like doing dishes. Makes me feel like their mother, and I hate myself for it. So it goes both ways.

xp not trying to get dirty, but there must have been SOMETHING about her that he dug, or he wouldn't even have a paragraph. She sounds like a pain in the ass from the get-go.

i wholeheartedly agree with nabisco about people who refer you to four page papers in obscure academic journals in order to make a point--had a roommate like this one. infuriating. he is actually a very good example of the kind of person this thread is about.

ian are you talking about j0e

No no, this was someone I mostly just knew via discussing stuff over email; there were no attraction or romantic issues involved; it was just odd to be happily discussing a topic of mutual interest and then suddenly discover that she thought I didn't understand (for instance) the differences of meaning between socialism and communism! Like if I have not been misemploying similar concepts thus far, why would you suddenly assume you're the only person in this conversation who understands something like that?

Images - w4m - 21 (Online)

Is there anyone here who understands or is familiar with images, relative to perceptions of reality, philosophy etc? If so I want to converse with you if and only if you are aware of what I'm talking about and you are affected by it in your daily life. The last thing I need is a lesson from someone who is just "book smart." Send me an email, so we can exchange screen names. Be sure to include the word philosophy in the subject line, so that I can then weed out all the people who just reply for kicks not having ever read my post.

xpost - the weird thing about referring to an academic paper is that, you know, I can follow and disagree with an academic's argument as well as I can with the person in the discussion -- it's not some kind of reference work you turn to for argument-settling. There's something odd about saying "catch up, you dumbass, please read and agree with the same academic analysis I do" ... and to be honest, if you can't paraphrase a cogent argument from the academic piece in our conversation, I'm not sure how much I trust your belief in it! I.e., you're talking to me, not giving me a reading list of concepts that are allegedly beyond my current comprehension.

i dunno imagine if we all started citing to works in our emails, how crazy that would be

Sometimes that is shorthand for "this makes my point and I don't want to distort it by paraphrasing" or "I'm too lazy to paraphrase, so this is what I'm thinking".

haha citing would be fine, it's when someone's like "no, your opinion is wrong, and if you read this paper you will find out why"

yeah Dan I am fine if things are sort of suggested in a "I found this interesting and persuasive on the topic" kind of way

And it seems kind of the opposite of smart to me to assume that anybody's work is the complete and final word on a subject.

when i think about it, i realize that particular example about socialism & communism would inspire me to write back and be MORE of a dick about it. i would get it wrong because i think i mix up the english and russian uses of the terms, so i'd be like "actually i'm too educated for that simplistic rule." yeah, i'm that girl sometimes too :/

it was just odd to be happily discussing a topic of mutual interest and then suddenly discover that she thought I didn't understand (for instance) the differences of meaning between socialism and communism

Unsettling to me. If I had never gotten out of the place I grew up, I would still do that, I'm sure. A particularly twisted thing happened from about age 7 on -- my parents started treating me like their equal, and sometimes (even weirder) their superior. I was supposed to know everything, so I figured out how to at least take that tone. Breaking that incredibly obnoxious, highly un-useful habit is still a work in progress, and probably always will be.

The ironic this is that I'd actually be a *much* smarter person now if I hadn't have ever gone around assuming that I was already the nth percentile of every room.

that's really interesting, i wonder why your parents treated you like that. it seems so much simpler to assume kids don't know anything.

They had me IQ tested. The doctor lined them up about how smart I was and that I needed special... something. Fucking hick doctor. I'd have been a lot better off with more chores and regular beatings.

My mother actually asked me today what I want to do to be the opposite of my parents (we just got back from a pretty rough weekend with her mom), and I couldn't come up with an answer. I may steal that one.

The only social "benefit" I got from any of this is that even when I was like twelve, I got along with my parents' friends better than I did anyone my age. It's all so weird, thinking on it now.

what I want to do to be the opposite of my parents

Not having kids is where I started, I guess.

There's something odd about saying "catch up, you dumbass, please read and agree with the same academic analysis I do"

it's the 'and agree with' part that gets me! It's not just that it's lazy, when a person can't be bothered to reformulate someone else's terms to fit the specific discussion they are having with you. It's that they're almost saying 'we can't be having this conversation unless you refit your argument to suit this other person's language and terms, which is where I'd prefer to come from'. Like the discussion can't take place on neutral territory.

Like the discussion can't take place on neutral territory.

I think it's all a matter of tone. A lot of discussions CAN'T happen on neutral ground, and a lot more are no fun at all if they do. What would be neutral, anyway? Eighth grade vocabulary, or some equally low common denominator? (Like a newspaper?) Starting from the assumption that, ahem, no one knows anything about the subject?

Mom, Dad, Mrs. Gilbert (art teacher), Mr. Nearpass (guidance counselor), my three older sisters (total bitches, all of them btw)

doesn't needless smug aggression like this actually contribute to the feeling of 'having to have an opinion on literally everything?'. Hyperconfident assholes enticing people to 'come at them' intellectually, usually over topics that aren't all that important