09 May 12
Originally posted by FMFThanks for the compliments.
You seemed to be quite clearly suggesting to jaywill that he could dismiss people who disagreed with him - people who chose to "rebuke" him - as "just haters", if he wanted to. I was baffled as to why someone with your evident sensibilities and thoughtfulness would go anywhere near encouraging him to do such a thing when this forum is already stricken with people resorting to this kind of thing.
I suggested that some people are just haters. That does not mean that you should reject all your critics without a second thought. But I really think it is true that you can discover over time [sometimes a pretty short time] that a certain person is just being a hater.
For an example of how a thoughtful person might nevertheless be dismissive of certain people, I'll go back to an essay of Isaac Asimov's, My Built-in Doubter. He gives three examples from chemistry. If someone hands him a bottle of a common chemical, he would probably just use it without testing it first. If it was a bottle of a rare chemical, he would say with considerable astonishment, "You have a bottle of X?" and would need to test it [say, by running it through an ion-exchange column] before using it. If it was a bottle of an extremely rare chemical, he would say "Sorry. My time is of reasonable value, and I view that possibility as so unlikely that it does not warrant my stepping into the room to get the bottle." (paraphrased from memory)
Sometimes thoughtful analysis leads to the conclusion that a certain person isn't worth wasting further time on. This sounds undemocratic, but one person's opinion is not necessarily as good as the next person's.