- Since I’m the one who coughed up the snotty response in question, I’d like to point out the follwing sentence from the OP I was responding to:
Now Pixie_dust knows where to find information!
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What kind of a response can you give to a question like that? Should I have said, “Mushrooms grow in cow shit and they taste bad and they make you vomit and hallucinate and sometimes you get euphoric and feel at one with the universe and sometimes you get all paranoid and they’re illegal and Eminem did a funny song about them and Bill Hicks had a funny routine about them and I took them at Disneyland once and here’s the molecular structure of psilocybin and here are some links?” Or should I have said, “Don’t come around here asking about illegal drugs! Mushrooms are BAD!” What exactly is the appropriate response to a child asking for information about illegal drugs? Do we want to encourage people like that?
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I have to mention Google whenever I find the answer to someone’s question in 30 seconds because I think it would be dishonest to come up with all kinds of information and give the impression that I knew it all along because I’m smarter than the person asking the question. If I don’t point out how easy it is to get the information I got, it would be promoting ignorance. In fact, I felt guilty a few minutes ago when I answered someone’s question about radioactive fallout without admitting that it took me 10 seconds to find the answer on Google. Do I want people to always be dependent on me for information? But, I don’t think it’s always wrong to post a question that might have been answered with a search engine. This wasn’t one of those cases.
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Wasn’t it Terry Pratchett who said that if you build a man a fire he’ll stay warm for a day, but if you set him on fire he’ll be warm for the rest of his life? There’s a message in that.
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I’ll try to be nice from now on. It’s kind of starting to hurt already, but I’ll keep going.
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Does anyone know what the capital of Texas is? Also, what’s my zip code?
