Lissener vs. his students (mild)

The BBQ Pit
1

In this thread in Cafe Society about whether/what sort of good singers there are these days, lissener impresses upon us how definitive his perspective is compared to those less knowledgable than he:

… [unspoken]while lissener is an authority, because he listens to more music, and he had to go to indie record stores to find it.[/unspoken]

Ah, not only has lissener earned the right to speak as an authority, having worked in broadcasting, but, for what its worth, his authorative opinion is that what you like sucks.

And yes, because of his extreme level of superior knowledge, it would be best if folks realised this and stopped talking like they know what they’re talking about, because they don’t, compared to lissener, because, you know, he listens to more music than us.

lissener, in a thread where most responses of dissent are, “oh, but what about so-and-so?,” you’re the one who says, roughly, “you don’t really know much about the subject, while I do.” And, you clearly do have a wealth of knowledge that is different than Chuck’s or others’, and I’m sure we all could (and did) learn from it. But that doesn’t mean you’ve necessarially got a better perspective on the issue, nor does it mean that you get to step into the “teacher” role while the rest of the “students” either agree or are ignorant.

The SDMB has always seemed to thrive on discussion and sharing between people of varrying degrees/fields of knowledge, and by throwing around quasi-insulting language and affecting one-sided teacher/student attitudes is not conducive to discussion. If you want the last word on a subject on which, though you may know a lot, you are not an expert, get a blog.

Equipose was able to respond with good points and legitimate arguments. You just seem to stroke your own ego half the time in that thread by harping on the fact that you have more (perceived) authority on the issue than other people.

2

Equipose did his own fare share of calling people ignorant. Of course, there’s “nothing wrong with being ignorant” as long as you keep your opinions to yourself. BTW boys, that’s what a thread about singers is, a bunch of opinions. Some are more informed than others, some have more experience than others, but NOBODY speaks from a position of “authority” because it’s all ultimately opinion.

Both of them could have framed their arguments positively and chose instead to assert dominance and tell others their opinions are invalid.

3

Yes it does. The informed opinion is superior to the uninformed opinion. There’s nothing wrong with having an opinion informed by nothing else but, essentially, your other opinions, but there is something wrong with not being able to tell the difference between that and actual information. lissener has a great deal of actual information on this subject, so what he has to say about it, as long as he’s drawing on that information, is not the same as what someone less informed has to say, data-value wise.

lissener does sound a bit toolish in that thread, but mostly I think he’s being defensive, not crowing. He’s defending his right to speak as an informed person because he is one, and he’s complaining that other people shouldn’t act like they are if they’re not. Right? I mean, that seems reasonable to me.

4

Right, his information makes him informed, but it’s not really clear that his information makes him any more informed than other people (which is what I was trying to get at in that thread, admitedly in a pretty unclear way). Lissener may know a lot about under-the-radar female artists. He shares it in a way that reads to me like, “surprise, you all don’t know anything; I really hate it when people who don’t know (as much as me) go around speaking like they do.”

The “I know more than you” attitude he has is based on nothing more than his own self-satisfaction with his body of knowledge.

He may know a lot about under-the-radar female artists. But just because he’s aware of a lot of female artists that most people aren’t doesn’t mean that there are relatively an equal amount of female vocalists to male vocalists (which is the sub-coversation that RealityChuck was having). It just means that lissener has self-selected his musical knowledge to be female-heavy. An “expert” in under-the-radar male vocalists could come in and have spoken “expertly” to support the exact opposite point that lissener was making.

Yes, he may know a fair amount about the subject, but that does not in any way justify him setting himself up as an authority, or assuming that his limited data set is somehow more valid than that of others.

I agree with your main point Ensign Edison (which is why this is a mild pitting), but I don’t support lissener’s self-determined level of expertise in relation to other posters in that thread, and the heavy-handed way in which he asserts his superiority.

5

Wait, lissener’s claiming intellectual superiority in Cafe Society? I’m shocked. Shocked I tell you!

6

If what lissener is saying, (and I think he is), is that there is much more out there than one will ever hear on commercial radio, then he is right on. As a source for what is happening in the music world, commercial radio comes in about dead last.

7

C’mon now. Yes, lissener is a tool, but he’s our tool, and if you stop and think about it, if we flog our tool too much we’ll only end up going blind.

That is all.

8

I just wanted to second what Ensign Edison said so eloquently. Opinions are partly subjective and partly objective. You can disagree with the subjective portion while still respecting superior knowledge and experience.

9

It’s a big pet peeve of mine, this idea that no opinion is worth more than any other.

10

Um, maybe your first clue should be the “unspoken” tags you had to manufacture. In that thread, and further in here, you base your entire argument on subtext you THINK I’m saying, rather than what I’m actually saying. For what it’s worth, I wasn’t even thinking of myself as the “authority” in question. I was thinking of people like Equipoise, and others, who know a lot more about it than I do. But mostly I was talking about people who live in narrow, insular worlds and spout authoritatively on subjects they know very little about, not even KNOWING they know very little about it. I was not talking about authority as a positive, which is near impossible in regards to such a subject matter; but about LACK of authority, and lack of humility, which often seem to go together.

It’s very difficult to define a level of experience that makes one an authority on a sibject that is primarily a matter of opinion; I certainly haven’t reached it on the subject at hand. But it’s very, very easy to identify hubristic ignorance. My attempt to describe a hypothetical level of authority–which I quite explicitly never claimed–was only as a backdrop, a point of comparison, for the ignorance under discussion.

11

I’d like to add that I am also driven fucking insane by what I like to think of as Modern Jackassery, after a TAL piece I heard about two guys who knew nothing about architecture standing around discussing the ‘Moorish’ elements of the building they were in, when one finally said ‘We sound like we belong in a magazine. A magazine called Modern Jackass.’

12

lissener, you’re claiming Eonwe for reading unspoken authority in your posts, when that’s exactly what you did with Chuck’s posts.

You claimed he had a “tone of commanding authority” and you don’t think you were speaking from any authoritative position whatsoever. Yet, you are the one who tossed our references to producing a radio show and having a 3,000 CD music collection, not Chuck. If that’s not an effort to establish authority on the subject, I don’t know what is.

Nothing wrong with establishing authority, I do that when something I’ve studied in depth comes up for discussion, but don’t act like you’re posting as an Average Joe when you’re clearly stating that another poster is dead ignorant compared to yourself.

13

Dang previews, that first line should read:

lissener, you’re claiming Eonwe is reading unspoken…

14

So, you determined that Chuck lives in a narrow insular world, and has a lack of authority and lack of humility based on that his one sentence stating that he couldn’t think of too many great women singers off the top of his head? You idenitified his hubristic ignorance from that post? If not, why did you deem it necessary to turn a post about the Four Seasons into a discussion about musical ignorance?

Know what is even easier to identify than hubristic ignorance? Boorish arrogance.

15

No, I meant to illustrate the vastness of the spectrum; there are WAY more authoritative people than me. Again, I had no intention of placing myself in authority. If I had, I would have done so for a reason, right? I pretty carefully didn’t express my own opinion on the subject in those posts, because I didn’t want to imply that I was lending my opinion any authority. I was just trying to put Chuck’s ignorance in perspective. If I’m gonna establish myself as an authority, it would be to “certify” my opinion, or whatever. Which, again, is why I limited myself, in those posts, to talking about A) Chuck’s ignorance and B) the vast spectrum of knowledge out there. I was only an example, not a paragon.

I very carefully did NOT go “here are my credentials, so that’s why these artists are great.” I very carefully meant to communicate “here’s a larger idea of the spectrum of experience that’s out there,” and then, separately, as a change of subject, in another post, I went on to say (at least I meant to), “and by the way, moving on, here are a bunch of artists that I, personally, like a lot.”

But whatever. If you want to ignore the content of what I said, and just make this about me, then go 'head on. The pyramids I described are pretty undebatable, it seems to me, and are the main point of what I was trying to say. If you want to focus on the fact that I used myself as an example, as if that somehow invalidates the valid parts of what I said, then knock yourself out.

Personally, I fail to see how sharing exactly what experiences make you enthusiastic about discussing this subject or that subject equates to boorish arrogance. Because that leaves us with the implication that opinions are only valid in direct proportion to your ignorance on the subject; if you claim experience on a subject, you will be disqualified for arrogance. Kind of ass backwards, but whatever.

16

lissener was reasonable in his opinions, as he usually is. He would have seemed a bit less grating had he not spent quite so much time bragging about his own musical experience. I think that’s irrelevant; establishing oneself as an authority when engaged in an anonymous argument on the internet is not that great a tactic, but it makes some sense in discussions of, say, academic matters. It’s irritating in discussions of the arts, though. Maybe I think that because I’m a college student and I encounter far too many besweatered, bespectacled boys engaged in musical dick-measuring contests. But either way, god damn did lissener come off like a tool in that thread.

17

Cheeseteak seems to have made the crucial point here:

lissener, I had to go back and re-read your comments twice to see how they might have been intended as anything other than an intellectual’s fang-baring. I do think I see what you meant now, but the vibe I got from a cold reading was far from the even-minded tone that you’re saying you intended.

To be clear: I don’t disbelieve you–I think you really did intend the rational position you’re now clarifying. I think this may be one of those cases when a poster has a certain tone of voice in their mind when posting, and the post comes across in a completely different manner.

Weird; that hardly EVER happens on the SDMB.

18

lissener, i agree with you about a lot of things, you know lots of stuff, and i think you’re a good person to have around on these boards. But Jeeeeeesus, dude, you do come off sounding like a self-absorbed tool in some threads about film and music.

Take this little gem, for example:

I can think of about ten different ways that you could have made similar points without the sort of thinly-veiled derision that you exhibit in that paragraph.

Why not say something like:

By not immediately accusing Chuck of being a naive, provincial music fan and a slave to commercial radio, you would avoid putting him on the defensive, and by adopting a little humility and some friendliness in your tone you could be didactic without coming off as such a self-righteous jerkoff.

Of course, you’ll probably argue that i’m reading into your words a tone and an attitude that isn’t really there, and it could well be that any offense you caused was completely accidental, and that you had no malicious intent whatsoever. But when a considerable number of people all see a similar level of self-importance and condescension in your posts, it might be worth asking whether it’s worth trying to be a little more sensitive.

And by the way, in part (D) of your questions to Chuck, you ask: “(instruments? who said anything about instruments?)”

Well, it seemed quite clear to me that the OP of that thread, Argent Towers, had instruments in mind when he started the thread:

Seems to me that the issue of playing an instrument (or not) was rather central to the OP.

Take all that for what it’s worth. I don’t question your intelligence or your erudition, just your delivery.

19

I think authority might be a loaded term, there is a whole continuum of knowledge levels, and you intended to establish your place above Chuck in that continuum. That’s a totally reasonable thing to do, you actually have experience in the subject that he doesn’t.

This is actually the thing about your posts that grated on me. Your goal was to put Chuck down, establish that he’s an ignorant boob whose opinion can be discarded. I think that the right way to deal with incorrect information is to correct it, (at least at first) not to just take the poster down.

You could have said “Chuck, I worked with Equipoise on a radio show that focused on female artists, believe me there are tons of great female singers out there, they just don’t get any visibility.” Add in details about how mainstream radio doesn’t give female artists play, lament how difficult it is to learn about new female artists, draw the picture for those of us who don’t know. You still establish that Chuck is wrong without having to spit in his face. If he still wants to argue about it, in the face of better information, take him down a peg, but your first foray into the topic shouldn’t be attacking another poster.

The boorish part isn’t sharing your experiences and discussing the subject. The boorish part is establishing your experience in the subject to assist in highlighting another person’s ignorance.

20

So this lissener is a fount of knowlege on a topic, but posts his answers in a way that is demeaning and comes off as smarmy and condensending? On this board? Who would have thunk?