Do you know someone who is never wrong?
Here are warning signs.
#1: They are prone to sweeping statements but don’t back them up.
#2: When called on said sweeping statements, they don’t clarify so much as create a complicated, hyper-technical argument filled with ten-dollar words to get you to back off.
#3: They insultingly tell me what my argument is instead of listening to me.
#4: That argument may reveal that said person actually meant something totally and completely different from what they said, which no one else on the planet might agree with, and which they failed to explicate.
#5: They insist the two things (what they said and what they meant) are identical.
#6: If I pull out some authoritative cites, the cites are wrong.
#7: If the cites are not wrong, then it was all someone else’s fault anyway.
#8: At no point do I receive an apology for having to do all of this to get him to listen.
Once it was spelling, another time quality control, now it’s a really stupidly written description which invites error (because what he wrote and what he meant, despite his pathetic presdo-science argument, are not at all the same thing*). And at least half the time he wins those damned arguments because, plus come to shove, he doesn’t have to change things. So I have no power at all.
- I a somehat philosophical turn, and I really had a hard time explaining it to him, but the phrase “Corruption of Power” refers a hell of a lot more than “three specific feedback loops which are mostly going to show up in bureacracies and rarely elsewhere.”
Eventually, this got pulled into an argument over the use of the world corruption, to which my primary response was that *(when paired with “of Power”) is not primarily talking about bureaucratic feedback loops but a much wider array of human activities, atitudes, and responses. And suggested several alternatives. But nothing.
