Here’s a long story, but I feel I must share. (Whoops, wrong forum. 
)
Last night (at a gathering unrelated to knitting, of course) my knitting buddies were once again comparing progress on our various projects.
My friend A------ asked if anyone knew how to do an ssk (which is a type of decrease.) I told her, you just slip-as-to-knit, slip-as-to knit, then slip those 2 stitches back onto the left needle, and k2tog. She said, what is this slip-as-to-knit you speak of? She said she gets the same result if she slips-as-to-knit or slips-as-to-perl. As she pulled out her work, I saw that she knits into the back of the loop!!! As in, all of her stitches are twisted.
My friend D----, the person who hates to purl and knits backwards instead, started trying to coach her on how to figure out how to do something that will be the equivalent of the ssk for what she does, and maybe even how to do the some weird thing on a purl so that her stitches will come out straight instead of twisted.
I, on the other hand, just said, for heaven’s sake, A-----, why don’t you just learn to do it right???
This lead to a long philosphical debate. A----- was upset that I was telling her how to knit, and saying her way was wrong. My position was, simply, from a pratical point of view, it’s less work overall to stop doing that right now and retrain yourself to knit correctly. Then for all the rest of the years of your life (she’s in her low 20’s, for heaven’s sake! She’ll be knitting for 40 years, at least!) you can just follow direction and patterns as they’re given.
But D----- took offense at the notion that there’s a “right” way and “wrong” way rather than a “typical” way and “different” way. (D----- is to put it mildly, a contrarian on every topic.) D----- says that A------ should just figure it out her own way.
Suuuure, I said, and then the next time she encounters something new, she has to do a lot of work to figure out how to convert it to her weird way of knitting. And then next new thing she sees after that. And the next new thing after that. And what if she needs help? If she shows what she’s doing to anyone in the world other than D------ and says, “This pattern calls for a nci2nf? How do I do that?” they’re going to say, what the hell are you doing A-------? Why do you knit into the back of the stitch?! I don’t understand what you’re doing; I have no idea how to help you.
And suddenly I realized why I was such an advocate of the “right” way. I’ve had many instances in my career as a physicist where someone told me, “Oh, I see what you’re doing. That’ll work, but it’s weird. Do it this way instead, because that’s how everybody else does it, or else nobody will understand what you’re doing.” Like, you could invent an entirely new system of notation that is correct and self-consistent, but nobody else will understand it, so why don’t you just do it the way everyone else does it? Of course, this way, you might turn aside from a better way of doing this and do it the “right” way instead. . .
What a moment of self-realization. 
But I still think A---- should learn to knit right. 
I always give people too much information before they’re ready for it.
