An undocumented benefit of public intellectualizing: the more smart things you’re perceived to have said, the more dumb questions you’re allowed to ask with no reputational damage (in fact you get a rep boost as in “wow, he’s smart but willing to look stupid”)
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Interesting how clueless knowledge-idealists turn it into politically dangerous prescription and pretend there’s no cost to dumb questions. Only true for children and only if age-appropriate. Adults kinda have to earn “stupid question tokens” by showing off smarts elsewhere
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Risky conversational gambit unless you can suggest with affect that it is in fact rhetorical. Online it reduces to a special case of Poe’s law I think.
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I actuallyrealized that but I often answer rhetorical questions for my own benefit anyway 😀
Never waste a dumb question even if you didn’t ask it
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speaking of dumb questions it's kinda worth asking what makes a dumb question dumb
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That’s an example of not-dumb
I think a question is seen as dumb (besides the trivial case of not knowing shit you are expected to based on resume) when it exhibits cluelessnesss about something foundational where the conventional understanding is both sound and commonly known
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or you can say every speech act is a proving event and the only thing that matters is the reaction of the audience because that changes the milieu
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