Ah, another irregular verb. I am a deep and original thinker, synthesising good ideas from multiple sources without regard to ideology.

I'm going over the verbs trying to locate what you're referring to as an irregular verb. Am I making a mistake? Does "irregular verb" have some metaphorical connotation I'm not aware of?

You seem to follow with 3 likely different interpretations of the same behavior. If I understand it correctly, that is kind of interesting, I'll warrant

I am deeply suspicious when people try to explain away their opponents' beliefs, rather than defeat them intellectually

So you have a criteria for being skeptical of (I won't say "explaining away", which would be presumptuous) my arguments having to do with the style of my argument rather than its content. That is good - I think we all should have such criteria, unless we plan to intellectually take apart all of the thousands upon thousands of assertions that cross our paths.

I have been proposing one such. You just proposed another, one which is generally pretty good.

Once you criticize something as "to explain away" most of what else you say is apt to be redundant.

Thanks for a good humored response.

Yeah, awesome is one that gets me.

That was impressively opaque.

By the way, is it really "bog-standard"? I thought it was "hog-standard".

Well, now I feel bludgeoned. To refer to your judgement or theory about what is going on with me as simply "seeing", and embed it in a subordinate clause is an old rhetorical trick, which I think we should avoid here.

But really, I am very interested in the problem of knowing (and somehow having that knowledge be transmittable) who it is profitable to listen to, and who will lead one astray, because I see a breakdown of common sense about this in the face of the profusion of "information" sources we have these days. This concern started when I began to get forwarded emails from my mother with proofs that Obama is a Muslim and that sort of thing. I worry that we may be going from a mediocre order of things, like the days of 3 major TV channels, where there is a hell of a lot going on that we don't get (but we're not apt to get all that excited and be stampeded over a cliff like the Germans were in the 1930s) to something worse than mediocre.

When you call it the "Brahmin class" dismissing it becomes redundant.

I think we need institutions though, in which the "marketplace of ideas" isn't just <B>the</B> marketplace. Lesswrong is one of them, as are universities.

I believe that the rules of the game in academic research can be very productive as long as there is a there there. I tried to model this as "discovering natural machines", which is what I think Newton did, or "Finding your Invisible Elephant" -- if the blind men actually have an elephant then they may be able to map it if they go about it the right way. But if they have no elephant - one is hugging a tree trunk, another has hold of a snake and another is pushing on a wall - no amount of "scientific method" will help them find the nonexistent elephant. This is why I think some disciplines, like literary criticism and some branches of sociology, despite having peer-reviewed journals and all that, simply go round in circles, and lead to distrust of others, which have something to offer.

That's a bit snarky, but yes, "correct style" may be arbitrary, but without it, we'd drift towards not being able to understand each other. All told, I think a professor (esp. in a thesis writing prep class) is expected to correct students' grammar, and this one was treated shabbily.

No contradiction there, in my opinion.

personal strategies for being more resilient and assertive in the face of perceived slights

I totally agree that we need that.