From: "R. Bononno" 

Nice article. I suppose I could say that most of the people I enjoy talking
with have strong opinions. Some have none. They are pretty boring. Others
don't so much have opinions as AUTHORITATIVE ANSWERS to everything -- often
unfounded. They are simply annoying and I can't say I enjoy their
conversation.



In article , "Bruce Biermann"
 wrote:

> I'm an Idiot, You Moron
> The Greeks, at least, knew the value of an entertaining opinion
>
> By Stephen Bayley (L.A. Times 12/21/03)
>
> Dude, who stole my brain? It's a question that needs answering.
>
> On both sides of the Atlantic, there is a deadening conformity in matters of
> opinion. In politics, the ritual responses of right and left are wearily
> predictable. Academic discourse is numbed by dual constraints of peer-group
> review in truck with the stifling nostrums of correctitude.
>
> In business, governance principles of excruciating probity along with
> diligence requirements of baffling exactitude gag corporate chieftains,
> reducing our 21st century hunter-gatherers to bland ciphers treading water
> in very deep pools of mediocrity. At home with friends, we mumble lazy
> platitudes.
>
> Research at the University of Chicago has shown that extroverted lab rats
> live longer than politically correct ones. Yet we are under daunting
> pressure to conform, not to be too exciting.
>
> But intellectual life should be a battlefield: a combat zone where
> hostilities are legitimized and turned into conversation. Take the dinner
> party. Too often it is a costive, strangulated, squirm-making conversational
> graveyard, a danse macabre where personalities die on the job and wit
> withers before it takes root.
>
> People should be discussing the relationship of sodomy to earthquakes, or
> the belief that evolution occurred because God was disappointed with
> monkeys.
>
> More than a century ago, the great French novelist Gustave Flaubert was so
> incensed by the dreary platitudes of his dinner companions that he satirized
> them in his "Dictionnaire des Idees Recues," an ironic guide
to the lazy
> conversational tropes of his day. If Flaubert were alive today, he would
> have written a thicker volume.
>
> Then as now, rare is the occasion when wit flourishes or booming ideas
> resonate around the table. Locked in a delicate and passionless quadrille of
> misguided politesse, guests trace a blameless path of non-confrontation
> while the angel of silence hovers above, leaving the dining room mute as the
> quenelle travels from plate to mouth.
>
> Why is this?
>
> It is simply because people do not have enough interesting opinions. We have
> a bias against them. The dictionary defines an opinion as a "judgment
> resting on grounds insufficient for complete demonstration." If we are
> honest, that means an exciting and interesting idea, because there can be
> few things more stultifying than "complete demonstration."
As the French
> know, "le secret d'ennuyer est de dire tout" ("the
knack of being boring is
> to say everything").
>
> Much better to take a conceptual risk and struggle to give birth to an idea.
> What we need are more daring demonstrations; ideas need to be launched long
> before their design has been finalized or their journey fully mapped. But
> the suggestion is always that to be "opinionated" is an unattractive
> quality. What a condemnation of our slack ways! Surely, to be opinionated
> is to be in possession of the juice that lubricates the moves of
> civilization.
>
> Not everyone agrees. Discussing the value of opinion with a desiccated
> philosopher on the BBC, I discovered the density of the opposition. The
> philosopher believed that sensory data alone were adequate for the formation
> of ideas. I argued that something else was required to make the world
> interesting and gave the following example: My sensory data tell me, I said,
> on air, that you are sitting there in a beige sweater. My opinion,
> however,is that I wish you were not. And that you have terrible taste.
>
> And I think I won the argument.
>
> It is exactly the same distinction that binary pioneer Claude Shannon made
> between data and information. Data is measurement, or what Donald Rumsfeld
> would call "known knowns." But information is altogether
superior because it
> is data with the added value of meaning and direction. Data records facts,
> information changes ideas.
>
> The Greeks, of course, had a word for it. That word was idiot." Only lately
> has it come to suggest intellectual impairment; originally an idiot was a
> person of strong and independent views who was unafraid to air them.
>
> In this sense, idiocy is immensely important. "Let's invite a lot of idiots
> to dinner," far from being a recipe for disaster, is the
specification of an
> entertaining evening.
>
> The risk is surely worthwhile. Risk and error are handmaidens of authentic
> idiocy. As Henry Ford knew, making a mistake is just an opportunity to start
> again more intelligently.
>
> Ludwig Wittgenstein said if people never did silly things, nothing
> worthwhile would ever happen.
>
> The consequence of discouraging well-meaning idiocy was perfectly understood
> by humorist O. Henry, who once said, thinking of the dinner from hell, "I
> drink to make other people amusing."
>
> As, in desperate search of entertainment, you raise yet another glass, just
> meditate whether you might not be (even) better off with some chewy opinions
> than another large glass of spicy Napa Pinot Noir.
>
>

--
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
robert b.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5