Stephen doesn't realize how crazy he looks

So I want to start this one off by noting that I'm writing this post on a whim. My updates have been sporadic for years now and, even if it seems suspiciously emphatic, I want to make it clear that nothing interesting happened today or yesterday or even this week to provide some kind of inspiration for this post. I guess it's going to seem spontaneous and I imagine that some day I'll come back  to this and wonder what was on my mind. It's not really anything timely or topical. The fact is, I guess that over the past month or so I've seen things that reminded me of things that reminded me of things and it kind of circled back around to something I should have blogged/journaled about years ago, and never did. Already I can't quite remember what train of memory-joggings brought me down this path, but here we are. Hey, at least I was motivated to post something. That's cool, right?

There's some quirk or set of quirks in the way I present myself, in the way people perceive me, which I've never been able to pinpoint, but which I can infer from remarkable trends in the reactions of others. As this here blog, and my LJ before it even moreso, might hint, I am kind of obsessively introspective. Well, you wouldn't know the half of it from just reading this crap. Because I don't dare write down the patterns of thought that really keep me occupied. Suffice to say that I am, have long always been, and probably always will be compulsively, relentlessly introspective. This paragraph is kind of getting away from me, so let's get back to this quirk or set of quirks. It took many years for me to appreciate it and I still really can't observe it in my own behavior.

I think I first noticed it in high school drama classes when I was trying to convey certain emotions in playing characters. As dabbling high school thespians go, I'd like to think I wasn't half-bad, and most signs seemed to indicate that I'd mastered certain basic skills, although of course I had a long way to go. But in certain recurring types of performances, instead of getting mostly neutral-to-positive appraisals with some mild criticism thrown in, I'd just notice weird looks. I shouldn't dance around the subject, but I don't know exactly what phrase to use. "Certain recurring types of performances" is stupidly vague. To be more specific, I mean highly animated performances in which I was doing one of two things, which I didn't and don't necessarily consider to be similar...

1. Displays of forcefulness, assertiveness, authority, including commands, demands, ultimatums, etc.
2. Displays of heightened emotion dealing with pain, rage, wrath, intense angst, generally associated with situations in which a character has been severely wronged, is in a heated confrontation, or is livid for some other reason.

I imagine there's overlap in there, but even back in high school I kind of spotted enough instances to note that it was both of these categories, either for separate reasons or due to some common element. Now, it really caught my attention in acting because I was acutely observing the reactions of my "audience" for feedback. Weird to say that now because it's not something I'd care about anymore, but at the time it was something I wanted to excel at, so I was interested in paying close attention to clues that might lead me to self-improvement. But it was never limited to stage performances or to acting of any kind. It happens in real life too. Whatever its going on here, whatever wrong signals I send out, it's not something I do accidentally because of a botched performance. I seem to provoke the same responses with both playing a character and with my real-life occurrences of these things.

When I attempt to be assertive, people get rankled by it. They appear to be mildly annoyed at first and sometimes try to work around that with various tools such as humor, misdirection, or simply walking away from me. They do not like me when I am assertive and they do not want me to continue to behave in that manner or to be around me if I do. I've seen people get visibly and disproportionately uncomfortable, even when my words aren't directed at them and when the situation wouldn't seem to call for it.

When I show outward signs of being enraged or emotionally defensive, people get very uncomfortable and seem to respond as though I'm completely unhinged. They seem to become unduly scared, harsh, or even combative, even if I'm not in a confrontation with them.

It's one thing to simply say, "Stephen doesn't realize how crazy he looks." But this is something I noticed repeatedly and, because of the acting thing in high school and continuing into college, something I experimented with, observed keenly. I compared my mannerisms to those of others, I tried to pay close attention to my inflections. I watched myself in the mirror. I even watched myself on video. Like everyone else, I don't always notice how I appear to others and how that differs from my mental image of myself. But the alarming responses I'd unwittingly invoke with those two types of behavior? I couldn't see the reasons for those. I still can't. I remain wholly and frustratingly oblivious to whatever it is that provokes these reactions in others.

At times, I've thought it comical. I've fancied that the problem isn't me: it's everyone else. It's a strange thing to know that you're showing some minor irritation but not flying off the handle, to catch yourself, rein it in and be firm, but restrained, only for everyone around you to react as though you're a maniac waving a gun around. It's even worse to be assigned some responsibility, some delegated modicum of authority at work, only for everyone in proximity to independently decide that is just not happening. "Stephen, you're in charge of this." And then everyone gets hostile.

It's certainly affected my life, although I couldn't possibly be sure how much and in what ways.

"Pro-Science" pandering

I happened across this statement on Facebook...

Most people in the Pro-Science™ crowd aren't interested in science itself, they're just interested in social signalling that they are smart and educated.

That's why they mostly focus on irrelevant lowest-common-denominator crap like flat earth and creationism.

For once, instead of a "Crap from Facebook" post, here's something I actually think has merit. It captures some stuff I've been pondering lately. There are a lot of people online, but also some I know in-person, who wear their "pro-science" on their sleeves. They're proud supporters of science and ostensibly hostile toward superstition and pseudoscience. That's not the same thing as actually having any knowledge of scientific concepts, and that's why they like to play it safe, or stay where they think it's safe.

Wait, what? A drinking straw has one hole. Everyone already knew that, right?

A while back I wrote a post about the not-so-brainteasing topic of hot dogs being referred to as sandwiches. It's silly, but the part about it that is silly to me isn't necessarily the same aspect that most people would find silly. It seems like commonly, when this topic is discussed, both sides attempt to exercise discursive techniques familiar from formal debates. They attempt to establish definitions of terms that they think will favor their own side. They refer to patterns and attempt to arrange various premises and contentions in such a way as to build a case that their side wins. It's the sort of stuff that I'd find interesting in another context, but it seems that the parties involved all forgot that they stumbled into an area where the terms exist within the context of a professional field of study, and that there is a definitive right answer. A definitive right answer, especially one that is readily available and rather clear-cut, tends to stand rather triumphantly against any kind of debate tricks, no matter how clever or sophisticated those tricks might be. So to recapitulate, hot dogs are not sandwiches because the terms "hot dog" and "sandwich" in the context of foods are terms coined by chefs, terms which exist in the context of culinary traditions. It's a rather mundane Q.E.D. to respond to some rather elaborate verbal hedging by both sides of the aisle. But then, that's how these things often work out.

To my surprise, I recently found another not-so-brainteasing question come up alongside the hotdog/sandwich topic: "How many holes does a drinking straw have?" My initial response as soon as I read that one was something like, "I think it's one, right? I mean, topology isn't really in my wheelhouse, but this is an exceedingly basic question and unless there's some trick, I know it's going to be one." And then I had the followup thought of, "Someone has probably already asked a topologist this question, so let's look it up on the internet." I was, in both instances, correct on all counts. It's an easy problem for topology, people have already asked topologists, and the answer is, indeed, one. Well, that was easy.

What's strange and frustrating to me about this, though, is that I guess I expected better. The hotdog thing seems more like a forgivable sort of mistake. The sort of people who like to argue about these things are nerds. A lot of them are into or familiar with physics, biology, epistemology, information science, etc. And perhaps the sort of nerds who are culinary nerds are also not the sort to get dragged into such arcane debates. So it becomes a topic with all sorts of irrelevant philosophical debate, because there just aren't enough people with both an interest in getting involved and the sense to remind the participants that there's already a system of nomenclature established for these things. At least, I thought that was what was going on, at the time I wrote the hotdog post. The nerds who nerd it up with elaborate discussions on abstract debate topics like "Does X count as Y" just might not have much overlap with people who are interested in culinary history. So they miss the point and look a bit silly to me, but it's the kind of mistake I guess I expected. But how many holes an object has? Surely many of these same sorts of nerds are also math nerds! Surely even the ones who don't know much topology know enough to know that it exists and know enough to look to topology for an answer. Right? Right? Apparently not.

And on that, I'm stumped. Here we have the sort of question that...

1. Seems obviously to be a topology question.
2. Has an easy, readily available answer in topology.
3. Has a definitive answer from the field of topology that also would seem to happen to match the most intuitive answer (from my perspective, anyway), so there shouldn't be much objection.

And yet some people are still arguing for a wrong conclusion? How? What's wrong with these people?