I just gave Joe hell for saying “I could be wrong.”

Then I wrote a piece, replying to Joe, about how it I feel things deeply.

Joe kept writing “I could be wrong” because he was making personal observations about me and he was being very careful to make it clear that he was not criticizing me personally, he could be wrong.

Joe is sensitive. So I attacked his sensitivity.

The same sensitiviy I just claimed a right to.

When I say I am wrong a lot, you have to admit I practice what I preach.

Once again, all this is simple but not easy. I deeply believe that you should STOP apologizing.

But on the other hand I just said that I understand sensitivity. This simple stuff gets complicated fast.

Joe, put it another way besides apology.

This is the problem with not being a Wordist. A Wordist can cut out his frontal lobe and stick a book in there. Sometimes I wish I had the Book of Whitaker to stick in there.

Everything in science starts simple. I remember being a Discussant at an economics convention and standing in front of a blackboard full of calculus equations and making corrections.

But all that calculus was based on the words, “supply and demand,” what goes by the not-so-simple-sounding name of Microeconomics.

The whole basis of Western Science, expresed in Occam’s Razor, is simple enough:

“Cut your assumptions to the bone.”

So you get simple basic like the Laws of Thermodynamics.

So you get engineering professors standing in front of blackboards full of equations more complicated than anyone before Occam’s Razor could have imagined.

The world gets very, very complicated when you see the simple truth.

In my piece below, I raised hell about how commenters keep apologizing and how I’m sick of it.

Let me repeat Jow’s comment on “Mark” below, and see if you don’t agree he has nothing to apologize about:

I think you are a person who requires patience and understanding and tolerance from the people you are dealing with. I could be wrong but I suspect that you have had many personal battles in your lifetime. One of the reasons for this would be that you take a stand on various issues. You stand up. You poke your head over the top of the trenchline. Of course, people are going to take a shot at it. People who stand up, especially on issues that the overwhelming majority of people in our country would not even whisper about, can expect a fist in the face now and then. I imagine yours has been pretty well battered. Of course, I could be wrong. It’s just a feeling I have. Look what they did to Christ! He told people the truth and they nailed him to a cross! Humanity. Don’t ya just love ‘em?

With regard to your most recent horsewhipping, perhaps there was a misunderstanding on the part of your cane-wielder. On the other hand, the person may have felt thoroughly justified in tapdancing on your chest. By now I would think you would be used to it. I suspect that you have seen the backs of many heads moving away from you. They don’t understand you, Bob. Furthermore, they don’t want to understand you. It’s too much like work.

I don’t think you’re thick-skinned, Bob. I think you’re very sensitive to criticism. You don’t like reproach.

What’s not good is people moving in the same direction and fighting with each other at the same time. I’ve seen a lot of this over the years. People claiming to want a certain goal and fistfighting with each other at the same time. Bodies lying all over like pieces of shrapnel and people wondering why the goal hasn’t been achieved.

That people can and will turn on you is something you can expect. I have a story for you about that but I won’t include it here. I can just tell you that when that happened to me I dealt with it immediately. I terminated the relationship. But he threw the first punch. I threw the last one.

Comment by joe rorke —

MY REPLY:

Yes, Joe, Mark’s explosion did hurt me.

No, I am NOT used to it. I deal with it.

Being a male, Old Bob hides the fact that he is hurt. And it is true I have grown an elephant skin over my personal sensitivity.

If I were half as tough as I pretend to be I wouldn’t need the elephant skin.

I venture to say that I am not the only male here who does this all the time. Our tendency to act as if we are untouched by unfair assaults is, as I said below, a result hundreds of millions of years of gene selection.

To repeat:

“The female does not choose the male who panics on the strutting ground.”

No comment I make is justified if it only applies to me. If what I just said doesn’t strike a chord with you, I miss my guess.

There are plenty of blogs, and a blog by an insenstitive person is not worth your time to read. So in order to justify your chossing this one, I have to 1) be able to dish it out and take, but 2) take your criticisms seriously.

A real Macho Man would not be able to do step 2)

So what you say gets us back to a point I keep making, the sort of point you read Bob’s Blog to hear:

What I do is simple, dish it out and take but never to be invulnerable to criticism.

Simple enough.

But, God knows, it is not EASY.

Simple but not easy.

Feel it but take the heat.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Simple truths are never easy.

In reply to my comment response called “Mark” below, Joe writes:

I think you are a person who requires patience and understanding and tolerance from the people you are dealing with. I could be wrong but I suspect that you have had many personal battles in your lifetime. One of the reasons for this would be that you take a stand on various issues. You stand up. You poke your head over the top of the trenchline. Of course, people are going to take a shot at it. People who stand up, especially on issues that the overwhelming majority of people in our country would not even whisper about, can expect a fist in the face now and then. I imagine yours has been pretty well battered. Of course, I could be wrong. It’s just a feeling I have. Look what they did to Christ! He told people the truth and they nailed him to a cross! Humanity. Don’t ya just love ‘em?

With regard to your most recent horsewhipping, perhaps there was a misunderstanding on the part of your cane-wielder. On the other hand, the person may have felt thoroughly justified in tapdancing on your chest. By now I would think you would be used to it. I suspect that you have seen the backs of many heads moving away from you. They don’t understand you, Bob. Furthermore, they don’t want to understand you. It’s too much like work.

I don’t think you’re thick-skinned, Bob. I think you’re very sensitive to criticism. You don’t like reproach.

What’s not good is people moving in the same direction and fighting with each other at the same time. I’ve seen a lot of this over the years. People claiming to want a certain goal and fistfighting with each other at the same time. Bodies lying all over like pieces of shrapnel and people wondering why the goal hasn’t been achieved.

That people can and will turn on you is something you can expect. I have a story for you about that but I won’t include it here. I can just tell you that when that happened to me I dealt with it immediately. I terminated the relationship. But he threw the first punch. I threw the last one.

Comment by joe rorke —

MY REPLY:

Joe, I once worked for a German who dectated letters routinely in French, English and Italian.

At a convention, he did what is hardest, he trasnlated between two foreign languages, French and English. I cannot do that in the languages I am acquianted with.

Frenchmen would sometimes correct his French, which is normally a pain in the keester. But they would tell HIM:

“Your French is so perfect that when you make an error, it stands out.”

This was NOT diplomacy. One of hte many reasons people love the French so much is how nasty they are when you make a mistake in their little language.

So this was the highest compliment they could give.

I have a similar problem with your comment. It is all good, solid, sympathetic man-to-man advice, the sort of thing I expect from you.

But you keep throwing in “I could be mistaken…” and that hits me the way my German friend’s grammatical errors hit the Frenchman.

I am SO sick of apologies for sincere and well-thought-out opinions!

All this time reading Bob’s Blog and you have to keep saying, repeatedly, “I could be wrong….”

No joke!

I just wrote a piece about how the disease of our world is people who think THEIR provincialism is not provincialism, THEIR cowardice is not cowardice, and so forth.

In plain English, most of the world’s horrors can be traced to people who cannot believe they can be just plain WRONG.

When you keep saying “I could be wrong” there is the slightest hint in there that I could be inflicted with the same disease.

Dammit, readers, STOP APOLOGIZING!

This is a very important matter to me.

Joe, don’t you DARE apologize for doing this!

ALL my commenters do it sometimes and you gave me the chance to raise hell about it that I needed.

I will deal with your excellent analysis in a separate piece above.