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> Earnestness, for example, is pretty far away from my conception of "playful" or "flirty" or even "fun". Cliff Stoll is the most earnest person I have talked

> Earnestness, for example, is pretty far away from my conception of "playful" or "flirty" or even "fun". Cliff Stoll is the most earnest person I have talked to in the past year, and also one of the most playful and fun. See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3mVnRlQLU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3mVnRlQLU I think you have a non-standard personal definition of “earnest”. As I understand the words, earnestness and playfulness are completely orthogonal/unrelated attributes.

croissants 6y ago
As mentioned in another comment here, I Googled the definition of "earnest", and it mentions "sincere and intense conviction". My post focuses on sincerity which (perhaps in an extreme form) seems to require honesty and an aversion to misrepresentation. This kind of aversion would seem to make play and humor harder. Still, the above chain of reasoning is longer and less convincing than I thought it would be.