I continually have to be on my guard against letting my smug, egocentric engineer (not saying all engineers are smug and egocentric, but the one in me sure is)

I continually have to be on my guard against letting my smug, egocentric engineer (not saying all engineers are smug and egocentric, but the one in me sure is) take over. Raganwald is correct that as soon as he does, I learn nothing. I like learning too much to allow that. It is also obnoxious to be in discussions with others who do that. Whether it's the mentioned "I stopped reading when" or the particularly pernicious "/s/your/you're/g" type of comments (quick, somebody point out if I was supposed to escape the apostrophe. I'm not a sed/vi wiz), it takes a discussion away from ideas and focuses them on something less. Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people. I think whomever said this (apparently there is some amount of debate about whether it was Eleanor Roosevelt or not[1]) was right. When we start talking about sentence structure or apostrophes, you know we aren't talking about ideas. I come to HN because there are a lot of really smart people here. I find it particularly grating, then, when a thread devolves (or worse, starts) below the level of ideas. I don't get to learn anything then. 1. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eleanor_Roosevelt#Disputed http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eleanor_Roosevelt#Disputed