> If you get frustrated by this, to me it's not about being a dick, it just implies they are not truly passionate or understanding of the area and may be insecu

> If you get frustrated by this, to me it's not about being a dick, it just implies they are not truly passionate or understanding of the area and may be insecure about it. Or they may just not have the patience for 99% of the people who aren't part of their field and want to comment on it. For example, a climate scientist is generally better off aggressively ignoring the 1000th person they've run into who wants to have an argument about if variability of the sun is responsible for climate change or something like that. Unless they're actually a science educator it isn't a good use of their time. And this very article -- on how easy it is to get to 95th percentile in anything -- is a good example of this. The >99.99th percentile Overwatch player shouldn't be spending their time explaining to people that "you should stand on the objective". That is a waste of their time. People in the 95th percentile should be doing that explaining because that's a 1:20 ratio instead of a 1:1000 ratio. So experts have heuristics to stop the millions of people out there from wasting their time, because to them they don't owe you anything. Without some kind of contractual relationship they're triaging their time based on the fact that you've paid them nothing and they owe you nothing. You have to in some way be significantly worthwhile to them. That isn't an indication of being "not truly passionate" or being "insecure". That's just the inherent problem of having expertise and being at the 99.99th percentile of something, which is that lots of <95th percentile people out there are going to have pretty dumb questions better suited to being answered by those in the 95th percentile and there just isn't enough time in the world for the 99.99th percentile to spend all their time on everyone who wants to chat them up. There are some people out there with the patience of saints who will explain to absolutely everyone, at their level, and always have time for others. But they're going to probably be passionate about education, and likely retired or nearing the end of their career. For most people, it is entirely normal for people to not give you their time BECAUSE they're passionate about what they're not and just not passionate about YOU. You can change that by establishing that you're really one of the >95 percentilers (again as we've seen in this article that can just be the engaged amateur), which makes you much more worth their time and they'll get more out of it as you'll probably get more out of it. Hiding the fact that you have expertise hides that information from the expert and that isn't helping their heuristics, and you can't really blame them for that.