I can appreciate why this comment is so up-voted. It's easy for us to think in terms of black and white, binary, here are the lines, true and false if statemen

I can appreciate why this comment is so up-voted. It's easy for us to think in terms of black and white, binary, here are the lines, true and false if statements. But on both points, the analysis is still coming from the same mindset/framework of thinking. On the issue of merit, if you can't communicate about the merit, the merit might as well not exist. In a case where someone has merit to solve a problem, but not the social skills to properly communicate, the person is very similar to a computer program that can receive input and provide output. Computers are great at following instructions to the letter, so much that if they do something wrong, it's usually the user's fault. But how often do we realize now that a program was designed ineffectively so that we now blame the application rather than the user (see any industrial design review), and how often do we wish we could implement machine learning capabilities that would allow the application to correctly guess what the user is really trying to do? People have the ability to adapt social interactions to the user (call it better AI) and also provide this dyanmic feedback (call it machine learning). We can rise above the level of dumb computers that receive input, provide output, and then blame the user if the output isn't actually what the user was looking for. On the issue of radical honesty and transparency, and feeling very dishonest and ugly. I really can appreciate this, I can. But in learning to be empathetic to others (especially my mother, whose mind operates in a totally different manner than my own, leading to many arguments with her when I was younger and I'll admit more immature), I realize that for them not taking into considerations someone's feelings is equally ugly. The words I usually hear are "You don't know anything about my problem, stop acting like you do." Basically in such interactions, I'm not helping, even if I'm right. If we want to speak about merit, the true test should not be my level of knowledge, but rather, did I solve the problem? If I can't solve the problem, how much is my merit really worth? That reminds me of this: http://xkcd.com/793/ http://xkcd.com/793/