[CLN-list] Re: "offensive phrase"

[Richard Haney]

--- Sheplyakov Alexei <varg at theor.jinr.ru> wrote:

> On Sun, Aug 13, 2006 at 07:42:59PM -0700, Richard Haney wrote:
[...]
> > and could possibility be misconstrued as to
> > being of any general significance by sufficiently
> > ignorant people.
> ... but instead of writing such an offensive phrase you
> could have modified your PATH before running configure
> to not contain that directory.

Sorry, no offense was intended.  I can only guess that perhaps the
phrase "sufficiently ignorant people" may have seemed offensive because
I have sometimes, but not frequently, heard people, when speaking of
ignorance, to speak with much distain and arrogance as if there is
shame in ignorance.  And in so doing they show personal and/or social
and/or cultural attitudes/values apart from any fact of ignorance
itself.  But it seems to me that there should be no shame in _mere_
ignorance.  It is a fact is that everyone is ignorant of a great, great
many things, and it seems the totality of human knowledge is extremely
miniscule compared to what is potentially knowable.  Moreover, it also
seems severely impossible for any human to even be knowledgeable about
everything humanly known and humanly important (sometimes even in a
rather limited context).  There seems to be some "truth" to the idea
one sometimes hears in a jocular context of someone "having just barely
enough knowledge (about something) to be 'dangerous'".  That is
approximately the sense in which I intended the phrase "sufficiently
ignorant people".

I suppose encyclopedias could be written about the idea of ignorance
(just as much has been written, especially by philosophers, about ideas
of "knowledge").  And it seems there is probably a great, great deal of
unwritten "knowledge" (or at least cultural and social attitudes and
values) about ignorance.

Best regards,

Richard


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