User:Sdr

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This user is a native speaker of the English language.

A Few Things About Me

I live in the United States of America and was born in 1983. I live in the same state I always have, Virginia, though my location within has changed from time to time. I have an undergraduate degree, with two majors. As well, I am a strong atheist (I believe in no deities, and I believe that anything 'spiritual' is the subjective experience of psychological/emotional phenomenon).

A Few Thoughts/Opinions

I personally believe that most of the world's problems are caused by people who:

a) have opinions

and

b) believe that their opinions are correct solely because they have them

I am human. I am imperfect, and I make mistakes.

I do my best to take other people's viewpoints and opinions into account, and I try to be as open-minded as possible. That said, I also spend a lot of time studying a variety of topics and thinking about the world in order to formulate my opinions, and so I traditionally (and tragically and naively) expect(ed) others to do the same. I think my problem was/is/shall be that I was/am/will be too willing to assume that an opinion has value because someone else other than myself has it, regardless of how much effort they put into forming the opinion (i.e. the person's thought process may be along the lines of "<celebrity/athelete/corporate shill> said that <bottled drink/electronic gadget/gaudy accessory> is <utterly subjective adjective perceived as beneficial to the consumer's social image>, so it must be good!"). Naturally, making an effort to correct this tendency begs for my habits to switch extremes, and I'm still trying to find a good middle ground.

If I ever post something on a talk page directed towards you, and you take offense, it was almost certainly not my intention to cause offense. Most likely anything that appears to attack you is an attack on your ideas, and not on you personally. Nonetheless, if you took offense, please accept my apologies. I could be wrong, overzealous, a jack ass, or all of the above. Please post disagreement with anything I've written elsewhere on my talk page so I'll take notice. I do not like to make personal attacks, but I have little reservation attacking a poorly formed opinion. There is an important distinction between calling an idea misinformed, and calling the person who expressed the idea an idiot. Both are opinions, both are judgmental, and both would require the one making the judgment to make certain assumptions. However, the product of Wikipedia consists of ideas, not people. We have little to no reason to debate the qualities of people, and far more reason to debate the merits of ideas.

Maybe I'll get around to adding more touchy-feely Humanistic fluff in the future.