I understand letting some non-essential facts slide if there's little threat that they can be used against you later, but US culture (at least Midwestern business culture) dictates near immediate rebuttal -- no matter how gauche.
In more informal social situations, I don't think this odd social rule is an issue though. After all, if I start talking to somebody at Starbucks about his laptop, it's hard for him to later claim I had an obligation to help him choose the right wireless dongle -- even if he mis-stated his needs for G vs. N connectivity.
Geeks can't see when they're lowering the status of the other person. In fact, they're inept at knowing when to play higher or play lower. I do improv acting. I find improv acting provides an incredibly useful lens to view social interactions.
(Cached link because the Improv Wiki is down.)
What i fear most is not that i might upset someone with my correction, but that someone might not correct me out of politeness if im talking bullshit(i tend to do that often). Thankfully i tend to avoid people pleasers and most of my friends would not hesitate to state my mistakes, even at the risk of insulting me.
1) Hear something incorrect.
2) Can I immediately tell that this incorrect fact will change the conclusion. If so, correct the fact.
3) Else, let the conversation continue but remember the incorrect fact. Keep looking out to see if it changes any conclusions.
I started doing this consciously and eventually its become fairly automatic.
Just look at any thread on this forum: people contribute information and correct each other and it's interesting, not patronizing.
Geeks find the constant back-and-forth of corrections in dialogue to be interesting and educational. Non-geeks do not; they lose interest by about the second iteration, and will become annoyed shortly after.
Little Edit: if you think describing 'I don't agree with you' as an 'altruistic desire to educate' and single-handedly preserving the 'validity of discourse' and the 'truth and correctness of human understanding of the world' is anything short of absurdly presumptuous, you might want to re-read the linked article very carefully.
Not necessarily. Preserving accuracy in a complex system with a lot of data flowing all over the place requires multiple checks throughout the system.
Geeks are obsessed with correctness. Sometimes this is helpful, sometimes not. Witness Slashdot discussions.
When I was a little kid, I had a very strong (and I now realize, unusual) affinity for the truth. I would feel bad if I told someone a fact which I later learned to be false. I felt that if I said something that was false, I was contaminating people's understanding of the world, and this was a wrong thing to do. I didn't frame it this way, in those words, of course, but I remember that this was my explicit thought -- that spreading inaccurate representations of the world was a bad thing to do.
I wonder if many hardcore technical people (I am getting tired of the word "geek") perhaps share this early attitude of mine.
To indulge in some evolutionary psychology, I wonder if this aversion to spreading misinformation was an adaptive trait back when proto-humans lived in small troops -- spread misinformation, and people on whom you relied would be lead astray, to your own detriment.
"I want to say true things, but apparently other people want to hear lies," I thought to myself. But I now know that it's more nuanced than that. Typical people ("non-geeks") do care about truth when it directly relates to what they're interested in: usually social status and mating, and if they're unfortunate, survival. Generally, they're not interested in more abstract subjects.
I interpreted people way too literally. If they talked or asked about X, I assumed they were curious about X. I didn't grasp that small talk is about entertainment and insecurity: the speakers reassure each other of their companionship; gauge each other's abilities, motivations, and desires; signal tribal affiliation; share gossip; and determine their places in the pecking order. It has nothing to do with X. X is just a pretence.
Even as I became conscious of this, I often acted the same way out of principle. Alas.
I think that it is even more nuanced than you propose. Often non-geeks are interested in the subject, but may not have sufficient interest or mental energy required for significant, structured thought into the subject. That is the kind of thought that geeks are accustomed to, but to non-geeks, that's what they do at work, not for pleasure (exceptions abound, though. For example, "non-geeks" often put careful thought into sports. Maybe they should be called "sports-geeks").
I regularly am asked questions about technical matters outside of my expertise. I try to draw some logic into the matter, break it down, and come up with a simple, reasonable, and probably accurate answer. If required, the asker is often intelligent enough to come up with a similar answer - or at least an equally plausible one. But they don't want to, so they ask me. And that's okay. If I don't want to think about, I'll tell them I don't know.
And it's even more nuanced than that. Someone might be very interested, on an absolute scale, in some subject. But as long as he's even more interested in social reassurance, gossip, networking, status, and so on, he will prefer conversations that revolve around those instead. It's a matter of priority. Yeah, there's a latent physics geek in his brain, but when he asks you about next week's weather, his goal is imprecise small talk, not a discussion of turbulence models.
At first I felt like I was being wishy-washy (changing my tune) but I later understood it as just an attempt to be right and not give out wrong information. I felt giving out wrong information and not correcting it when I found out it was wrong was breaking the "trust" relationship I had with the people involved.
Even though I am still in that type of a position and still delivering those types of answers, I now attempt to couch said answers in language that shows "this is what I currently believe, and this may change if I get contradictory information."
Also, I notice I am much pickier about correctness if I have recently been programming. My wife likes to point this out: "Oh, you're in THAT frame of mind."
I guess no one got the obscure Feynman reference.
For example, A geek will know various properties of PI out to some number of decimal places etc. If they have to calculate with PI they'll try and use as much precision as possible in order for the results of the calculations to be as correct as possible at the end. A geek knows that if they just say "PI=3 is close enough". Then calculations using PI end up with all kinds of weird results...and cars will fail to roll and houses will fall down, and ballistic trajectories will miss their mark etc. So a pedantic fetishizing over the digits of PI becomes a necessity. It's hard to turn on and off that level of mental discipline, so by force of necessity most geeks simply set the switch to "on".
So a geek necessarily internalizes the practice of being pedantic and sweating the details.
This happens with anybody who sweats the details in a narrow field because they understand that you can reach the wrong conclusion at the macro level if you don't. Even in seemingly traditionally un-geeky fields like fashion or cooking, you find similar types of behavior patterns.
What this essay is identifying is either the lack of the ability in technical geeks to turn off the pedantic-ism or to not forcibly apply it to all aspects of life.
(To me, this is the question that needs answering.)
A few quick illustrations off the top of my head:
* I speak Spanish fluently and was traveling to Honduras with a group of twenty-some other Americans, only one of which had similar competence with the language. They asked me to give them a quick "Intro to Spanish" course. I started with a simplied academic view, "I'll start with some simple vocabulary, some verbs, some conjugations of 1st/2nd/3rd-singular/plural forms to give them an idea of how to talk." I quickly abandoned that, stuck to the "where is the bathroom?" kind of sentences, names of common foods, other words, and a little human-interest history/geography. That approach worked, they could ask for bananas even if their word ordering and conjugation wasn't perfect. They would have been bored to tears after two minutes of a formal language presentation.
* I was working at a startup and a cute phone-sales rep wanted to know more about our product so she could sell it better. She enjoyed biking too. Great, we go on some great bike rides, I try to educate her about our product but went into way too much depth. Her eyes kind of glaze over, I'm really disappointed about her lack of interest in the product. "You really need to know this," I tried to explain. She probably didn't. She just needed the talking bullet points. She wasn't interested the engineering world view of things and I couldn't deal with that. I saw some disturbing rigid tendencies in myself too. The friendly relationship kind of stopped at that point.
* The best support person I've ever worked with was a master at glossing over the truth, in a good way. He'd talk to us engineers, we'd tell him exactly what was going on and how we needed to change a configuration or fix a bug or apply a patch. What he told the customer often had nothing to do with what we'd tell him. And we and the customers really were better for it. Either the explanation was too detailed for the customer to follow it, or would alarm the customer and bring up a whole bunch of questions they really didn't need to be asking. That's wisdom, of a sort, at least.
But really, it's way more important to get along and be happy than to prove I'm right about something that doesn't matter. (I still say it, but refrain from proving it.)
Wife was having trouble with a financials spreadsheet from work, and asked me to help out. I took a look, and although I didn't know the actual content, it was clear to me what the kind of error must be, and how to correctly design a spreadsheet so that such errors are easily identifiable.
She said she didn't know that the incoming data might be problematic; I replied that one must always treat all inputs as untrusted. She said that XYZ gave it to her; I said be defensive against bad data even if I give it to you.
Anyway... the whole thing turned into a conflict, when I could have just said "I'm glad I could help you this time".
Well, they could if she thought of it like that.
Well, that's the theory anyway.
My wife now frequently turns to me when she hears "facts", I've become a sort of a content filter for facts and trivia; not to mention an encyclopaedia too. I've still got to teach her a true understanding of the universe and our solar system, but I learnt all that by being a sci-fi nerd from when my dad showed me Star Wars at like 3. I've literally got almost two decades on her on that front.
What it has lead to is that I will often cede the point for the time being, I will then look up the relevant literature and either bring it up the next time I'm with the person or send them the link. I try to do this even if I'm wrong.
I'm sure it doesn't help me come off as sociable, but I like to contribute to the spread of fact-based discussion which we have so little of these days.
Boom! The jackals were on him in an instant, tearing away at any and all weak spots. It was pretty funny.
So, yeah, I've been guilty of this myself, but lately I've been trying to pay more attention to what people are saying and why. The Dreamweaver dude had plausible reason for his preference. But every time he mentioned something he liked about it, two or three people jumped in to explain how he could do that with TextMate or Vim or whatever.
While I think people were mostly trying to be helpful, a good part of this had to be the opportunity to show off specialized knowledge of this or that tool.
It's why trolling is one of the best ways to get help.
Don't ever ask how to do something; assert that something can't be done.
You'll get a flood of people wanting to show off and prove you wrong.
(Someone one has written about this behavior, and has an Internet law or rule named after him regarding this, but I can't recall who. I'm counting on everyone here to jump in and show off their knowledge by providing the name. :) )
Oh, and I assert that the quote can't be found.
It's not a named law, but this quote pops up on reddit from time to time.