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Comment by zazen | Hacker News Reader

Your friends must be better story tellers than mine! Second-hand stories tend to be pretty stale in my experience. Bad enough when people try to tell about something they heard happened to Joe, worse when they try to tell about something technical that happened centuries ago.

Stories like the Longitude story can be told outside academic dissertations - by people like Dava Sobel, though, not really by Fred who's just read her book.

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So you're saying that no lay person can share interesting facts during casual conversation? You must be an expert on something to casually talk about it at lunch? Nonsense. This is one of the sillier things I've ever read on HN.

It's one thing to share some interesting facts and point people to the book. No-one's going to object to that! But I think it's a bit different if someone spends an entire lunch "explaining" the contents of a book they've just read.

Sometimes interesting stories or explanations one reads about then wishes to convey to someone else may require more than a few minutes to convey. It seems that was the case here.

It's not a matter of arrogance, pseudo-intellectualism or anything else. It's a matter of wanting to share interesting things one knows.

I think this varies massively between different situations. There are definitely good motives for sharing facts, and there are definitely bad motives for sharing facts. It is _sometimes_ a matter of arrogance and pretend intellectualism. Probably most of us have worked at a place where "that guy" was always trying to show off his knowledge. I got the impression that this was one of those times, but I could be wrong easily enough, and I've apologized to the original commenter in a cousin comment.

The phrase "I explained about longitude" paints a very different picture in my head to "I told my friends about this great book about longitude", but maybe that's just me.

Not everyone is a great storyteller... But when someone starts off with: "Here's something really interesting I read the other day, let me try share it with you" -- isn't it kind to listen and engage?

I guess I was seeing a big distinction between telling your friends _about_ this great book you've read, and telling the story yourself, as if you were the expert, as if you, rather than the author, had done the research and formed the narrative. I got the impression that LiamMcCalloway had done the latter, because he said he "explained" to his gf about longitude (and doesn't mention the book at all). If you start to "explain" to people on the basis of having read one book, that's being a know-it-all. Yes, this is an uncharitable reading of LiamMcCalloway's post, but I don't think I quite pulled it out of thin air. LiamMcCalloway, if I've got you wrong and you are in fact an intellectually honest person, I apologize without reservation!

If I don't make any more replies, it's because some people who don't like the tone of my original post are taking the opportunity to downvote everything I say.

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