We all know the meme, but most of the time it's referenced about someone shitty saying something you already agree with. What I wanna hear about is a time when someone who you broadly disagree with actually gave you some kind of new insight about something - even if you didn't end up coming around to their point of view. Maybe they gave you a piece of a puzzle that you were missing, but then you built on that in a completely different way.
Doesn't have to actually be "the worst person you know," interpret it however you like.
6 Comments
Witchfire@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 257d
Well a famous podcaster hasn't said a racist thing in the last month or two, so I'll give him that
IWW4@lemmy.zip · 4 pts · 257d
I work with a few people who are fucking assholes to deal with but when it comes to the tech they work on they know their stuff.
jrubal1462@mander.xyz · 3 pts · 256d
All the time. When people start talking about how the FDA and legislators are all captured by industry lobbyists. YES! And the regulations they wrote don't actually help protect people. YES! So we should skip vaccines and drink raw milk. NOoooooooooo!
So close but the answer I was looking for was abandon FPP elections so we can have a multi-party system that actually represents us and maybe has a chance at overturning citizens United and all that stuff. I don't know, I'm not a poly scientist, I'm just pretty sure pasteurization isn't the root cause here.
cerafredo@reddthat.com · 2 pts · 238d
flamiera@kbin.melroy.org · 2 pts · 257d
TriangleSpecialist@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 255d
I mean, having done a bit of science research, and now being in tech, I'd say I routinely learn from good points and insights from some of my colleagues in their domains of expertise whilst they are otherwise selfish assholes, so... Yeah...
HubertManne@piefed.social · 1 pts · 254d
I found most people in the right situation on the right topic can be knowledgeable or insightful even if they are sorta assholes in general. I mean there are other people I know who are so often knowledgeable and useful that your like woa. Even this person does not know what to do in the rare case they don't or can't add something useful.
isyasad@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 256d
He's not really the worst person I know, but conservative philosopher clown Jordan Peterson has a couple books of life advice, something like a total of 24 rules to follow. I went through them all with my friends debating the merits of each one and we created a ranking of them all.
Some of them were absolutely insane (especially in the second book) like "do not criticize social institutions" (paraphrase) or "you shouldn't criticize anything unless you're perfect" (paraphrase) or the very mysterious "do not hide unwanted things in the fog" (absolutely not paraphrased) but some of the more standard life advice was very useful. I think we agreed that "Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping" was the best one. So that's my final answer. Many people treat themselves worse than they treat others. They could stand to benefit from Peterson's advice and treat themself better, helping themself out as they would another person.
Incidentally, the one we debated about the most was "Do not do what you hate" where half of us were like, "This advice is stupid. Obviously you have to do stuff that you hate sometimes. I hate going to work and doing the dishes, but I gotta do it anyway" and the other side was like, "Well I dunno, suppose we take a really strong view of the word 'hate' and we're just talking about not doing things that you absolutely despise. Maybe you shouldn't do the dishes if you really hate it that much. Maybe you shouldn't go to work." And then we talked about whether or not that view had any merit.
Well, somebody thought to pull up the actual book and see what he was talking about and it turns out he really just meant "I hate being politically correct and using pronouns so I'm not gonna do it" and it's a stupid point to include in a self-help book but honestly if he hates it that much, maybe that's okay?? 🤔