The Usenet Motto

“It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them.” — Caron de Beaumarchais.


You probably know about Car Talk, the public radio talk show about cars and car repair. The hosts, Click and Clack (a/k/a Tom and Ray Magliozzi) once had a spirited conversation about whether two people who don’t know anything about a subject know more or less the one person who doesn’t know anything about that subject.


The answer, of course, is that two people know less. Two people arguing about something that neither knows anything about are capable of building an entire towering construct of ignorance and supposition, each particle of non- or mis-information building on the one previous.


 

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