It’s no Puzzle Fantastica #1, but it’s what I have at the moment.
In a comment on my post about what I think the point of a college education is (or is not), Caledonian left this tantalizing comment:
I’ve noticed a fascinating trend among those people who have responded to this post favorably. Hopefully additional responses will reveal whether this pattern is genuine or spurious.
Of course, Caledonian isn’t going to bias the data by telling us what the pattern is (at least, not until the data is all in). But now I can’t help poring over the comments to try to discern just what pattern (or patterns) might be emerging among the favorable responses.
In the interests of science, if you haven’t yet commented on the earlier post, go do that before you read the comments here. (Indeed, it might be best to leave your comment on that post before you’ve scrutinized the other comments there — just so you’re not biased toward fitting — or bucking — some pattern or other.)
Once you’ve resolved any urge to comment on that post, have a look at the comments and tell me what pattern you see emerging, either among the commenters who express approval of the post, or among those who take issue with it.
I’m hoping Caledonian will then announce “the answer” (which is to say, the pattern Caledonian has in mind), and then we can let advocates of competing patterns justify their answers.
Maybe there will be prizes.
Well, I think I was going to comment on that post but have forgotten what I was gonna say, and I’m sure it wasn’t brilliant enough to bother reconstructing. But the pattern I noticed amongst positive commenters there is that several of them mentioned they wanted to reproduce your words in some medium.
I’d say that the common theme is that you can clearly tell which persons have had full college experience and those who have not. Those who agree with you most often say they’ll tell a friend or link to or re-publish your post. Those who disagree tend to wave you off and make point that your opinion on the matter will fade into the darkness and none of us will ever discuss it again — because we’ll ‘mature’ out of it. Those who understand you point are about learning and sharing knowledge, while those who diagree and go for the college=job-training angle are all about everybody doing whats best for number one.
Aerik: I agree that a lot of the supporters are showing or mentioning their college experience, but among the few dissenters I saw, none went so far as: “your opinion on the matter will fade into the darkness … because we’ll ‘mature’ out of it.” Were we reading the same post, or were there comments that got nuked, or what?
As far as Caledonian’s “pattern”, I suspect he’s just playing with our heads, but that’s no reason not to play with his comment….
PS: My guess at a pattern is close enough to my own comment that I consider it barely even a guess, but here it is anyway: Supporters have experience both with ideas *and* some aspect of “the real world”. Dissenters lack one or the other.
No comments were nuked. Perhaps Aerik is reporting the subtext?
And, whether or not Caledonian had a particular pattern in mind (which I have no reason to doubt), it seems to me there are patterns to be found!
Subtext? Well, there were a few references I don’t “get”, notably Boethius, Porphyry, and A Confederacy of Dunces. (Never read them….)
If you examine the postive comments long enough, eventually you’ll see a man’s face emerge from the text. He has shoulder-length hair, a modest beard, and concerned expression. In fact, he looks like Jesus …
😉