Avoid trolls and grey vampires. You cannot change them. No need to pity them with your company; they will find others. Life is short and your energy level is not infinite. Do not squander your energy on trolls and grey vampires. How to know who they are? Just pay close attention to your personal energy meter and see who makes it dip. Avoid those people.
This is just this all over again. It's just a different way to justify being closeminded and to treat people badly.
"life is short".
To the extent we practice short term thinking we are generally less moral.
"just pay attention to your personal energy meter and see who makes it dip."
The writer is a professor of philosophy which tells you plenty of that profession. The failure of philosophy is that when it comes to such essential practical matters as how we should treat one another, this is what our philosophy professors can manage.
A 'personal energy meter'?
Hmmm, women with big breasts make me feel energetic, I guess they must be anti-trolls.
People who I perceive as being dumber then I, make me feel at ease and confident. I guess they're OK.
People who seem highly intelligent make me doubt myself. Best to stay away from such trolls.
Worst of all, those who ask questions I have no answers for.
It is maddening but useful stuff to think about. It's the philosophy of being closeminded, deciding you're right and finding ways to permanently condemn those who disagree, without ever answering the questions they have, but instead by simply ignoring them as ultimately 'they're not being positive'.
That, I think, may be what it reduces to. In the case of this professor "they don't have a project, I/you do" is used instead of they're negative and you're positive but it amounts to the same thing.
It's a matter, one way or another, of saying some person isn't being positive enough, and permanetly condemning them, closing your mind to them and their concerns.
And what really is being 'positive'?
Being a short termer. Ignoring negatives and focusing on fun (even in 'object oriented philosophy') right now. Ultimately being a idiot. A closeminded fool.
To a degree anyway. And the people who do it, they've not a clue really what's going on in their heads. They view 'the troll' with suspicion. They start by imagining the worst of others and then it's a matter of just finding a way to justify ugly behavior on their part in order to defend themselves from questions they'd rather not face as they have no answer.
You want to do something actually worthwhile? Face the questions you can't answer.
If instead it is someone just asking questions you've already answered over and over again, OK then, that is someone who's wasting some time unfortunately.
(This fellow's idea that if you haven't been published by 35 you're probably hopeless is also crudely stupid.)
