It's cruel to mock the stupid

[pecunium]

Which is why I am not linking to this, but it's an amazing moment of WTF!?!, and I can't keep it to myself (I'm not always the nicest of people).

Today I’m on a flight to San Jose, CA. Well, two flights. Couldn’t find a direct flight.

It was yesterday that I discovered LA and SF were not in the same location… See, I don’t know CA very well and I’m actually headed to Palo Alto. So I mistakenly assumed that LA was pretty much right there, too.

I think the confusion came from last time I was in CA, I flew into SF and out of Oakland, so I had this impression of all the cities being close to each other.

I'm croggled. Not so much that a grown man, and an american citizen, might not know LA and SF are 400 miles apart from each other, but that he would look at a state the size of California, and assume all the metropli are adjacent because two of them were so colocated the last time he was here.

That's the first bit.

The second is that he admits it, with a sense of blasé delivery which implies he thinks this a reasonable mistake to make.

Comments

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

How are people supposed to know what they don't know? Does it help to shame them, even mildly, for admitting ignorance?

If you and robot_scandal have overlapping flists, then other people would have known who you referred to without robot_scandal bringing it up.

And then I thought I'd see what robot_scandal had to say about other matters, and when I looked at his lj and saw a link to his blog, I found he'd linked to this thread, so he might be adding a little drama to the situation.

I sympathize with your amazement, but I still think mocking admissions of ignorance doesn't have a net educational effect.