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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5812128" data-attributes="member: 54877">It shuts down conversations instead of starting them. It creates certain bad impressions, frequently some that may be counter to the ones the speaker wants to create. At best, it can come across as a kind of "lazy snobbery" that instead of asserting a forthright elite proposition and defending that, seeks to drum related things out of the discussion. At worst, it smacks of an agenda separate from the thing itself. Those are all self-interested reasons why it is emprically foolish.  More philosophically, it excludes experiences that people are reporting, in some kind of tight loop--like that madman who thought he was the King of England. It's one thing for the madman to say that the authorities are against him. Of course they are--they are supporting some other King. This would be true whether the man was the rightful King or a madman. It's another thing entirely for the madman to exclude all the common citizens walking around living their lives as if the current King is King, and the madman is rightfully locked up. It's foolish to discount strong emprical evidence that whole swaths are doing some thing that they call "roleplaying" and then construct a definition that says they are not. As a parallel example, I was once of those people who said that "rap isn't music". Now, if pressed even then, I'd have grudgingly admitted that was a tad extreme, and would have backed down to "rap isnt' very good music". Later, as I got more familiar with some other music that I also didn't care for, it finally dawned on me that I have a strong preference for melody over rhythm. If a piece doesn't have a strong melody, I will not find it very enjoyable, and extended exposure won't typically create an appreciation for it--beyond perhaps, "Hey, the rhythm in that is pretty interesting, if you like that kind of thing."  If the earlier me meets a rap enthusiast, we can't really have a productive discussion about "music". At best, we can pick something in music that has an overlap without current interests, and talk about that. But as far as he is concerned, my views on "music" as a whole are so fatally flawed that he might decide to discount them entirely. He might still enjoy talking to me about melody, but that's it. The later me, in contrast, still dislikes rap as much as I ever did. But now we have much more to discuss. He might find why I don't like it insightful when dealing with people like, well, the earlier me. In his vast collection of rap, he might have come across some with a stronger emphasis on melody, and be interested in what I thought of those. And so on. Moreover, you'll note that my "extreme" position was never so bold as to write everything but a narrow slice out of the definition. It never occurred to me in my "listen to nothing but Baroque to Mozart classical music" period to claim that they were the only music.</blockquote>

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