Lack of Peers?? and social problems associated with intelligence The Urth list — 2 messages, 2 voices, 20 Oct 2011 https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/6075 Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it. Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. ============================================================================== Gwern Branwen — 20 Oct 2011, 01:31 > From the dual n-back mailing list: > On Sun, Sep 20, 2009 at 10:31 AM, Dennis Peterson > wrote: > > I recently saw Gene Wolfe speak at a conference. Aside from being a great > writer and an engineer, he's a Korean War veteran. He said he once asked a > bunch of college students what a friend is, and they all said "Someone who > shares your interests, who you can talk to about interesting things, etc." > He was somewhat appalled. He said "No. A friend is someone who will give you > a drink out of his canteen." > He went on to talk about some of the great friends he had during the > war...guys who had nothing in common with him, but they liked each other > anyway and looked out for each other. -- gwern http://www.gwern.net ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Marc Aramini — 20 Oct 2011, 19:01 in reply to Gwern Branwen Well, sometimes the more people ostensibly have in common with you, the more you argue with them (wolfe mailing list, anyone?). I like Wolfe's definition there. > --- On Wed, 10/19/11, Gwern Branwen wrote: > From: Gwern Branwen > Subject: Re: (urth) Lack of Peers? and social problems associated with intelligence > To: "The Urth Mailing List" > Date: Wednesday, October 19, 2011, 6:31 PM > From the dual n-back mailing list: > > On Sun, Sep 20, 2009 at 10:31 AM, Dennis Peterson > > wrote: > > I recently saw Gene Wolfe speak at a conference. Aside > > from being a great > > writer and an engineer, he's a Korean War veteran. He > > said he once asked a > > bunch of college students what a friend is, and they > > all said "Someone who > > shares your interests, who you can talk to about > > interesting things, etc." > > He was somewhat appalled. He said "No. A friend is > > someone who will give you > > a drink out of his canteen." > > He went on to talk about some of the great friends he > > had during the > > war...guys who had nothing in common with him, but > > they liked each other > > anyway and looked out for each other. > -- > gwern > http://www.gwern.net > _______________________________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------