People who talk as if they know

[cjsmith]

I have a coworker who talks as if he is an authority -- full of confidence, very firm statements -- when he doesn't have any information or experience to back it up.

Random person: "Hey, where's a good dosa restaurant?"
Him: "Restaurant A is the best."
Me: "I like Restaurant B, too."
Him: "A is way better."
Me: "Have you ever been to Restaurant B?"

No, of course; he hadn't. I had to ask him twice before he admitted it, too. So he knows when he's doing this, and he doesn't like getting caught at it.

In another hallway conversation, just now, he spouted off about flying airplanes, a subject I have some minor experience with. Now that I know he doesn't like being confronted, I stopped myself short of asking outright if he had a pilot's license. (Obviously, I'm convinced he doesn't.) I did go ahead and mention what "my flight instructor" had "taught me" about the topic "when I was getting my license". He had the grace to stop making shit up for a few minutes.

How the heck do people deal with somebody like this? Dude, you're POLLUTING THE DATA STREAM. Shut UP. But maybe I'm oversensitive about people making things up and presenting them as truth. Maybe people are smarter than I think, and there isn't any increased tendency to believe a person just because he's confident and loud. (And maybe the Easter Bunny really is ten feet tall.)

Comments

[dpolicar]

I find that by being an attentive audience and asking leading questions and never contradicting them, I can string them along into saying more and more outlandish things. It's fun.

[ckd]

Kind of like the fun game to play with idiot vendor reps?

"Does your product support RFC 1149?"

Some of them will say "yes, of course we do."

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

OMG, I definitely have to work that into the next networking conversation. [memorize number... memorize number]

[abqdan.livejournal.com]

Completely off topic - excuse the indulgence, but I love some of the old RFCs . This is a favorite: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2324.txt The funniest thing is that by now, I'm sure there are coffee pots with Ethernet ports...

Oh - and the colleague is a pompus ass of course.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

The acronym alone makes that one worth publishing! HTCPCP! I love it.

[gdmusumeci.livejournal.com]

RFC 527 is probably my favorite....

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

HAH! Man, I sense a new poll coming. Name your favorite humorous RFC. I don't remember ever seeing any of these before!

[densaer.livejournal.com]

Sheep Over SONET:

http://linuxmafia.com/pub/humour/sheep-over-sonet

[ckd]

They've been collected into a book, too, for reading in the bathroom offline.

[densaer.livejournal.com]

Heh.

I used to do security evaluations for potential products my company would purchase. In the security evaluation questionnaire, among all the nit-picky questions about how the application was coded, and server hardening and encryption modalities, was a simple question: Does the product support RFC 3514?

It was a good way to sanity check who was actually answering the question: engineers, who could look up the RFC real quickly and laugh it off, or marketing types who wouldn't get it.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

There is a devilish little imp inside me who really wants to try this. Heh. :) I bet it takes a bit of practice, though, to do it well.

[dpolicar]

Well, I'm pretty good in general at talking to people about their views of the world; this is simply a use of that power for Evil. Mostly, the trick to it (in both cases) is to ask for clarification a lot.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

So "What is it that restaurant A does that makes so different from B?" might have been a start?

[dpolicar]

Sure. And if you happen to know something about the field, so much the better.
"Mm. So what did you think of restaurant A's $dish... is it (spicy/bitter/round/whatever) enough?" (Extra points if $dish is not supposed to be in the slightest (spicy/bitter/round/whatever)...)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Ha! I should ask him whether he thinks restaurant A's dosa has enough meat in the filling. (It's not exactly impossible, but as far as I can tell it's quite unusual, to stuff one with anything that's not vegetarian.) Or maybe complain that restaurant B's doesn't have enough meat in the filling -- restaurant B is 100% vegetarian. :)