Dr. Kacy TillmanNov 23, 2022
I sat by an election denier on the airplane and he started poking me in the arm to be emphatic about his views on people stealing ballots secretly and the airplane was full and I couldn’t move anywhere so I started explaining the yellow fever in very great detail, all the way down to telling him about the bloody vomit that looks like coffee grounds and it worked. He stopped talking to me. The moral of this story is you can’t out-weird an academic; our toolset is too vast. #vastearlyamerica
Show threadExpatriéNov 23, 2022

@kacytillman

Thanks for the wonderful post. The problem with your approach, for me at least, is that it takes endless patience, and it’s somewhat analogous to speaking with a plant. I applaud your perseverance, which is beyond my capacity. I merely put on my noise canceling headphones and tune then out.

Show threadAphrodite (recharging)Nov 23, 2022

@americanabroad @kacytillman

I’m going to disagree with you.

It requires just a little more patience than the target.

The tactic is a bet that you know the tactically gross subject more deeply than the target knows their subject, which in this case is winning with house money since Dr Tillman actually has a knowledge base and the rube pushing the bullshit only knows either duckspeak responses if they’re a follower and only bullshit if they’re a leader.

Show threadJohn Carlson
@Aphrodite @americanabroad @kacytillman This is a double win: getting out of an unpleasant conversation and into a conversation that is actually interesting. Any conversation about arthropod-borne pathogens is going to have interesting biology, ecology, history and there are such important lessons for public health applicable to non-arthropod vectored diseases. Well done!! 🦟
Nov 24, 2022 at 12:13amWeb