Read part 1 first.

I used to post on this programmer newsgroup (a newsgroup is basically a message forum), where I'd answer programmer questions and, occasionally, ask a few myself. Anyway, one day, this guy comes along, and I don't know if he asked a question, or was just participating in other threads, but he was basically being an ass.

The guy was both extremely stupid and stubborn, and yet articulate, so a lot of people figured he was faking it and just trying to incite anger. But then, other people came in and said they remembered this guy from several years ago, and he's not faking it, he's just mentally unstable. They posted links to archives of him from before, still acting crazy as proof. Many people ignored him. Others exchanged a few "Fuck you" back and forth maybe a dozen times before giving up (the guy would always respond to every message you posted, even if he never actually responded to the actual content you presented in your message). I kept talking to him, though.

I was curious. I had never seen a mind like his. He was obviously intelligent in some ways, and yet so stupid in others. To give an example, someone mentioned Ant, which is a programmer tool. The crazy guy asked what Ant is, and we told him to just Google for it. He said he it wouldn't work, 'cause all he'd get are pages about the insect. Then we told him that if you googled for it, the very first link you'd see would be http://ant.apache.org/, which is the homepage for the tool. He said that didn't make sense. And we spent maybe a week arguing about it. By "we", I mean the community on this message board, not me specifically. The crazy guy's basic argument was something like that Google's search algorithm should return relevant results, and when someone is searching for "ant" they should be getting results about insects. One of our arguments were that the guy should just try entering "ant" into google and see what happens. This is an easily verifiable experiment that anyone with internet access can try. The more he argues against this, the dumber he'll appear, because anyone reading this thread and try the experiment for themselves and see for themselves that a query for "ant" does indeed return as the first result a link to the programming tool.

The crazy guy also got really angry when you'd insult him. He'd freely insult you, but he'd say things like "I'm warning you, don't ever say I'm wrong" or don't say he's a liar, or don't call him names, etc. Sort of like Bill OReilly, I guess, except more articulate (I guess you'd have to be, online, because you can't interrupt other people, shout over them, or ask to cut their microphones on bulletin boards).

Anyway, I got into a discussion with him about the Is-Ought problem and talked about the relative utilities of talking what Google "should" do versus updating your beliefs so that it reflects what Google actually does do.

As I argued with him over the months, I got to learn more and more about his belief systems. He felt like life or reality or the universe or something like that is a game. Every time he loses an argument, he "loses points", and gains points when he wins them. I tried to point out to him that most people here think he's wrong, and thus, in this ruleset, he's losing a ton of points. He said it's because of this that he cannot ever stop arguing, and must reply to every post made towards him (easily over 200 per day). I didn't bother to address whether or not simply responding to a post meant he "won" that argument. Instead, I pointed out that he could simply not play this game, so he'd no longer be losing points, thus ending with a score of 0, which is significantly better than his current score of some huge negative value.

I told him about Buddhism, and the fable of the monk who realized it's easier to wrap his feet in leather rather than pave the whole world in leather to make it more comfortable to walk (a metaphor for the fact that it's easier to change yourself than to change others). I also invited him to go ahead and insult me, and I wouldn't retaliate, as examples of this concept of "not playing the game" (interestingly enough, he'd never take me up on the offer, which I feel only more strongly reinforces my point, but perhaps that idea was too meta-abstract for him).

Throughout our months of discussion, the guy would often say that I wouldn't understand him, because of something that happened in his past. Towards the end, he finally opened up and revealed to me what happened. He had some friends, people whom he believed were his true friends, but they betrayed him. Someone said something bad about him, and everybody believe this ugly rumour, and he became a social outcast. I guess this sort of explains why he hates it when anyone says anything bad about him online, and why he has to argue against this accusation with every last dying breath.

I forget what happened, but I stopped talking to him (and stopped posting to that message board) for over a year now. Surely he didn't stop (i.e. it was I, rather than him, who dropped the conversation). I don't know if I was fed up, or just got busy with other aspects of my life. I also don't really remember how I felt about him at that time (pity?), as most of the intrigue was gone, and things were starting to get repetitive, implying I've gotten all I could have out of the guy. I sort of just forgot about the guy after a while.

The important part of this story is that I remember telling him and thinking that this wouldn't have happened with his real friends. If his real friends are rational, fair people, when they'd hear an ugly rumour about him, they'd want to hear his side of the story too. They're not just going to automatically believe that rumour without fact-checking first, right?

But the guy assured me that's what happened to him. Someone said something bad, and his friends, his TRUE friends, believed it, and stopped being friends with him. And I thought what a miserable existence this guy must have. He truly is a tortured soul, for having a belief system which is so untuned with reality.