h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Being a fan - A2743661
Author: Verc [MINER](A good idea is more important than the syntax and semantics that bound it) - U201249

A journal which I have turned in to a guide entry for the AWW.

I hope this may be a bit of a conversation point to bring about discussion about how we conduct ourselves in life and why we conduct ourselves that way

Nice piece, Verc (though, if you don't mind, we'll gloss over Transformers, Sylvester McCoy and Everton).
Fans are fanatics, right? You ask whether people can have conviction about something, and yet still be prepared to change their views. I think we all can do that, but it takes a very mature standpoint. It's not real fan-dom. Fans are partisan. To be a fan, you have to suspend rational judgement, don't you? Almost by definition.
Scientists have to be prepared to change in just that way, don't they? If you're not ready to re-evaluate everything on the basis of an experimental outcome, then how can you be a scientist?
More generally, some things are axiomatic, and the rest of our values are constructs around these. Confusing your own constructs with axioms is what creates obsession. Confusing other people's constructs with their axioms is one of the things that creates enmity.
I like to speculate about living without axioms. I think there might be a kind of utopia in relying on nothing, but I can't reach it. Probably none of us can. At some level, we all have something that matters too much to let go. If you can't first be philosophically ascetic, maybe you can't be materially ascetic.
My humble opinion, anyway.
Pin

Oddly enough I encompass both extremes. I will argue 'till I'm blue in the face in the belief that I'm right, but in the off chance that I'm wrong and proven to be so, I will change my belief in an instant. The pivot is being proven wrong. At that point I will once again argue 'till I'm blue the same point that I was argueing against. Sometimes right away.

Anyway, I liked it. A well thought tirade on the phenominon of obsessive fandom.