An observation, since I've been shouted out like three times here:

goobster, rd95, veen but directed entirely at rd95:

- You may be fascinated by all this and use it as a means to knowledge, but if your counterpart isn't enjoying it, you lose. When your style of discussion revolves around "here's a counterargument to what you just said" the conversation will necessarily focus on shutting down, not opening up.

- You may browse Wikipedia to find answers but the people you're talking to just know shit. So while you getting an argument countermanded reads as "I guess I didn't understand the argument" to you, to your counterparts it reads as "you don't know shit, here let me pull something tangential off of Wikipedia to shut you down."

- You may think that "please continue" is rude but "I'm going to attempt to close off other avenues of discussion" is ruder.

This discussion is likely relevant to your interests. Veen and I get along really well and damn near came to blows over the concept of "mapping." This is due because he's neck-deep into the theory of mapping and my experience has been with the practice of mapping and we were talking across each other for entirely too long. Here's a great highlight:

The "arrogant" engineers are the ones that know they know more than you and are sick of having to explain it. They're the ones whose knowledge is called into question because somebody just did a study somewhere. They're the ones being forced to (temporarily) rewrite their entire code of behavior because some expert somewhere in another unrelated field has better PR.

NASA scientist sick of debunking Planet X doomsday theories

Word to the wise: when you start to suspect that you're talking to an expert, start to respect the expert's expertise. It isn't just you and Wikipedia making conversation, it's "how can I continue this discussion without being one of those assholes that drives expertise off the internet." Wanna see what it looks like when a skunk raises its tail?

This is not true at any scale.

I work for Continental Corporation, and Daimler Trucks North America.

That's a cat with it's hair up, a pufferfish puffed, a dog growling around a hambone. The Internet think that it's the "appeal to authority fallacy" because Reddit et. al. have created a world where having expertise is somehow a losing proposition but in the non-internet world, knowing shit still counts for something.

And I know you didn't mean to discount the knowledge of the people you were talking to. That's totally not you. But it doesn't take much. Everybody I know who knows audio avoids the shit out of gearslutz... and they'd perish the thought of visiting Reddit. I among them.

It's no fun being told you're full of shit by someone who is clearly, plainly, demonstrably full of shit. And if you're the expert and they're not, they know you're full of shit long before you do.