Yes, I thought that might be the case ;-) The vexing thing is, it is interesting, but there's certainly a maximum frequency with which those conversations can happen before they get tedious.
It's also challenging to triage the conversations from that starting point: sometimes they branch and leaf out into new, useful and intensely enjoyable discussions and sometimes people are essentially saying 'EDUCATE ME, PLZ!' or using it as a springboard to ask lots of frustratingly simplistic questions/tell you about their own usually-less-informed-but-strongly-held opinions. I have also found this to be true for online discussions about feminism. But without knowing which it will be, it feels unwise to just shut down the conversation by going, 'I'm sorry, I think about that all day long and would rather talk about pie, or clouds'.
sometimes people are essentially saying 'EDUCATE ME, PLZ!' or using it as a springboard to ask lots of frustratingly simplistic questions
Mmm. Though, of course, it's easy to understand their motivation – if they want to have an interesting discussion about your interesting topic, they've got to get up to speed on enough of it to talk about usefully, and the options for doing that within the time frame of the current conversation are either to persuade you to bring them up to speed or abandon the whole thing.
In such situations I do try to anticipate what the most obvious stupid question must be and avoid asking it, but I'm often left with the suspicion that I probably only succeeded in replacing it with the second most obvious one...
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It's also challenging to triage the conversations from that starting point: sometimes they branch and leaf out into new, useful and intensely enjoyable discussions and sometimes people are essentially saying 'EDUCATE ME, PLZ!' or using it as a springboard to ask lots of frustratingly simplistic questions/tell you about their own usually-less-informed-but-strongly-held opinions. I have also found this to be true for online discussions about feminism. But without knowing which it will be, it feels unwise to just shut down the conversation by going, 'I'm sorry, I think about that all day long and would rather talk about pie, or clouds'.
Mmm. Though, of course, it's easy to understand their motivation – if they want to have an interesting discussion about your interesting topic, they've got to get up to speed on enough of it to talk about usefully, and the options for doing that within the time frame of the current conversation are either to persuade you to bring them up to speed or abandon the whole thing.
In such situations I do try to anticipate what the most obvious stupid question must be and avoid asking it, but I'm often left with the suspicion that I probably only succeeded in replacing it with the second most obvious one...