Here, try this: he both thinks that you are not stupid and that "nobody" would confuse who wrote the book (evidently, the second thought was shown to be factually incorrect).
Not so hard--I, however, think you're being silly.
Yes. If he knows that he has never read the book and thus doesn't know what is and isn't in it, then I would consider it a deliberate lie to make a confident claim about the contents of the book.
I say deliberately, because it is so specific and so easy to verify. Either the commenter has read the book, in which case such a strong statement could only be confidently made if paired with an extraordinarily bad memory, or the commenter has not read the book (or done a quick search to see if the book contains these references), in which case I consider the lie to be the result of deliberate ignorance.
That makes it sound completely naive but I think that conclusion would be too rash. it seems like the author has some audience in mind. Perhaps himself after trying a page builder.
that's my point. as someone who had no idea of this, i would think that the author was a raving lunatic or something. at the very least put the thing in quotes and have a citation at the end.
I don't think him claiming he's keeps getting misunderstood is necessarily an indictment of him. Sometimes the misunderstanding comes from readers having a particular mindset, so they see everything through the lense of their preconceptions, which might not match up with what the author was thinking.
I'll take your word for it. Though "Surely You're Joking" reads very closely in style to his letter and with "What Do You Care What Other People Think?", in which he's listed as author with Ralph Leighton as editor.
The point isn’t how, but that the idea isn’t in the words. If I held that view, I’d be bringing in assumptions into the words that aren’t actually there in the words. This is true even if the author actually had those thoughts. The words simply don’t carry that information.
If you're going to make an assertion about the intent of an author's work, it seems like you should back that up with facts? Otherwise it's an "i think" or "it seems like" or "one could argue", isn't it?
Well, sure, but he's describing people who have known him a long time.
>Yesterday, I got told by someone I really care about
>The day before that, one of my very closest friends and someone who I love like family told me
If these people are as close to the author as he claims, then this assumption-projection thing I don't think would hold up. They don't need to backfill with assumptions about "what would a rich guy think" because they should know the author well enough not to have those kinds of gaps.
That said, I wonder if the things I find interesting, smart, or well articulated are thought of that way by the author.
If the author knows it and I don't, maybe the author thinks it's obvious where I find it surprising.
Not so hard--I, however, think you're being silly.
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