&gt; I didn&#x27;t take the time, this time. I let your words to me stand on their own, and they weren&#x27;t standing up very well. I repeatedly asked, and you didn&#x27;t clarify some of the apparently very important nuances of your view point.<p>I didn&#x27;t take the time to elaborate on questions you asked that I felt like I&#x27;d already addressed elsewhere. If I had known you didn&#x27;t bother to read them, I would have briefly restated them.<p>Oh well.<p>&gt; The entire history of science has been gathering data, and making predictions.<p>You missed the hard part of actually testing those predictions. Data science does not bother testing, it just collects more and more data. Often the premises change right underneath, and data science just goes right on lamp posting.<p>An excellent blog to watch this in real time is Slate Star Codex. The author will make you reconsider everything you know about science if you listen to him long enough.<p>&gt; by looking at the other people who were similarly stocking the shelves.<p>You just looked at them? You didn&#x27;t get to know them? Appearances can be very deceiving, especially when it comes to public settings like that. I&#x27;m not saying you&#x27;re wrong, but I&#x27;ve learned to not trust other people&#x27;s perceptions if there&#x27;s nothing more to go on.<p>It doesn&#x27;t matter to me that it&#x27;s anecdotal. I&#x27;ve learned that anecdote can be more trustworthy than &#x27;scientific&#x27; analysis. But one needs to learn how to draw conclusions from anecdote and where the holes in the logic might be before relying on it.<p>The people at the soup kitchen may have been putting on their best faces to go out. Without knowing their stories you don&#x27;t know why they&#x27;re there.<p>I worked at the Atlanta Community Food Bank for a short time. I maybe was the only person on the team actually getting paid. I went in with one perception of the people that were working there, and left that place with a completely different perspective after talking to them and getting to know them.<p>&gt; If you enjoy it, then please refrain from the negative comments (&quot;the very way you think about wealth is utterly silly&quot;). I doubt they increase your enjoyment, and they negatively impacted mine.<p>My suggestion to you, since you did say that you were here to perhaps learn from my experience, is to be a little more critical of your own understandings. It took me a long time to come to my current understanding of what wealth is, and I&#x27;m sure that understanding will evolve further as I delve more deeply into topics like economics and finance to flesh out what I feel is a strong historical understanding. I didn&#x27;t gain that understanding by believing in myself, I did it by disbelieving in my own thoughts.<p>If someone told me that the way I think about X was silly, I&#x27;d immediately want to know why he felt that way. Hearing the rationale of people that have negative opinions of me is quite valuable to me. For someone whose been on BBSes for the last 20 years, I&#x27;d have thought you&#x27;ve have acquired the same thick skin that I have regarding intellectual discussions. I apologize for offending you, but as I don&#x27;t think I did anything wrong, it&#x27;s obviously a hollow apology.