There are two types of people: People who are open to receiving new information about the world, including information about people they are interacting with. Their reaction is something along the lines of, "Oh, that's cool, I didn't know that. I'm going to go with the assumption that you're not just lying to my face or just wrong about everything, or something along those lines, an assumption I would have arrived at for no reason at all."
Then there's the other type of person, who regards new information as an attack, against which a defense must be mustered.
I wish I met more people who were the first type. I’m so used to keeping info to myself around new people because I don’t wish to make enemies since most people I meet are the second type.
There was a point in martial arts training when I started to be the upper belt to my partners more frequently, and for the first time I started to be the one answering questions rather than asking them.
The best lesson I learned from this is that I usually learned more while I was teaching. People would ask me “why do we do X” and even though I basically knew the answer I wouldn’t be able to articulate it, and the quest for that articulation would force me to really think about the answer in ways that I hadn’t before.
Long story short there: I learned that there is always an opportunity to learn, and that I never knew as much as I thought I did. These were so damn useful to me in not being that second kind of person. I wish everyone could have that experience.
I think it stems from the "I have to be the boss" mentality. If someone tells you something, and you learn from them, then they are the master and you are the learner, and to some people that is intolerable no matter how accurate it is, or how trivial the scenario.
Worryingly we may all be both types. The problem is that we’re typically the first when the new information aligns with the world as we think we understand it, and the second when it conflicts. Information that calls into question our understanding of the world around us makes us feel threatened and through that threat activates our fight or flight instincts. Since we can’t run from information we’ve already heard the only choice is to fight back against it either publicly or in our own minds.
Kinda horrible first date though because it's several hours and if it's an MLB game tickets might be a bit expensive to drop on "wait you have a dog? Eww."
The actual original names of baseball teams are fun. Almost all of these teams changed names (or locations) since their founding. The Atlanta Braves used to be from Boston, where they were the Boston Braves (much better alliteration). Meanwhile, Miami gained alliteration because they just used to be the Florida Marlins.
The Phillies were known as the Phillies pretty much from the beginning, but their official name was the Philadelphia Ball Club Limited. But that was a mouthful so they were nicknamed the Phillies (and also the Quakers).
The team that's now the Washington Nationals used to actually be Canadian: the Montreal Expos (named after Expo '67). Seems a bit weird to me that the baseball team in the US national capital is a transplanted Canadian team.
Also, while looking this up, I found probably the worst-named team ever. The Philadelphia Phillies came to be because the league needed an 8th team to balance things after this other team was dropped from the league. Its hometown was too small to support a pro team. But, it did do some historic things before it folded, like being the first pro team to visit Cuba in 1879 and having the first pitcher in MLB history to throw a perfect game, but it wasn't because they were an amazing team. They also set a record as the first team to be defeated at home without even a single hit.
The name of this historically interesting team? The Worcester Worcesters. Also, if things were pronounced then as they are now, that would have been pronounced "The Woostah Woostahs"