Comment by Nomentatus
8 years ago
"Part of his method, at least with me, was to deride contemporary options and dare me to tell him differently."
This was Ibsen's method as well. Notoriously, if he needed a private tutorial, say on an aspect of physics for a play he was writing, Ibsen would make outrageously false statements about the relevant physics in front of a Nobel laureate in physics in order to provoke exactly the energetic private tutorial he needed, from an expert. Didn't give a shit about embarrassing himself.
This is like the correct way to ask for help on Linux forums. If you simply go and say "How do I do X on Linux?" you'll get rude responses of the form "RTFM, n00b." To get any help you have to go to the forum or IRC chatroom and loudly announce "Linux sucks because you can't do X!" Then watch as the nerds fall all over themselves to help you, thereby proving you wrong.
I too was struck by the similarity.
I'll do this on internet help forums. If someone's question is languishing with no answers, I'll write an answer that's probably incorrect, because you know someone will them quickly show up to correct this injustice of someone being wrong on the internet.