If you are anything like me, you probably have a passing interest in many things and often find yourself intrigued by certain things and set out to learn more about them. If your experiences have been anything like mine you have probably come across the three phrases in the title of this post many times- that is to say you come across extremes most often and discover that the middleground - that fourth assertion that offers encouragement, can be rather hard to find.
When I have an interest in something new and look online to find out about it I usually come across 1 of 3 types of people, a preacher, a hater, or a scorner. Preachers love the thing you are interested in, so much so to the point that they are often blind to any negative point and fail to critically assess the field they are interested in. Admittedly I can have a lenience toward this as can anyone really but I'd like to think I can look at it from a third person point of view, I know there are a lot of things I like personally that others hate, or find very boring. Preachers on the other hand assert their opinions as fact and believe that their way is the only way.
That leads me to the haters, these are people who effectively form the antonym of the preacher, they hate something with such vehemence that they will not even concede any redeeming positive attribute even where they do exist. There's little to be said here except "haters gonna hate" - there's no point wasting your time and effort on these people, their opinions will never change.
The third mentality I find is the scorner. These people seem to deplore anyone asking questions and most often treat their fields as an almost occult status, if you don't know, then find out yourself. I despise this mentality the most as it is the most abject mentality of the three and seemingly deplores the act of learning from others in itself - to them self teaching is the only acceptable form of teaching and I just can't accept that.
Beyond the Internet I have experienced all three mentalities in various situations and perhaps the most relevant to the post I have experienced all three within learning environments such as school and University. I have met teachers who were like this and I stand by my judgement on them - they're in the wrong job - without going into details I HAVE actually said this to a teacher before.
It just seems to me that the middleground is rather hard to find. Finding someone or some source of information that is not in one of the extremes is quite hard. You'll often find on forums and in groups and sites used for resources that there are collectives that fall into the three categories above. If you are going to suggest Wikipedia to me as a source I'd ask you to refrain. If you have never edited an article on there then I would forgive you for suggesting it but if you have ever tried then you'll know as well as I do that the editors of Wikipedia are prime examples of the above three categories. You will find a number of articles are quite "militantly moderated" by volunteers to the site who push their agenda more than any other.
'Bias' it seems is a fact of life, something we just can't escape, no matter how hard we try.
