gwax's rumblings

I have been think­ing about the fol­low­ing quote a fair bit recently:

Great minds dis­cuss ideas; aver­age minds dis­cuss events; small minds dis­cuss people.

– var­i­ously attrib­uted to Eleanor Roosevelt, Hyman G. Rickover, or anonymously

Since hav­ing come across the quote, I have found myself group­ing social inter­ac­tions by whether the dis­cus­sions are pri­mar­ily of ideas, events, or peo­ple. Near invari­ably, I have found the inter­ac­tions involv­ing dis­cus­sions of ideas are stim­u­lat­ing, inter­est­ing, and enjoy­able; whereas, sim­i­larly, dis­cus­sions of peo­ple – in the absence of sociological/anthropological/psychological analy­sis, which blurs the line between peo­ple and ideas – tend to feel hol­low and vapid.

At present, I have really only got­ten to the point of notic­ing the con­nec­tions, and fre­quently only so notic­ing in ret­ro­spect. I have not, as yet, found a prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tion for this knowledge.

Practical, or not, I do feel that it is fan­tas­ti­cally inter­est­ing to seek cor­re­la­tions between my enjoy­ment of inter­ac­tions and the under­ly­ing class/topic of discussion.