Intellectually inbred individuals who whose intellectual experience is limited to a single domain, culture or genre.

Western culture has historically been very good at turning out individuals who are blind to the glories of other cultures. Intellectually inbred individuals also include:

• rocket scientists who only vaguely recall who wrote Hamlet; thinks that Cajun food is anything served live and in need of a cage;
• thespians who think of space shuttle launches in terms of their entertainment value and Cajun food as anything cooked by a straight man
• Louisianan rednecks who think that ``space shuttle'' would be a cool slogan for an RV and suspects that they're related to Hamlet via their mother's aunt Thelma and their father's brother Bob.

You're likely to be intellectually inbred if you receive more of your intellectual fodder by a single genre (sci fi, modern novels, classic literature, comics, technical documentation, newspapers, TV, films, pulp romances, civil war documentaries, wildlife documentaries, the WWW, UseNet, E2, MTV, …) than all other genres put together.

Many geeks are intellectually inbred, many for example assume that Unicode contains no embedded cultural assumptions (hint: it assumes the primacy of written language); that most modern languages are easily representable on the internet (hint: try Hindi) and that Robert A. Heinlein invented utopian novels.

I'm just going to go out on a limb here. . .

Has it not occured to anybody that people who spend too much time simply reading and writing on E2, with little to no influence on their trains of thought, are going to wind up being "inbred" in this sense? I know that sometimes I have to take a week or so break from noding, because all the nodes start to look the same, and I start mentioning E2 in real-life conversations that have nothing to do with it (It's okay for other people not to care, you know?) and my noding just deteriorates.

This obviously doesn't happen to some people, but DAMN. There's a lot of non-content on here that just makes my head spin after a while.

Interestingly enough, although Western culture is notorious for its condescending and unsympathetic attitudes towards the foreign and the different, it is only an open culture that could find itself in this predicament in the first place.

If one lived all their lives in the Amazon forest, never coming into contact with the rest of the world either through travel, visits by other travellers or some form of verbal communication, one could not be accused of being intellectually inbred because the frame of reference for their cultural scope of knowledge would be completely different - more self referential, less comparative etc.

A narrow mind is something that can only exist in a wide world. It is not incumbent upon us to know any more than is necessary for our day to day survival, and althouh I myself try to educate myself on foreign customs and beliefs, and sneer at those who are only interested in what goes on in their back yard, I can't, upon rational reflection, really justify this behaviour.