So in actuality, you do pick and choose who you respond to. You don't just go down the list, you naturally stay away from those who, to put it succiently, aren't easy wins.

if you're more curious than egotistical, then you'll rarely find the time for that sort of thing. which is me. i'm a scientist, so i'm more than anything just curious to know things. which means i go at everything in life with the assumption that there's something there to learn, something i don't know when i first approach.

If that were true, you would welcome the oppertunity to engage everyone and cast the widest possible net you can. That however, is not your MO. As you've already admitted, you are quite happy blocking certain viewpoints which you find yourself unable to refute. You don't consider that perhaps your position is flawed, your EGO tells you that the responder must be the one who is flawed, not yourself.

this approach nearly requires that you, by default, not be ego-driven.

Do you realize that you are repeating yourself?

lot's of people think that the best scientists must have raging egos because, well, they're the best, so they must know it and therefore must be hotshots and, thus, ego-driven.

Lots of people think that? Do you have some basis for that assertion? This is an example of the assumptions you make in your arguments. You like to present an assumption you've made as fact and then you go from there and when someone challeges your assumption, instead of realizing it's an assumption and changing it, your EGO drives you to make rediculous twists of logic in order to protect that assumption.

On another side note, so far, you've written a great deal of words but have actually said very little. Are you aware of that?

but this perception only persists because the only way we know about top scientists is thru the media, and the only way the media knows about scientists is when they leave their research institution to form a private company with their own personal work and become rich-guy company CEOs. this happens alot, and why shouldn't it. but thing about rich-guy CEOs who are also scientists is that this automatically selects out for Big Ego. it's just something you find in CEO types that you don't find in "spends 30 years in the lab" guys. and while the scientist CEO might be more prone to have some brilliant theoretical insights which were too good not to monetize, this is only one type of brilliance.

Blah blah blah, tangent, tangent, assumption assumption, meaningless drivel that has absolutely no bearing on the topic at hand.

the Theoretician is distinct from the Empiricist. the Empiricist insists, above all else, on rigor. and this rigor is gotten to by direct observation of the natural world. it's all well and good to see something that "must be true" on paper. but the world is full of suckers in back alleys, standing in front of 3-card-Monty tables, smacking their foreheads because they were SURE the little pea HAD to be under card #2.

So, in this case, you would be the Theoretician with your theories about oh say, the effectiveness of UBC and no one would dare sell a gun without a background check under UBC and we would be the Empiricists when we point out that 80,000 people fail background checks and only 14 were procecuted, hence UBC would do nothing to stop blackmarket sales because, what the hay, the likelyhood of being prosecuted for doing so would be astronomically low.

this is my approach, i'm an Empiricist.

LOL.