Low-temperature bunk

For years I have been baffled by people I consider much more intelligent, knowledgeable and skilled at producing clear explanations than I am, who nonetheless enjoy conversations with people I consider much weaker along those same axes, particularly the third one.Recently an explanation occurred to me. The value of a statement has two sides: the thought the speaker is trying to convey, and the thoughts it manages to inspire in the listener. The first side is fixed regardless of the audience. But since intelligence includes the ability to generate new ideas, it's actually not at all surprising that the second side should depend on the listener's intelligence. The interesting question is: which kinds of statements are more prone to create this differential?I particularly dislike "performers of knowledge", i.e. people who know all the jargon, deploy it in superficially correct ways, but occasionally say things that reveal a complete lack of understanding of the basics.[1] I now think of them as generators of "low-temperature bunk": slight deviations from known truths, some of which occasionally happen to coincide with statements from a genuine expert who dissents from some taken-for-granted assumptions in the field. More often, they might sound like a promising step in that direction. I still find these people annoying. But I now recognize their potential high value as interlocutors.I also realized I do something similar along a different dimension. Some people seem only capable of giving "canonically correct" answers. I don't particularly enjoy talking to them, because I feel that I could have simply checked Wikipedia or LessWrong. On the other hand, there are plenty of people who hold views I consider wrong or unjustified whom I value enormously as conversation partners. I can imagine others being baffled watching me relish those exchanges. "Wasn't everything X said wrong?", a confused observer might ask.It was all wrong, but wrong in very particular ways: it was low