heh. My neighbours for example: they cannot have a discussion, if you disagree then it becomes an argument.
A while back we were having a wineparty in the garden (neighbour is a wino) and he was talking about fermentation etc, he made a very basic mistake (it requiring O2 I think) and I corrected him, while thinking "finally, a topic I know about". This was not acceptable. While I have a degree in biology and have done some microbrewing, even after showing him some diagrams of the Crebs cycle and fermentation he was not convinced but just grudgingly dropped the subject.
There's a book that deals in this subject that I'm very fond of, called "How to Win Friends and Influence People." From the title it sounds like it should be the most terrible tract on manipulation known to man, but surprisingly it actually isn't. It's more about phrasing things in such a way as to be an unoffensive as possible, and ways to make yourself a more pleasant person to be around. (For example, it includes rules like "become genuinely interested in people" and "talk in terms of the other person's interest.") From reading that book, and from my own experiences, being unable to accept education or correction is a common human failing--but luckily one that can be gotten around with enough work. It does take work and a lot of patience though.
ok if we are going to talk about questions that are flawed but are in tests:
what is hotter, boiling water, or steam?
It seems to me that this would depend on several different factors, including how pure the water is, whether it has been superheated, what altitude we are at, where you are measuring the steam in relation to the water (remembering that the further away from steam you go, the less hot it gets, though it might not necessarily condense back to water), ambient temperature, and whether we are talking about steam that comes from the same boiling water or a different source. For example, the steam that comes from a cup of hot cocoa on a cold winter's day will be cooler than the water that has been boiled under extreme pressure in the middle of a volcano. Does the steam come from the same source?
The problem is that steam doesn't have a set heat. Without a set heat we can't absolutely say that in every situation steam would be hotter than water.