'You always think you're right'. The single most ridiculous thing people say to me, and they say it on a regular basis. More ridiculous than 'baseball is so much more interesting than cricket' or 'science doesn't give you real answers' and even more ridiculous than 'will you be voting Conservative?'. The implication is that I have opinions that I think are right, which is an obvious truism. The only possible alternative to that is to have opinions you know to be wrong. This would be a bizarre thing to do (and a prerequisite for taking holy orders).
What they really mean is 'you always think you're more right than I am.' This is more acceptable but still a touch daft. If they know more about it than I do, then I can understand their annoyance, but they should lay out their arguments and I may change my mind. If they know less about it than me, I cannot and will not. If you think the world revolves around god's arse as it (probably) says so somewhere in the bible or koran, and I think it doesn't based on the work of every physicist and star gazer since Copernicus as well as stuff I can directly do to prove the heliocentric model, I have a strong basis to think I'm more right than you are. It's a question of demonstration of demonstrable knowledge. as I once heard Christopher Hitchens say, 'claims made without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.'
The risk with having a good knowledge base for your opinions is that it can alienate people. Though being confident works in so many ways, arrogance never does. The problem is there is a fine line between confidence and arrogance. Luckily I know the difference. Mainly because I'm so awesome.
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