Regardless of whether a student agrees with my worldview, I want them to be biased at the end of their research process. I want them to have strong opinions about a subject and to be skeptical of uninformed pronouncements about it. Think about it: if you’ve been researching a subject for eight or ten weeks, using academic resources and doing primary research – that is, research out in the field – on a subject, shouldn’t you have a strong, informed opinion?
Read MoreOkay, so our first night in California, Edgar’s sisters insisted on putting on Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, which is a uniquely bad film.
Read MoreA simplified version of this appears in Neal Stephenson’s book Anathem as an adage that the inhabitants of that fictitious world know as “Diax’s Rake”, which goes “Never believe a thing simply because you want it to be true.” In business, a similar idea is put forward more generally, “past results are not indicative of future performance.” In our world, the postulate that you can’t get an is from an ought or vice versa is known by a different name: “Hume’s Guillotine.”
Read MoreAs I hit “publish”, I hear Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s voice in my head, saying “You understand, of course, that everything I say is horseshit.”
Read MoreWorld builders can diverge from reality quite a bit, and for fantastical stories, this is compulsory, whether something as restrained as Hav by Jan Morris or as outre and surreal as the work of Leonora Carrington. However, not all divergences from reality are created equal, and they should all be to roughly the same degree in the same work — most importantly, the writer should understand what the big asks from their work is and implies.
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