Proprietary

Lorca is mine. Please don't write anything about him that I could possibly disagree with, or that question's my ideal image of him.

I sometimes feel like that, lacking any disance from my proprietary interest in the objects of my research. It's good to feel ownership in some sense, but not to feel one has a monopoly interest.

Writing as Solace

I draw real comfort from good writing, as from well-played music. It is soothing and refreshing. I hope that something I write will have that effect on someone else at some point. Most academic writing depletes rather than refreshing.

Other People's Writing...

Of course, other people's really good writing can get me going again. Here is Dryden translating Virgil:

Meantime imperial Neptune heard the sound
Of raging billows breaking on the ground.
Displeas'd, and fearing for his wat'ry reign,
He rear'd his awful head above the main,
Serene in majesty; then roll'd his eyes
Around the space of earth, and seas, and skies.
He saw the Trojan fleet dispers'd, distress'd,
By stormy winds and wintry heav'n oppress'd.

Other People's Writing Is Hell

I think it was Sartre who said that, or something similar. Working on other people's writing when I want to be working on my own is a peculiar form of torment for me. Even things that are reasonably well-written are not written in a way that will satisfy my particular preferences.. The average piece I am reviewing or evaluating is going to be written indifferently even when it has other merits. When I say written indifferently I mean exactly that: the writing is indifferent to the qualities I value in good prose.

It Doesn't Rain But It Pours

I have to read an article for a journal, a book manuscript for a press, an article for a colleague, a dissertation chapter, a paper written by a grad student for an independent study, and my undergraduate students' paper revisions. My approach to this is to get a few things out of the way quickly, so this morning (and afternoon) I finished the dissertation chapter and 40 pages of the book, and read through the article once. It doesn't have to be done all at once, but I I don't want to be only reading other people's work for the next month, and more things will come up: NEH summer stipend review panel next month, for example.

More Critical Thinking

People tend to think in dichotomous ways. For example, if you happen to question the efficacy of various sorts of "alternative medicine," people will think you are an advocate of everything that the big pharmaceutical companies advocate. Really, though, those two questions are totally separate. A treatment associated with "alternative medicine" works (or not) because of whether it works, not because it is "alternative" or "natural." A drug developed by a drug company has the effects that it has, the efficacy (or not) that is has, because of what it does, not because of its origin. A scientific theory is valid if it works and produces the predictions it has predicted, not because it is "science." There is no contradiction in applying equal degrees of skepticism to anything and everything.

***

What does this have to with with Scholarly Writing? Nothing much, except that being very, very smart does not allow you to bypass cognitive biases. You have to figure out each new intellectual problem from scratch, figuring out what to believe and what not to believe. The kind of articles that seem to be pure confirmation bias do not seem quite as revelatory.

A Critical Thinking Exercise

On the internet you will find advertisements for colon cleaning that claim that an average adult is walking around with 5-25 lbs of fecal material in their large intestine, caked drily on the sides. How could you evaluate such a claim if you were not in the medical field? (I apologize in advance for this post. It just somehow needed to come out.)

(1) When you feel you have to take an enormous dump, step first on the bathroom scale. Then weigh yourself right afterwards on the same scale. How much weight did you lose? Probably less than a half a pound. I have a scale that measures in 0.2 lb increments and sometimes the scale gives me the same measurement before and after a substantial bowel movement. So the claim is that you have between 10 and 74 times more crap left inside you even after ridding yourself of some serious turds.

(2) Now go to the gym and pick up a 25 lb. weight? How heavy does it feel to you. Now pick up a 5, 10, 15, and 20 pound piece of iron. A pound of metal weighs the same as a pound of shit, so you need to get a feel for how much weight this really is. Imagine that you are carrying around the fifteen-pound dumbbell within your gut all the time. Does this seem plausible? Of you have a toddler handy you can lift him or her into the air. How heavy does the kid feel?

(3) Look at a pregnant woman. Suppose she is carrying an 8 lb. baby and the placenta Or look at a person who's 40 lbs oveweigth and carrying about 25 of it in a beer belly. Do you think your colon is carrying something of equivalent mass? Wouldn't it be as big as the uterus of a pregnant person? If so, how does the stool even pass through there? Wouldn't you die of a blockage before you got to 15 or 20 pounds? If the argument is that the matter is so compacted that it has a high density, remember again how much your elimination weighed after you did your business, remember again the relative density of metal and flesh.

(4) Now look at the advertisements again. What are they selling? How much would it cost to get your insides cleaned out? Now compare this to the price of the laxatives they tell you to use before a colonoscopy. Before you get one of these, you have to clean out your entire system, and the result is that there is nothing there. I guarantee you won't lose 20 lbs.

(5) Now think of what other mental experiments you might perform to evaluate a claim of this type. You need to balance what your own experience tells you, unbiased information, and the opinions of experts. Suppose the claim was one like "we only use one tenth of our brains." How would you evaluate a cliché meme like this? Maybe it might be more difficult with some more elusive ones.