Bret Devereaux

I lost count, for instance, of the number of Taliban explainers where somehow Hibatullah Akhundzada... the ::checks notes:: "supreme leader & commander of the faithful" just didn't figure in. His *existence* much less his role in the leaderships structure was never explained.

This tendency to dwell entirely in abstraction - and to propose solutions which only exist in the air of abstraction and not on the ground of reality - seems to me to be a common error of the intellectual class and one that good teaching should push against.

Give students the tools they need to understand something at a more granular level and then keep asking "and *how* do you do that?" until you get down to the very concrete 'who-goes-where-and-eats-what' sort of implementation questions on which the entire issue depends.

Because a solution or theory that works at the level of air abstraction but doesn't work in the details...doesn't work. Abstraction is useful and important but only as the servant of the real, finicky details, never in replacement of them.

Livy puts it brilliantly: "For as new inventions often have great force in the words of men, but when tried, when they need to work, and not just have their working described, they evaporate without any effect – just so the war elephants were just a name without any real use."