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Everytime I tweet non-trivial thoughts, I get a flood of links/pointers to work by others that people think I ought to be familiar with/connect to. I appreciate it, but without specific hooks I’ll likely ignore it. If I followed all such leads I’d get no thinking of my own done.
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If you actually want to help me (or anyone) think better, supply hooks. Supporting/confirmation bias hooks that build on what I’m saying in a yes-and improv way are most useful: “This book adds to your idea and as a bonus connects to your other pet topic of mediocrity”)
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Disconfirmation leads are second-best? Why, because until I build something worth subjecting to falsifying scrutiny, I’m not going to bother. The momentum of a creative fugue is more important for the first half of a thinking session, and confirmation fodder is 10x more useful.
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Least useful is just pointers to vaguely similar thinking you’ve seen elsewhere with no clear build-up or break-down creative destruction dialectical potential with reference to mine. It may be there, but unless you give me a specific preview, screening the leads is intractable.
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Think about it from my point of view. I’m generally trying to build out a thought that’s useful, interesting, and has some novelty. Pointing to undifferentiated similar things can only convince me to abandon a bunny trail, not pursue it more deeply (if that’s what you want of me)
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And of course, if I detect hints that a reference/pointer is a warning shot across my bows, to defend intellectual turf, you’ll attract a very different, beefy kind of hostile attention from me rather than respectful and grateful clue-following 😂
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It’s easy to assume that, if there’s an academic field named after some phenomenon, the people in it are doing whatever can be done to discover things about that phenomenon, and everything known about it is taught in that field. This is rarely true.
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Also, be aware that my thinking style involves a LOT of “scholarly civil disobedience” ie refusing to know about things. Please don’t be offended if I seem reluctant to go down paths you’re eager to send me down. It’s just process discipline.
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Refusing to know about things is a valid form of civil disobedience
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This may not be your style or best style for all topics, but I prefer reinventing wheels to digging up refs or getting lost in other minds mazes. It’s a big reason I left academic research. It’s how I uncover whatever nuggets of interestingness I do, and how I have unpaid fun.
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Thank you for reading my social media API documentation. Yes it’s a small-minded, petty way of conducting one’s intellectual life, obsessively protecting elan vital, fun, and shitposting rights over being a good, collegial citizen of scholarly communities. Sorrynotsorry 😇
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