However, when it comes to more inchoate domains like research skill, such writing does very little to help the inexperienced researcher. It is more likely that they’d simply miss out on the point you are trying to tell them, for they haven’t failed both by, say, being too trusting (a common phenomenon) and being too wary of ‘trusting’ (a somewhat rare phenomenon for someone who gets to the big leagues as a researcher). What would actually help is either concrete case studies, or a tight feedback loop that involves a researcher trying to do something, and perhaps failing, and getting specific feedback from an experienced researcher mentoring them. The latter has an advantage that one doesn’t need to explicitly try to elicit and make clear distinctions of the skills involved, and can still learn them. The former is useful because it is scalable (you write it once, and many people can read it), and the concreteness is extremely relevant to allowing people to evaluate the abstract claims you make, and pattern match it to their own past, current, or potential future experiences.
I wholeheartedly agree.
The reason why I didn’t go for this more grounded and practical and teachable approach is that at the moment, I’m optimizing for consistently writing and publishing posts.
Historically the way I fail at that is by trying too hard to write really good posts and make all the arguments super clean and concrete and detailed—this leads to me dropping the piece after like a week of attempts.
So instead, I’m going for “write what comes naturally, edit a bit to check typos and general coherence, and publish”, which leads to much more abstract pieces (because that’s how I naturally think).
But reexploring this topic in an in-depth and detailed piece in the future, along the lines of what you describe, feels like an interesting challenge. Will keep it in mind. Thanks for the thoughtful comment!
I wholeheartedly agree.
The reason why I didn’t go for this more grounded and practical and teachable approach is that at the moment, I’m optimizing for consistently writing and publishing posts.
Historically the way I fail at that is by trying too hard to write really good posts and make all the arguments super clean and concrete and detailed—this leads to me dropping the piece after like a week of attempts.
So instead, I’m going for “write what comes naturally, edit a bit to check typos and general coherence, and publish”, which leads to much more abstract pieces (because that’s how I naturally think).
But reexploring this topic in an in-depth and detailed piece in the future, along the lines of what you describe, feels like an interesting challenge. Will keep it in mind. Thanks for the thoughtful comment!
I agree with this strategy, and I plan to begin something similar soon. I forgot that Epistemological Fascinations is your less polished and more “optimized for fun and sustainability” substack. (I have both your substacks in my feed reader.)
No worries. ;)