How does this not come down to saying that people you consider rigorous, on average did more work on their texts than people you don’t consider rigorous, and therefore they wrote less as a whole?
If we take a random (educated) person, and ask him to classify authors into rigorous and non-rigorous, something similar should be true on average, and we should find similar statistics. I can’t see how that shows some deep truth about the nature of rigorous thought, except that it means doing more work in your thinking.
I agree that it does mean at least that, so that e.g. some author has written more than 100 books, that is a pretty good sign that he is not worth reading, even if it is not a conclusive one.
How does this not come down to saying that people you consider rigorous, on average did more work on their texts than people you don’t consider rigorous, and therefore they wrote less as a whole?
That is what it comes down to. I’m not trying to show any truth about the nature of rigorous thought.
Ok. In that sense I agree that this is likely to be the case, and would be the case more often than not with any educated person’s assessment of who does rigorous work.
How does this not come down to saying that people you consider rigorous, on average did more work on their texts than people you don’t consider rigorous, and therefore they wrote less as a whole?
If we take a random (educated) person, and ask him to classify authors into rigorous and non-rigorous, something similar should be true on average, and we should find similar statistics. I can’t see how that shows some deep truth about the nature of rigorous thought, except that it means doing more work in your thinking.
I agree that it does mean at least that, so that e.g. some author has written more than 100 books, that is a pretty good sign that he is not worth reading, even if it is not a conclusive one.
That is what it comes down to. I’m not trying to show any truth about the nature of rigorous thought.
Ok. In that sense I agree that this is likely to be the case, and would be the case more often than not with any educated person’s assessment of who does rigorous work.