What you describe going through suggests a general principle that it is much harder for people to believe an individual critic or investigator is in good faith (oh god damn it not gotchya), than that an entire system of standardized technical procedures might have enabled bad faith.
Accentuated all the more by adopting the perspective of journalists much more compelled by the violence and thrill of the chase than the question of sides.
Thank you!
Which was the article on qualitative research?
Interesting - almost like a version of Goodheart's that fetishizes subjectivity rather than objectivity! Where the objective metric is the presence of written "output" that can testify to all that subjective thinking (but without actually doing the interpretive work. Neat analogy.
That's a good point. I think there's a key difference between writing as deliberate *practice* (where there is a therapeutic purpose of engaging with thinking), and writing as an instrumental task. We tend to equate verbal work with "thinking" because language=thought. But thought isn't thinking!
I often find myself desperately jotting down useless notes as a way of inspiring myself to think, when really it only simulates the appearance of thinking. But when I'm *really* thinking, it often inspires me to write. And sometimes seeing others' writing in venues like this sparks genuine thinking.
I remember you bringing up this topic a few months ago, and it's a great question to revisit. I think in some cases, writing is just a pivot to "doing" mode that allows one to skip over the requisite thinking. For others, it's a useful catalyst forcing them to think. Depends how we define thinking.
I agree, but there's just a tiny grain of truth in the parallel and I wonder if that's responsible for the conflation. Knowing that the novel you admire in itself was created by a mere mortal can enhance that admiration, and a marathon is cool not only bc it's hard but because 26 miles was traveled.
Looks great. Did you see the recent special issue in Theory & Psychology? journals.sagepub.com/toc/tapa/34/3 Perhaps of interest as a narrower, methods-oriented version of your question (psychology could be seen as a kind of border case).
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