I’ll start with the ending: three Mondays ago, after 2 years of work in a lab and several recent months of panic and suffering quiet perseverance, I turned in my thesis. It arrived at the biochem office 51 minutes after the deadline.
This was after I wrote an abstract in 10 minutes (4:30pm), an entire chapter of results in 5 hours (11:00am), made two figures overnight (12:00am-9am) off of data collected from experiments 2 days before. If had gotten to the office 9 minutes later, the doors would have closed and locked away any hope I would have had of graduating with honors. Fortunately I made it in time.
It looks like there is somebody with more spare time on his hands than I do. A philosophy PhD by the name of Gary Curtis has compiled this extensive catalogue of logical fallacies, along with a blog to track recent offenses. Before you think “what a nerd” and close this tab, let me just say that I agree with you. But, also, somehow, this guy makes reading about logical fallacies actually really interesting.
The key, I think, is that he chooses to illustrate the fallacies with examples taken from real literature–court decisions, essays, speeches, some written by very famous and respected people. Besides being much more subtle than the typical textbook examples, these passages highlight the much more complicated nature of logic and truth in writing. Some of them aren’t even, strictly speaking, fallacious, but simply demonstrate the linguistic pitfalls that are likely to befall anyone demanding true philosophical rigor from their writing.
If nothing else, the examples are good for a few laughs. For example, can you guess what fallacy this quote is intended to demonstrate?
…[I]f once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begin upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time.
Hint: click here.
In the spirit of the last post on procrastination. What can I say, I’m a slow reader, and lose focus easily. Some of these required multiple renews, and still weren’t finished. Which failure is the most lamentable? Which one should I return to first?
Letters to a Young Poet (Ranier Maria Rilke)
The Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie)
Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)
Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami)
To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
Gödel Escher Bach (Douglas Hofstadter)
Women in Love (D.H. Lawrence)
I have a friend who is a hopeless (-ly impractical) intellectual, an incorrigible procrastinator, and an internet addict. Convincing him to get a del.icio.us account was the best thing I’ve ever done.
Case in point: today, in the middle of my 3-year-and-counting hiatus from Ranier Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (I was on the 2nd letter when I struck up a game of Starcraft and never looked back), this gem pops up on Dave’s del.icio.us account: Letter to a young procrastinator, from Slate magazine.
If you don’t feel like reading the article yet, head on over to Procrastination Central. Then have a cup of coffee. You’ve earned it.
Moving on. The title is self-explanatory. First a few words of advice, followed by some light self-deprecation, and then the punchline:
While that grind in your econ class is toiling, you’re becoming a more relaxed, quirkier, less-programmed person. You nurture the creative sprouts that take root only in long hours of idleness. You’re open to soulful experiences that lie only beyond the bounded worlds of work and study.
Soulful experiences? Sounds like the writer’s been sitting in on our favorite grumpy Yale professor. More self-back-patting ensues:
Executed correctly, this method is in fact terrific practice for maintaining your cool in stressful work environments. Pressing deadline anxiety can be channeled into an extreme level of focus. If you can train yourself to complete your assignments under pressure, quickly and efficiently, you will always find yourself in demand.
Hallelujah! This is what I’ve been trying to tell my parents/teachers/bosses for ages! After the jump: Pat yourself on the back for a job well-deferred!