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DOWN_THE_SCALE

                                           December 2, 2013

It seems to me I frequently go
through the same process in
evaluating an intellectual's output:

It starts out with something like
"Okay, has this guy really got anything?
What can they tell me that I can use?"

Then there's a phase of Disappointment,
where I realize that they don't really           This is combined with a
have all that much, and I'm going to need        certain nasty enjoyment
to put in a lot of effort to debug their         at writing the great
work.                                            take-down, but that only
                                                 goes so far.
   In the Disappointment phase, then
   the work under study becomes an
   object of study itself.  How could
   they go so far off the rails?
   Where do they land in the triangle?    DEGENERATE_TRIANGLE
   Why did anyone take them seriously?
                                               It's a strange way to read: skim
   There remains a hope that even              a web page that looks somewhat
   studying something that's wrong             interesting, cut and paste it
   (or mostly wrong) will lead somewhere:      into a text file, begin combing
   it might make you think of something        through it, looking for the
   else, an attempt at correction might        pieces you want to quote,
   lead to a new approach that's worth         trimming out the redundancies,
   something.                                  interjecting a critical comment
                                               here or there...
Then there's another phase after that:
Disgust.                                       One thing that becomes clear,
                                               quickly: The smart folk out there
                                               working the intellectual press
                                               aren't shy about fluffing up
                                               their opinions with lots of
                                               deceptive verbiage...

                                               If they were posting to a blog, I
                                               wonder if they'd tone that down a
                                               bit... you don't try to get away
                                               with a handwave when you know a
                                               dozen picky pedants are going to
                                               be calling bullshit immediately
                                               afterwards.

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