How to Spot a Weak Argument

A brief excerpt from Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking by Daniel C. Dennett:

When you’re reading or skimming argumentative essays, especially by philosophers, here is a quick trick that may save you much time and effort, especially in this age of simple searching by computer: look for “surely” in the document, and check each occurrence. Not always, not even most of the time, but often the word “surely” is as good as a blinking light locating a weak point in the argument. Why? Because it marks the very edge of what the author is actually sure about and hopes readers will also be sure about. (If the author were really sure all the readers would agree, it wouldn’t be worth mentioning.) Being at the edge, the author has had to make a judgment call about whether or not to attempt to demonstrate the point at issue, or provide evidence for it, and—because life is short—has decided in favor of bald assertion, with the presumably well-grounded anticipation of agreement. Just the sort of place to find an ill-examined “truism” that isn’t true!

 

Content or Objects: Neil Gaiman and the future of books

"I worry that too many of us . . . are certain that if only we can get 1993 to come back again, we'll clean up. That if we hold our breath and close our eyes and guard the gates with bigger and more dangerous weapons, time will turn backwards and it will be yesterday again. And we all knew what the rules were yesterday. The rules of publishing were simple. Authors, agents, books, incredibly long lunches--that was publishing. Not any more." 

Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite writers and this keynote at The Digital Minds Conference 2013 is further evidence why. 

I've been an avid reader my whole life. Growing up in Puerto Rico my parents used to say that I was a "come libros," literally a book eater. The only thing I would consume more was music. You could see me with headphones from a brand new walkman or a book in hand, sometimes foolishly reading while walking. While my schoolmates grumbled at having to read Cervantes, Quijote was my hero.

Nothing has changed, I still devour books and music. Sometimes listening to music while simultaneously reading on the same device. Well, something has changed, I now have a deep understanding of what it takes to both write and produce a book.

And then there is digital. I've spent most of the past month tumbling through the wild frontier of editing, programming and packaging digital books in EPUB format. I find all of it challenging, frustrating and terribly exhilarating. I feel that to honor all those books I've read and that in many ways have consumed me, that I too have to do my part in figuring out the future of books. 

Writing, creating, is a dandelion thing. When writing, make good art. When coding, make good art. Produce beautiful content in beautiful packages, make good art. Try everything. 

 

David Foster Wallace: On Real Freedom

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings…

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, IN HIS OWN WORDS | More Intelligent Life

Hand In Hand: Advice For Writers

For Shared Worlds 2013, we have asked some of speculative fiction's finest artists, editors, and writers to write advice on their own hands and send us a picture.

Here are some of my favorite images and advice from the Shared Worlds 2013 Hand in Hand project:

Neil Gaiman

Gregory Norman Bossert

Lev Grossman

Patrick Rothfuss

 

Nine Decades of Science in The New Yorker: Looking Back to Look Ahead

The New Yorker has been writing about science and technology for almost a century. In one of the magazine’s earliest science articles, “Invention Factory,” from 1931, the reporter Malcolm Ross visits Bell Telephone Laboratories, which occupies a ten-story building on the Hudson, at West and Bank Streets in the West Village. Ross tours the building, eager to see the research that, “depression or not,” the telephone company is funding to the tune of nineteen million dollars a year. On the roof, to test its durability, telephone equipment is being prematurely aged in the wind and rain; inside, technicians are working to find the combination of metals that will most efficiently carry a signal. In one lab, hundreds of researchers have been working to create an automated switchboard; in another, a hushed “sanctum,” mathematicians are exploring the relationship between population density and what we’d now call bandwidth. For the past year, Ross writes, “two airplanes have been flying around New Jersey, by day and by night, in the worst weather they can find,” so that Bell Labs’s scientists can improve the radio systems that connect airports to pilots; related technologies are being developed for Hollywood, to help clean up “the buzzing noise which is continually present in all talkies.” Ross speaks to one scientist about the prospects for 3-D cinema but has sad news to report: it’s unlikely that “movie heroines will soon appear on the screen with the rounded effect of your Uncle Stephen’s stereopticon collection of stage beauties.” But there’s better news in the ultraviolet photomicroscope lab, where a microscope Bell commissioned to look at metals is now being used to peer at chromosomes.

The New Yorker has launched NewYorker.com/tech and plans to feature current coverage and articles from the archives, which as the excerpt above shows goes back a long time (and proves the more things advance the more the process of progress is the same.)

I am curious to see how the new content will be received given the reaction by some tech writers to a recent post about Apple.