“In his seminars he taught us: * To do your work, you must have a scientific or intellectual problem, not a topic. * Do not try to be path-breaking or original. Find a problem that excites you. Work on it an take what you get. * You must want to communicate to your reader; you must be clear, never use big words or anything needlessly complicated. (“Write it for Tirzah,” he would say – referring to Agassis eight-year-old daughter.) Do not use logical symbols or mathematical formulae, for instance, if you can possibly avoid it. Know logic, but do not parade it. * It is immoral to be pretentious, or to try to impress the reader or listener with your knowledge. For you are ignorant. Although we may differ in the little things we know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal. * Do not be attached to your ideas. You must expose yourself, put yourself at risk. Do not be cautious in your ideas. Ideas are not scarce: there are more where they came from. Let your ideas come forth: any idea is better than no idea. But once the idea is stated, you must try not to defend it, not to believe it, but to criticise it and to learn from discovering its defects. Ideas are only conjectures. What is important is not the defence of any particular conjecture but the growth of knowledge. * So be scrupulous in admitting your mistakes: you cannot learn from them if you never admit that you make them.” William Warren Bartley III, Unfathomed Knowledge, Unmeasured Wealth.
Posted on: Tue, 22 Apr 2014 03:30:00 +0000