Re: A typical scientist? (Re: Evidence . . . .

Robin Roberts (scipio@ix.netcom.com)
21 May 1995 06:55:40 GMT

In <3p8jdi$n52@miwok.nbn.com> dandrake@nbn.com (Dan Drake) writes:
>
>In message <ABDB641A9668475A@cara.demon.co.uk> -
peter@cara.demon.co.uk (Peter
>Ceresole) writes:
>>In article <Admin.0ym6@oubliette.COM>,
>>Panopticon@oubliette.COM (Eric Shook) wrote:
>>
>><<Hectares of stuff deleted>>
>>
>>...
>>
>>Great verbiage! How do you guys do it? It must take training.
>>
>Of course it does. You don't get a PhD in the social sciences by
writing a
>short dissertation. It was great fun for me to hear my sociologist
friend
>(dissertation of about 700 pages) comparing notes with my
>astronomer friend (dissertation of almost 30 pages, and she said she
had to
>justify being so wordy).

There are two things going on here. (1) If you can't express an idea
or a reasonably related group of ideas in 30-50 pages, then you
probably don't understand the idea at all yourself; (2) If you can't
express it in those number of pages, the _reader_ can't understand the
idea either.

>Dan Drake I'm not the NRA.
>dandrake@nbn.com --George Bush

George Bush isn't President anymore either ...

Robin Roberts

-- 
scipio@ix.netcom.com Thousand Oaks, Ventura County, CA -- DVC
"The worse the society, the more law there will be. In Hell, there will
be nothing but law, and due process will be meticulously observed."
-Grant Gillmor, Yale Professor of Law
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