To see something, one can start with photographing it and letting "the camera" guide the story.
My husband and I like to take pictures of our geese. The strange thing was that I used to know they were "beautiful" but not that they were "actually visible". I didn't care about understanding what "beautiful" means... It all began when we named Fatty Hillbilly and Dimon.
We saw their cloudlike shapes and many-textured surfaces. Ways they move. Things they do. Foods they love. I heard the sounds they make. All of it had been there before, we had to have observed it on some level to even come up with the names... but the ganders had been big white birds.
Of course, we immediately antropomorphized them to hell and back. They had Views, like Granny Weatherwax. Lovers. Fears. Mannerisms. Tropes. They started grumbling. Writing songs. Wishing people happy birthdays. Going through their old photo albums.
Other geese wanted in on the fun, which is how they behave IRL anyway. And then the cat, the ducks (including the Lady Duck, a wild bird who brought her babies to swim in our pond), the chickens, the dog, and the goats. We had a young rooster who used to fly over to the neighbors; it did not bode well for his life expectancy, at the hands of my father-in-law. But we named him Columbus, and suddenly, he was opening the New World. Twice a day. (He is now in his prime and a very fine chicken man).
...And what I learned from this whole process of things suddenly starting to mean and to matter, was this:
To tell a story, you can start with taking a picture...
...of something you will only see later.
I feel confused. I have been exactly betrayed, and I have betrayed other; it's when someone promises something and then doesn't do it. Were I to complain about being betrayed, I would not speak about anger or hurt; in "normal" speech that would mean that I have stopped demanding the actual promised thing itself and the other person now has a right to "ok, we can talk when you are less upset" or some other grown-up answer. After all, anger is a passing thing, isn't it. It creates no obligations.
(But I also don't understand why "betrayed" and "manipulated" are not allowed, and "hurt" and "used" are.)
Yeah, we don't know if the people who sent the Boy Who Had Cried Wolf to guard the sheep were stupid or evil. But we do know they committed murder.
Yes, in my experience abstracts are results-oriented, not problem-oriented. I do like introductions, too) they are often written so generally that I fail to identify the problem. But what a nice feeling of understanding) The break between the intro and the specific problem they attacked can be really jarring.
Overall, we read it for what it is, not for what it promised to be.
Editor's assistant here. Came in to grumble when I saw familiar worlds)
I don't find papers by browsing. My bosses decide what we publish, so I simply read the manuscripts they do send my way. Geophysics... microbiology... I try to at least get some idea of what it's about. It doesn't have to be good or important! I just have to keep at it until the last doi. So, with this in mind:
Citations are often stuck in awkward places where I can't really understand what they refer to. Several citations at the end of a long passage might all support the same thought. But which one?.. If I only read it because I have googled it up, I would cheerfully follow the links or not. But I would hardly stop to ask why they are grouped so. (True, I never learn the answer. But sometimes, when I point it out, the authors redistribute the citations differently.)
Tables and figures require thought, much more thought than one would think from reading an interesting article. It is surprisingly hard to marry the text and the "illustrations". Some "illustrations" might be lacking. Some might be reprinted from other works, in which case putting them in context might require incorporating some of the context they used to have. This is very hard and often omitted.
Conclusions should not be results. Or a list of things people managed to do. But somehow, I am usually satisfied with conclusions in the wonderful articles which I have found on the internet!
All of it makes me think that the same must be true for the wonderful articles as well, I just read them in a different mode. Much less aggressive.
"Games we play": civilians helping troops from different sides of conflict. As in, Army I entered the village; N sold his neighbors, the neighbors died horribly. Then Army II chased away Army I. Would N be reported as a collaborationist? Commonly, no. But everybody knows that everybody knows. And everybody knows who knows what everybody knows, which means N is probably going to sell a lot of people if another opportunity arises.
I'd say it depends on the situation as well as on the idea.
If you are unable to test it for a while but feel reasonably sure you will be able to do it well, given the chance;
If at the moment, you are, demographically, someone who is likely to stop pursuing ideas regardless of what they amount to, properly tested;
If you have obligations (or expectations, yours or not) which you can meet more easily following your idea whether it works or not;
If you do have other ideas, and they are cool and everything but would require more work and - worse - are much less well-defined than your Big Idea;
If you wouldn't have to depend on others (much) to follow exactly this one idea and you don't feel like those others are really interested in working with you after all;
If your field of study (or whatever) is just built around... well, data... and there have been a few people you admire who went with their ideas instead of simply collecting observations...
then yeah, idea scarcity bites hard.
Followed the Twitter link. I actually liked it, but... is it just me, or is the word "superpowers" sensu lato (including someone suddenly dropping dead and stopping being an inconvenience) more frequent in the list than the word "money" and things like that?
I get that a lot of the questions are about interpersonal exchanges (maybe most of them). But in some ways, "money" hits harder.
My son's eleven, and I read him Hugo's "Ninety-three". I had known it was too difficult for him, perhaps boring, too. It did bore him at times. (But "hey, there will be a civil war, invaders, fire, a court martial, kids in danger and a beheading" worked just fine.)
I omitted some passages, too, like the description of the Convent's building or whatever it was. OTOH, I deliberately read to him the description of Paris itself. Not because he could understand it, with all those strangers and situations mentioned only once. Because it was exactly incomprehensible, and yet conveyed some image; because I wanted to show him a myth, without having to label it so. (I want to read to him "Coriolanus" for a myth that appears to me strongly related.)
Also, Hugo says things like "an error of minds in which logic occupies the place of reason" in a glaringly obvious, offhanded way. It's awesome. (And I had forgotten it was there.) My son actually noticed it and tried to get me to tell him what it actually means. I guess the book did illustrate this particular sazen. Hugo is great at this.
Ah, now it's clear. Thank you. But how then Y would relate his the model of the world to X after X lost (or "lost") Y's research samples and never said a thing until Y tried to find them in the fridge? Using the NVC, I mean. (I myself would not speak to X at all.)