“We’ve analyzed lots of orders and restaurants. What we find is that if you sit near a window, you’re about 80 percent more likely to order salad; you sit in that dark corner booth, you’re about 80 percent more likely to order dessert,” Wansink said.

The other day, I was explaining Writing Process Reengineering to a PhD student. I told him to articulate a key sentence at the end of the day and pick a specific time on the morning of the next to write. I told him not to let himself write at any other time. If the moment passes, he is not to write that paragraph at any other time the same day. He must make a new decision for the next day. And then do a better job of keeping his appointment.

He was puzzled about why. I told him it was jarring to his unconscious (the unconscious component of his prose, if you will), not just to be told it would be writing and then not get to write, but also to be forced to write at some unanticipated moment later that day. A double shock. I told him he would find his unconscious working more reliably if he kept his promises to it. He politely wondered whether I had any science to back that up. I did not claim that I did. I just asked him to take my word for it. To try it.

Andrew Gelman’s relentless critique of Brian Wansink is a good example of why I do this. It’s something I slowly realised after Freddie deBoer once pointed out that Arum and Roksa’s study isn’t, perhaps, as credible as one might hope. I realized I didn’t really know how credible it is. And I realized I didn’t really care. I had just found it useful to be able to cite a study that shows that writing makes you smarter and group work makes you stupider. It was a simple and effective way to present views I already held. Putting it the way I did, however, might have slightly overstated Arum and Roksa’s result. I didn’t really seem to care about that either.

Likewise, Wansink’s research, as Andrew keeps emphasizing, might very well be suggesting perfectly good health advice. The problem is just that he puts numbers on it and therefore might give the wrong impression about the effect size. Eat your rice on a black plate and you’ll probably eat less. But you’re probably not going to lose exactly 18 pounds. (And certainly not some even more precise number to three decimal places.)

I think I’m going to renounce science altogether in my area of expertise. I know what works for my own reasons. I’m not going to pretend to have “scientific” reasons to back me up. In fact, I think we should stop demanding scientific reasons for everything we do. Let science be what it can be. Mostly, we have to get by without it.

Tell your unconscious what you’re going to do the next day and then do it just as you said you would. I’m pretty sure that’s not going to do you any harm. And I’m also quite confident you’ll find it improves your writing. I could be wrong. But I’m not wrong about the science because I’m not claiming there is any science. If someone does come along with a study that shows I’m wrong, I will look at it very closely. But I promise I will not cite a study that confirms my views and say “See! I told you.” I’ll only do that when you come back to me and tell me my advice worked for you. As Van Morrison sings…

And if you get it right this time
You don’t have to come back again
And if you get it right this time
There’s no need to explain

People sometimes ask me how they know they are improving if they are not getting feedback. My answer is to remind them that no one has to tell them they are getting into better shape if they are running three or four times a week; nor does anyone have to tell them they are getting better at playing piano with daily practice. The trick is to put yourself into the same frame of mind with your writing.

What that means is that you have establish conditions that allow you to experience your competence. When you set aside a time to run, and map out a route, you are defining the run in a way that (if you’ve done it right) let’s you relax and enjoy it at your own (if you will) pace. You decide how intense it’s going to be, and you therefore open yourself to the details of the experience. The same goes for practicing the piano. Since you are in control of the conditions, you can listen to what you’re doing. It should be clear to you what sounds good and what doesn’t, what is easy to play and what is hard.

With your writing, my advice is to decide the day before on a particular claim to support, elaborate or defend, at a particular time, in a single prose paragraph (of at least six sentences and at most 200 words). Deciding what you will say is like deciding what route you will run or what piece of music you will practice. Now that you know what you’re doing, you can focus on whether or not you are doing it well. Fixing the moment in time lets you concentrate fully until your time is up. Then you stop.

It’s difficult to explain this in a way that is as effective as simply having the experience. Try it. Try writing a predetermined paragraph for a predetermined amount of time. Whatever else you may think of that experience, it brings the act of writing, and your ability to carry it out, to the fore. That’s the entire point of doing it this way. It makes improvement palpable.

I’m going to write a series of posts vaguely inspired by Van Morrison’s 1986 album No Guru, No Method, No Teacher. I don’t have any particularly good reason for this, other than a moment of free association I experienced while reading Andrew Gelman’s recent post about Brian Wansink.

In the comments to Andrew’s post, there is a brief discussion about Wansink’s atheoretical approach to behaviorial economics. In this video, Wansink is quite explicit about what he’s doing. He says that instead of extending and testing theories based on past research, he just comes up with “cool” questions that he has “hunches” about and constructs “pilot studies” to find out if there’s anything going on. Andrew comments: “This won’t work too well with noisy data. In the absence of theory, effect sizes will be low, and anything statistically significant is likely to be a huge overestimate of any effect and also likely to be in the wrong direction (that’s type M and type S errors).” In another comment, he elaborates this point with an example from Wansink’s research:

I’m no expert in food science, but let me just take an example: Wansink’s claim … that “if you sit near a window you’re about 80% more likely to order salad.” There has to be some theory underlying this, right? I don’t know what it is, not having read Wansink’s book or watched his video, but whatever it is, I imagine one could take measurements on some of the intermediate steps. You develop theories, make testable predictions, the usual story. I’d think if that is someone’s full-time job and he’s supposed to be a world authority on the topic, that he can do this. If there’s really no theory at all—zero—then my guess is that the whole thing is a waste of time, that he’s just chasing noise and learning nothing at all.

When Van Morrison rejects guru, method and teacher, he’s talking about his personal journey towards enlightenment. Some version of that rejection is part of many wisdom traditions because spiritual enlightenment, whatever it is, is supposed to be a liberation of the self, which must ultimately happen by yourself alone. I get that. But it doesn’t play very well in academic circles because academic “enlightenment” is a much more social sort of experience.

In my adaptation of Morrison’s slogan, I’ve only replaced the “guru” with “theory”. It reminds me of Bertrand Russell’s observation that sometimes a system of logical notation can bring insights as good as a live teacher. (Frege, who invented a “conceptual notation”, has had his writing described by one commentator as “an epiphany of philosophy itself”.) But it’s actually that rejection of teachers that should tell us what’s wrong here. After all, what is a school (an academy) without teachers and their students?

Academic knowledge is the sort of thing we can learn from others. That’s what makes an education something quite different than a spiritual journey. We’re not just supposed to find the answers within ourselves (though we may find many of them there while attending a university); we’re supposed to be brought up to speed about what the culture already knows.

A “scientific” discovery, likewise, is one we can teach to others, it is “contribution” to others, especially other researchers. That’s why theory is so important. It’s what you are contributing a particular result to. In science, you can’t really claim to answer “important questions” instead of extending or testing a theory. It’s the theory that gives the question its importance.

For Wansink to present an “experimental” approach to economic behavior with no theory is as odd as if he proposed to conduct his experiments with no method. And, in an academic context, that, in turn, is as odd as signing students up for classes and then refusing to be their teacher. There is some wisdom in all such rejections of history and authority. But it is neither scholarship nor science.

I’m doing a seminar later today, and I just wanted to reflect a little on my opening remarks. The purpose of my Writing Process Reengineering seminar is to help writers think about their process as a manageable one. I want them to see “the problem of writing” as one that can be solved, almost entirely separate from “the problem of knowing”, i.e., their substantive research problem. Obviously, it won’t be satisfying for them to be able to write if they’re not also knowledgeable, but the truth is that everyone knows something. So I can always help you train your writing, even if you don’t think you know enough in some absolute sense.

Most importantly, the problem of writing is not solved once and for all. It arises every time you learn something new, every time you discover something that might make a contribution to your field. How do I write this down? How do I tell my peers about this? That’s the question. That means that I’m not actually helping you solve the problem of writing, I’m helping you to become better at solving it in particular cases as they arise. I’m showing you how to approach the problem … as an ongoing and practical one. That’s important to keep in mind. A healthy prose style is not an automatic process that produces representations of what you know as you come to know it. It’s a capacity you have. A problem-solving capacity. The problem is communicating your results to others for the purpose of discussing them.

My title is the somewhat overconfident answer to the question I posed in a previous post. If you are reading this on an electronic device, it is a fact that the device is turned on. It is also a fact that this post is being displayed on your screen. You can, presumably, turn off just the screen. The first fact (that your device is on) will remain the case while second (that it is displaying this post) will cease to be. Or you can simply close the browser. What’s interesting here is that you will now again have destroyed the fact that the post is being displayed, but you will have done it by a different means. The screen is still on, after all.

I know this sort of philosophizing can seem tedious. I was very careful not to say that the fact is “true” or “false”. Truth is not a virtue of facts–they simply are or are not, they “obtain”, we sometimes say, or don’t–while statements of fact may be true or false. But statements may also be many other things, like long or short, articulate or muddled, obnoxious or boring, controversial or conventional. Their truth value is only one of their many features. My point is that propositions are the sorts of things that are only true or false. Or rather, they have something else too: a meaning. And what they “mean” is the very state of things that makes them (or would make them) true.

A proposition is true or false of a fact.  A fact is the truth or falsity of a proposition. That’s the sense which I want to claim that facts, like beliefs about them, are “propositional states”. They are states of affairs with “propositional content”. The belief and the fact (and the approximating statement of that fact, for that matter) have the proposition common. If I believe something and tell you, and if you believe me, then there are two beliefs, a statement (made by me to you) and a fact, but only one proposition, which is the common logical structure of them all.

A prose paragraph is usually a statement of fact along with reasons to believe it. It can be very useful to you as a writer to clarify the propositional content for yourself. Isolate it from the rhetorical flourish, if you will. Imagine the fact and it’s simplest statement. If I’m right about this, what you will now have in mind is the proposition. And it belongs as much to the fact as to the statement and the belief.