Awl contributor Alex Pareene offers up a compendium of a decade in counterintuitive thought. I bet some poor kid at Slate is working on a piece about how all the articles referenced are actually works of conventional wisdom as we speak!
Monday, December 7, 2009
25
Size IS really important.
Alex, you forgot:
Blogs Are Actually God For Newspapers
2009, Website.
Newspapers aren't being wrecked by blogs reproducing the pertinent parts of their stories thus making them unnecessary to visit, it is newspapers themselves that aren't summarizing their content and then making fun of it.
GABRIEL SNYDER; THE TIME GAWKER PUT THE WASHINGTON POST OUT OF BUSINESS
Good.
I propose a moratorium on book titles that include any of the following: "In defense of ____," "In praise of ____," and "A secret history of _____."
"The case for/against _____", especially when followed by a colon and an inflammatory-sounding subtitle
I agree! This could be the basis for a fun little list[icle]...
Anything with "code" or "secret" in the title.
"The _____ Myth"
"Confessions of a _____"
I Used The Dartboard, 2018, Malcolm Gladwell
"Conventional wisdom is right."
Isn't that intuitive? Or... um...
(one-liner).
No. Because anyone who uses the term "conventional wisdom" is actually suggesting it's wrong. It's an ironical term.
"CW" (which is bad) is the opposite of "counterintuitive" (which is good). Which is why that entire entry's premise - taking the counterintuitive position that conventional wisdom is good - is genius.
I mean, just look at it - the whole entry it's so "meta" it kind of make my head want to explode:
Conventional wisdom is right.
2001, Magazine.
While you may have read (hundreds of times in the very magazine this piece was being written in) that the conventional wisdom is wrong, it is actually usually right. It is “a broad agreement of elite opinion†and “a time-tested means of filtering out the bunk.†Attacks on the C.W. are vestiges of the New Left’s distrust of authority, and the consensus of wise, mainstream figures is reliable.
FRANKLIN FOER, “IN DEFENSE OF THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM: WHY WHAT EVERYONE THINKS IS USUALLY RIGHT,†THE NEW REPUBLIC, MARCH 19.
I'm not sure what this says about myself, but the one idea that offended me the most was Slate article claiming that Creed is a good band.
I'm right there with you.
"A YEAR LATER, THE ATLANTIC PUBLISHED AN ESSAY ABOUT HOW GOOGLE IS MAKING US SMARTER."
Needs more Alfie Kohn. http://www.alfiekohn.org/books.htm
This decade has been a thinly-veiled attempt to make us heedlessly acquiesce to orthodoxy.
Any guesses as to what prefix Levitt and Dubner will put on the next Freakonomics book?
Uberfreakonomics.
Ubringthefreakonomics?
SHESASUPERFREAKONOMICS
Dad's Bathroom Reader-onomics.
TalkinboutReaganomics
That article about Delaware's corporate laws is totally right though. Although the stuff about their venal highway tolls is a little overblown.
It's painfully, embarrassingly obvious that Balk wants to work at Slate. He namechecks them constantly.