In Reply to: Re: I enjoy the exchange... posted by Farmer on June 15, 2010 at 08:28:34:
"When I referred to your academical skills and degrees, I was aware of it in which field they were attained, however I just concluded, that makes you more than smart enough, to be able to tackle my plain posts...or should I conclude otherwise?"
With advanced education, I was trained to look at things with certain presuppositions and through a particular kind of lens. It's very hard to throw off these frames of reference or expectations when I look at information from sources outside my field. Since I'm specifically trained to do social science research--and do that for a living--my mental habit is to look at a lot of detailed information and draw very few conclusions. When I do make a conclusion or "finding," it is very modest in comparison to all the information I've reviewed and analyzed. Social science, like the hard sciences, should look for the simplest possible explanations, imo. Very often what I end up "proving" through an analysis is really just common sense.