Finding Sources vs. Using Sources

Imagine a psychologist who believes that children raised by single parents are more aggressive and likely to abuse their own children later in life. She has noticed a trend in her patients that leads her to this belief, but she doesn’t have the evidence to draw a compelling conclusion.

Listening to the Evidence

Once she has formulated her thesis, she starts to listen to her patients differently. She’s working on a paper for a psychology journal, so therapy sessions become partly about gathering evidence for her theory.

She pays particular attention to patients of single parents and guides their sessions into conversations about their violent feelings, their attitudes toward their own children. When they speak of frustration, she hears that they’re angry. When they speak of venting those frustrations, she envisions them punching through walls. When they say they leave the house in such situations, she imagines it’s to avoid hurting the children.

Hunting for Proof, We Find “Proof”

She’s on a hunt for evidence that proves her thesis. What her patients with two parents say about their violent personalities she dismisses as irrelevant. What they tell her about hurting their children she attributes to factors other than their parentage.

She wants her evidence neat; she wants it free of conflict; she’s looking for a slam-dunk. Consequently, what she hears sounds like proof, and evidence to the contrary she considers noise.

Why Publish Someone Else’s Truth?

We read and study to discover the truth, not to prove that our preconceptions were valid all along. When we forget this essential point, we start reading defensively, hoping to avoid unpleasant counterarguments that upset our worldview. Reading openly and honestly, remaining receptive to the best ideas and evidence we can find, we gain knowledge and perspective.

Finding the “perfect source that proves our argument!” is a catastrophe. It means we’ve arrived too late at someone else’s truth and have nothing left to say except: “Look! Right there! That’s what I’ve been thinking!”

Just as bad as finding the perfect source is starting with the perfect source that proves our point and provides all the necessary evidence before we even begin my work. What is left for us to do when the definitive article has already been written? Nothing but to share it.

Look for Evidence, Not Conclusions

We write to learn, not to prove. The research part of the writing process is our chance to find better, not to locate good enough. If our first five sources say the same thing five ways—or worse, say it the same way!—we have to start asking ourselves: where are we in this process?, what’s our contribution to the conversation?, why does this chorus need one more voice echoing the others?

Failing to find the source that “proves” our thesis is the real blessing. Without an expert to follow, we are free to become the expert. Instead of giving the credit for our ideas to acknowledged authorities, we get to draw our own conclusions, based on the best evidence we’ve found, and make a unique contribution to the debate. Wrong is as good as right; both are better than safe.

Rachel Saltzman, whose questions are better than most people’s answers, told me she had found plenty of sources to demonstrate that white patients get brand-name Prozac disproportionately more often than patients of color, who more often get generic drugs, but that she hadn’t yet tracked down a source to explain WHY the disparity occurs (or HOW the mechanics of health-care delivery produce such a result). I say that makes her very lucky. She is free to draw her own conclusions and challenge her readers to dispute them with their own evidence. The most successful papers take a good look at a perplexing problem and offer a solution that requires further study. They’re part of a conversation, not an echo of the last word.

Alex LaVallee is tackling the thorny issue of the Toms Shoes program of donating a pair of shoes for every shoe purchased. The idea that the program did more harm than good was once quite controversial, but Toms and the world have caught up with this thesis, so Alex has to catch up too. He can no longer make a relevant argument that the program creates trouble for recipient economies: that argument has been done and done. Toms has recrafted its program and many observers have offered further refinements. To avoid doing more than survey the alternatives, Alex will have to craft his own recommendation for Toms that adds value to the ongoing conversation.

Simone Stilley eloquently describes a controversy about decision-making that divides her sources into 1) those that favor conscious decisions; and 2) those that believe our unconscious makes better complex decisions. These either/or controversies rarely make compelling papers, since the author merely points at one side or the other and says: This one is best; the other is flawed. While the question is fascinating and sources are readily available, choosing A or B is not the worthiest thesis. Reading her proposal I kept wondering: who’s in charge of deciding what’s the better choice in all these “experiments”? I was also distracted by thoughts of other experiments: Could we create distractions that prodded subjects to make decisions quickly but unconsciously, so that Simone could conduct her own experiment instead of just analyzing the data from existing research?

Ryan Veltman proposes to examine a diet or eating plan called IIFYM (If It Fits Your Macros), which has its detractors (thus making the topic counterintuitive), but Ryan is pretty clearly already committed to the benefits of the plan, or so I read his proposal, and his sources are magazine articles by fans of the program too, so I worry he’ll be reading to find proof rather than listening to his evidence. I wonder if—for his own benefit and to help the cause by challenging it—he would be willing to strenuously propose the best counterargument available against IIFYM to see if it meets the challenge. An essay along the lines of “Why IIFYM Might Backfire for Certain Adopters” would be most beneficial to everyone, it seems to me.

Stephen Rivera-Lau is promoting the counterintuitive idea that we’re more likely to be killed by something silly like falling in the shower than a terrorist attack. I’m hoping that instead of satisfying himself with articles that already deliver conclusions about hazards of various types, he’ll do original research into perils for which there are uncollected and unanalyzed data. The sort of essay I’m thinking of would make use of life insurance actuarial tables to discover the most likely causes of accidental death, for example. Then it could challenge readers to decide how much is too much to spend for coverage for certain perils. If falling in the shower could be covered for $1 a month, would it be a good buy?

Troi Barnes, like Alex LaVallee, is not satisfied with the philanthropic work done by most agencies seeking to better the lives of needy recipients in developing countries. She cites Toms Shoes as just one example of “bad aid,” which she distinguishes from “good aid,” for which she hasn’t provided an example yet that I can see. The topic gets very broad when it contains big survey articles about the best and worst types of aid programs currently at play. She’ll need to point hard at something small and crucial to avoid waving a big hand across the horizon. The best possible example from this observer’s perspective would be a company that manages to make the Toms model actually work; or an agency that tried to “empower the local economy” with disastrous results; in other words, an example that would keep the spirit of counterintuitivity alive.