(Written on May 18, 2018)
I am sitting in Columbia's Lehman library preparing a presentation.
I am reading The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan these days. Sagan represents the ideal skeptic for me - he carries a certain maturity about the limitations of human sentiments; that we cannot all go about expressing profound doubts on all that we come to believe in our daily lives. At the same time, he unleashes a spirited attack on the proliferation of what he calls pseudo-science and how it causes people to be led to "easy" beliefs about the way the world works. He's worried - this is in the 90s - by the growing market of peddlers of pseudo-science and his exasperation is endearing.
Among the macro-literature that I am exploring these days is about "bunching" and its use in finding deep structural (that means used in economic theories) parameters such the elasticity of intertemporal substitution. This is part-attempt to learn something fascinating and part-desperation in trying to finish a course safely but it's not time wasted. And that, at least, is a relief.
This will be the last class of my life in a must-pass setting. And I never thought I'd say it but here it goes.
I am relieved.
Really.
When I left my consulting life, I told myself that one of the things that'll transpire would be the prospect of eschewing the making of presentations. After all, while it's perfectly understandable why the consultant needs her slides it was, at least to my naive past self, somewhat obvious that an academic need only worry about getting her work convincing, novel and useful.
Well, I am sitting here making my fourth presentation in a month, well past 25 slides, and not finding an end point any time soon.
I can bore you with the nuanced differences between presentations made in this life and my last one but I know you'd care about it as much as Spurs' chances of winning Silverware next season so let me not torture you.
I can talk about tennis. I guess I can only talk about tennis these days. In my free time and when I am tired but need to continue working I switch on my TennisTV and have a match playing in the background. This isn't very different from the last two years of my schooling though I suspect I was not too sincere about the balance between work and sport back in my teen years.
******
I am reading The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan these days. Sagan represents the ideal skeptic for me - he carries a certain maturity about the limitations of human sentiments; that we cannot all go about expressing profound doubts on all that we come to believe in our daily lives. At the same time, he unleashes a spirited attack on the proliferation of what he calls pseudo-science and how it causes people to be led to "easy" beliefs about the way the world works. He's worried - this is in the 90s - by the growing market of peddlers of pseudo-science and his exasperation is endearing.
******
Among the macro-literature that I am exploring these days is about "bunching" and its use in finding deep structural (that means used in economic theories) parameters such the elasticity of intertemporal substitution. This is part-attempt to learn something fascinating and part-desperation in trying to finish a course safely but it's not time wasted. And that, at least, is a relief.
This will be the last class of my life in a must-pass setting. And I never thought I'd say it but here it goes.
I am relieved.
No comments:
Post a Comment