ABSTRACT

During his sophomore year of college, Ned (age 19) told me that when confronted with discrepancies in his studies “you have to trust the author” because “at a freshmen-sophomore level as I am, I don’t know enough about these things.” At age 26 he described learning on his job like this:

I figure things out as I go along and adapt, change, redefine, until you get to the final conclusion. I approach it based on other past histories or experiences I’ve had that lead me to a more accurate hypothesis of what’s going to happen. You read a couple of lines in a book saying [it] should do this, but it never happens that way and there’s always some good reasons why it doesn’t.