Fourteenth law of worker entropy
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The hoary old chestnut that underpins the radical, brilliant theory of Thomas Kuhn, and succinctly describes what pragmatic people find so excruciating about academic philosophy.
Ask a silly question, and get a silly answer.
If you read latter-day philosophical whizz-kid William MacAskill’s book What We Owe The Future one question you will certainly ask yourself, though it isn’t so much silly as rueful, is: “why did I just do that do myself and how will I get those hours of my life back?”
The serious point — advanced by Kuhn — is that the boundaries of an intellectual discipline, power structure, narrative, paradigm — call it what you will — frame and condition validity of a question as much as they do any answer. If you find yourself getting silly answers, the problem may lie in your question.
Hence, paradoxes: if your discipline is (as analytical philosophy is) riven with paradoxes, this is not so much a sign that you have hit upon an eternal conundrum, but that you are barking up the wrong tree.
Hence, a new JC law of worker entropy. Let us call it the fourteenth:
A paradox is a silly answer. It means you have asked a silly question.