Alexis Turner

Edge Cases

(academia, edge cases, fear, innovation — )

13 Feb. 2008

Great post over at Blue Flavor about the evil of edge cases. It speaks to me on the obvious level of web work and my current job, but it also really jumped out at me as being applicable to a lot of other areas, especially academia. In particular, it beautifully explains the tendency of graduate students (and, by extension, the later faculty members they become) to focus solely on the problems in an argument and thus miss the big picture. They seem to gain an impeccable ability to deconstruct, but no real impressive ability to construct.

At the end of the day, I think it comes down to the Behar quote included at the end: "If you stick your head out, you can't be afraid to have it cut off." We need less fear in academia. It holds us back. We need to be willing to make mistakes and look like idiots every now and then for the ultimately larger payoff of solving an intractable problem or discovering something new.