The Importance of Clarity in Humanities Writing

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"I don't want to be an ass like and I'm kind of doing an ass about this right?" he asks. "There is a desire to push a kind of a it's a kind of an inaccessibility heuristic so I know that I can't understand a physics paper published in science right? So how do I feel when I'm writing just about happiness how do I make other people take my stuff seriously"? The cardinal sin of writing is willful obscurity, says the author. He thinks no one person maybe has that intention of doing it but that and only that can account for the arms race of like fucking cryptic language in so many areas including philosophy.

David and Tamler welcome author and environmental science professor Jennifer Jacquet to the podcast to discuss the pros and cons of shame. What's the difference between shame and guilt? Is shaming effective for generating social progress or getting tax cheats to pay up? Is twitter shaming on the rise or on its way out? And what does David do when he's alone in the dark?

But before all of that, David and Tamler introduce a new way to support the podcast--through our Patreon account (patreon.com/verybadwizards). Plus, we discuss the retraction of a press release announcing that a professor agreed to referee a journal article (!) And can one passage get Tamler, the eternal optimist, to hate philosophy?

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