Fuck Nuance (2015)

But I am confused by the term ‘Actually Existing Nuance’. I’m pretty sure I understand what you mean by that, it’s the kind of nuance that someone is asking for when they say “your paper needs more nuance”. But to me, the term if anything seems more appropriate for the kind of nuance you’re not against: the level of sophistication the theory needs to be any good. I’m wondering whether something like ‘superadded nuance’ would be better.

I sometimes wonder whether academic papers and books shouldn’t have a ‘hair let down’ section where the authors can just go wild with whatever stuff doesn’t really belong in the theory itself. It’s here that they can display all the nuance they want, speculate wildly, distance themselves from their own theory or gushingly cheerlead it, engage in whatever aesthetic appreciation they want, etc.

And I think there are merits to displaying that you don’t think your theory is some kind of rich, high-fidelity reflection of deep aspects of reality, or anything. I’ve made a cautious truce with homo economicus for the time being, but it is a rather brutal construct, and if some economist had come clean much earlier on that they don’t actually think morality is just the same sort of thing as a preference for the colour purple, and had rhapsodized about how great goodness is and how much they like the magic of sunsets and Sibelius, but that economics just doesn’t try to capture this stuff, I would have gotten over the hideous simplicity much earlier.

I sometimes wonder whether academic papers and books oughtn’t to have a ‘hair let down’ section where the author(s) can just run wild with