One of the podcasts I listen to is The Hidden Brain. Recently Elliot Aronson (ground breaking work as a psychologist studying cognitive dissonance, social psychology, and the Jigsaw Classroom), was the guest. Aronson studied under Maslow as an undergrad. Yes, that Maslow. He told a story of being Leon Festinger’s grad student. Festinger was the first to describe cognitive dissonance and its impacts.
Festinger returned one of Aronson’s paper because it was, in Aronson’s own words, a pitiful attempt. He spent three days reworking the paper. When it was finished, Festinger read through it and said, “Now this is worthy of criticism.”
I love that and all that it implies. It harkens back to Thomas Aquinas and his methodology of attacking his own arguments by considering, and addressing, what he thought were the best objections.
Professional efforts should be criticized. How else do we get better? You don’t have to make ugly comments about someone’s mother, but areas where performance/writing could be improved should be addressed.
Several years ago, I was giving a presentation at the US Marine Corps’ MAWTS-1 (Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Squadron One – I don’t think there is a Squadron Two or Three, so only the Marines know why it’s necessary to keep the “One” in the name.) While I waited for my turn to present, General Charlie Bolden addressed the students. One point he made was that when he came back from being an astronaut, to flying F-18s for the USMC, he had a hard time getting honest feedback. When he pooched a landing, his instructors would say things like “Yeah, the winds are squirrely today.” He put a stop to it by telling them “Look, I was a good pilot once, and can be again, but not if I don’t get forthright critiques.”
There are, however, lots of things that don’t deserve to be critiqued because they’re just not worth the time. My friend Scott used to say: “Sometimes it’s like trying to teach a pig to sing. It’s frustrating for the teacher and it annoys the pig.”
Since AI plays a big role in my novels, I try to keep up to date and read a lot about latest advances. I just abandoned my latest purchase. It had decent reviews, but was so poorly written, said nothing new, and the author spent so much time talking about how great he and the book were, that it’s not worth criticizing. I’ll rate it online in the hope of saving others both time and money, but not here.
There are other books I read that I don’t review. I like to support local and indie authors. I read the books. If they’re decent, I review them. If they’re not, I’ll DM the author and ask if they want feedback. It’s pretty easy to make changes to manuscripts that are published through Amazon. It’s not as if Harper Collins printed 100,000 copies and shipped them out. Amazon prints on demand. You order the book, they print it and send it to you. Updates to the manuscript might take a day or two to go live.
I hope my stuff is worth critiquing and reviewing. If you have feedback, I want to hear it. I’ll even try not to be annoyed.