looking back i can see this has plagued me before: in january when i first identified the problem, in february when i explained in some detail what the heck i mean by a negative expense, and most recently in may when i enlisted the cognitive muscle of my dad.

at work i’m usually responsible for defining problems and finding solutions. if i come up with a bad solution, it could mean there’s a better solution, or it could mean something’s wrong with the problem (or it could mean that i’m being dumb). it’s really difficult to determine whether there’s a better solution that i don’t see, or whether i could reconstrue the problem, which would thus allow for a more elegant solution.

an aside: my emphasis on elegance as a value can be traced back to chip gerfen, who would urge us in phonology to find the most elegant solution to a linguistics problem. given two possible solutions, he would say the more elegant one is most likely right.

time to redefine a problem in life? i’ve really been hatin’ on my masters program lately. mostly because of this masters paper rigamarole. i just don’t want to jump through the hoops i have to jump through to do it. but rather than angsting over what to do, i could just leave sils and poof! masters paper problems disappear.