Hey, what's up, Mike! And
@diggerpup and
@Petch!
… I'm wondering if any of you would be up for a thought exercise? …
What would you all share?
In giving a talk, the audience is asking at every moment:
What’s he saying?
What’s he going to say?
Do I care?
You have to answer those questions quickly and comprehensibly or the audience will leave.
You have to promise something worthwhile or the audience will not care and will leave.
You have to deliver on your promise (also quickly and comprehensibly) or the audience will think you are dishonest or incompetent or uninteresting or the like.
The above is arguably the entire top-level technical requirement for the “how to say it” part of good nonfiction communication. Tikk and Mike have said similar advice, but I’m putting the advice into a terminology and a complete framework.
Here, the writer promised an answer to the question of “what if Koll was hired, and Sanderson stayed at Iowa State? Would Penn State still be chasing a national title?” Even though writers don’t always write their own headlines, here the headline did ~match the article’s own literally stated question and ~answer.
The writer did not deliver on his promise. Tikk and Mike have discussed this failure. Below, I examine the failure in literal and logical detail.
1) The author’s ~answer was not even an answer. The writer never even said Koll would not have made PSU as good as Cael has made PSU. The writer merely said “Sanderson’s dynasty has trumped that of Koll’s resume”. That is not even opinion nor analysis. That is mere objective non-answer fact, given that Koll has not won 8 national titles.
(And when the author said “It’s impossible to know exactly what events would have followed if the opposite of reality happened”, he also was not giving an answer because it was already always trivially and actually true that we cannot know an alternative reality.)
2) The author’s ~answer, even if we were to infer its intended meaning, would merely be a naked opinion with defective non-sequitur reasoning to support it. Let’s help the author and interpret him as saying that [we should believe Koll would not have made PSU as good as Cael has made PSU
because] “Sanderson’s dynasty has trumped that of Koll’s resume.” That reasoning is a non sequitur because the same reasoning can be used to prove that Cael would not have made PSU as good as Cael has made PSU. (You know, because “Sanderson’s dynasty has trumped that of Cael’s Pre-PSU resume”
. #reductioadabsurdum)
To summarize, the author invited us to a meal and served us a nothing sandwich.
