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UofWinds 419, Week 35 2025: Trolleyology, HAGOROMO Fulltouch, The McPhee method


Good morning. I am properly poised at the writing desk, trying to focus on the words in front of me, despite the temptation to join my family who are watching Chelsea FC in the TV room. I am also trying to resist refreshing Bluesky for a whisper of news from The White House.

September has always felt like the true beginning of the year. But it's not the first day of school just yet. We still have three days to spend at our leisure. Today, we are going to pile into the car, escape the city, and drive around the county.

Trolleyology

Friends we are clearly in The Bad Place as Netflix is removing The Good Place from their roster on September 25. There is no funnier introduction to moral philosophy. If you miss your chance, then next month you are going to have to get your moral philosophy laughs by listening to the Trolleyology (MORAL DILEMMAS + THE TROLLEY PROBLEM) with Dr. Joshua Greene episode [01:22:19] from the Ologies podcast.

Train tracks. Split decisions. And a philosophy humdinger worth debating. Dr. Joshua Greene is a Harvard Psychology professor, neuroscientist, and *actual* Trolleyologist. This thought experiment pops up in everything from policy discussions to board games and looks at: What makes you a good person? How do you reason with people who make you scream into a jar like Yosemite Sam? How far would you go to save others? Which charities should get your money? What is active versus passive harm? And what would a monk do? Also: how neurodivergence influences moral decisions, religion used as a moral compass, and your new favorite skeleton on the planet.

I was surprised that I enjoyed this episode as much as I did because I generally find the discussion around The Trolley Problem as difficult to sit through. But after listening to Dr. Greene's summary of the research, I have a better understanding of why I have such a visceral reaction to this hypothetical question.

And (spoiler alert), I don't know whether I trust Buddhist monks anymore. At least, not near train tracks.

HAGOROMO Fulltouch


About 15 or so years ago, the university where I work started the process of replacing all the classroom chalkboards with whiteboards. When asked why they were replacing this perfectly operational educational technology, at least one official response was the they were doing it to protect computers from chalk dust. This is how I remember it.

I don't think I wrote a blog post about it despite having very strong opinions on the matter. If I did write a post, it would be about the superior affordances of chalk in a social setting. For example, when find a set of whiteboard markers left for you, you have to try each one until you find one that has any ink left. With chalk, you know exactly how much is there for you. Also, chalk is the literal embodiment of writing. It is matter that transforms into the symbols you need.

I was reminded of this all as I read, Embodied cognition, blackboards, and mathematical insight:

Tabatabaeian’s work (published with a small circle of coauthors) asks a deceptively simple question: Why do mathematicians work at blackboards?
Mathematics is all about concepts, logic, proofs, and other things that are abstract and cerebral; and so if any kind of knowledge work could happen independent of place, it would be math. Tabatabaeian's work starts wth a bold claim that this vision is backwards– or at least highly incomplete. “Despite mathematics’ reputation for silent reflection,” Tabatabaeian writes in one article, in reality “its practice is almost always a form of manual labor — scribbling, sketching, erasing, gesturing.” Indeed, as she puts it in another article, when you watch how they work, “mathematical practice appears to be a species of physical labor.”
That labor happens mainly at blackboards, and the practice is widespread enough for mathematicians to even talk about a specific brand of chalk— Hagoromo's Fulltouch— the way pianists talk about Steinway. “Real-world mathematical cognition involves a lot of writing,” Tabatabaeian writes in one article.
Blackboards aren’t just convenient but ultimately disposable props for mathematicians: their work “occurs within a distributed system that often includes—in addition to a mathematician’s brain—their body, a blackboard or notepad, and the inscriptions they create.” To put it another way, mathematicians think with blackboards, in somewhat the same way that musicians and instruments become part of the same expressive system.

I found the above in Andrew Curry's Just Two Things: 26 August 2025. Work | Cognition, which is worth reading on its own.

The McPhee method


Years of blogging practice and weekly newsletter writing has given me the confidence and ability to handily produce a 1000 word first draft of writing in one sitting. But, in spite of my time at my keyboard, I still struggle with writing scholarship and other any composition that involves more than one draft.

For my next project, I am going to try The McPhee method.

I ended up relying on a very short user’s manual I’d discovered in the The John McPhee Reader, a book of collected journalism from the New Yorker writer John McPhee. In the introduction, William L. Howarth, who edited the collection, described McPhee’s method for producing what the New Yorker called “fact pieces,” or deeply reported nonfiction. I liked the sound of the method, and I liked the products of it. So I just did my best to copy what Howarth said McPhee did. It’s basically the process I’ve used ever since. The method is not that hard to describe and it’s so useful that I think it bears broadcasting. In fact I think those two or three pages from Howarth’s introduction are a decent substitute for journalism school, at one one-hundred-thousandth the price.
In brief, McPhee’s idea is to never face a blank page. Instead, in stage one he accumulates notes; in stage two he selects them; in stage three he structures them; and in stage four he writes. By the time he is crafting sentences the structure of the piece as a whole, and of each section, even paragraph, and the logic connecting them all, is already determined, thanks to the mechanical work done in the first three stages. McPhee is on rails the whole time he writes his first draft. From there it’s all downhill and the standard thing that everybody does: revision, revision again, then refinement—a sculptor with ax, then knife, then scalpel.

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