I wrote about adversarial reading. Then I tried it
Claims have always needed resistance from the reader. For a long time, I thought I was providing that. I was not. I was nodding at what sounded reasonable
One of my friends asked me after my last essay: “Can you actually show how you do the adversarial reading thing you wrote about?”
Fair question. I had written about playing with ideas instead of just passively reading them. So I tried it. I picked one claim from a career advice article I had just read: “You have to be good at technical work first.” It seemed obviously true when I read it.
I took that claim and applied a series of interrogation methods which I have listed below:
The first thing I discovered was embarrassing. I thought I knew what “technical work” meant. Obviously it’s coding, engineering, data analysis. The hard skills you get hired for. I wanted to counteract the claim to see if it holds.
What about therapists? Their core skill is understanding people, not traditional technical work. Does that break the claim?
Well, I was treating “technical work” as if it meant one specific category of skills. But the author probably meant something broader. Technical work is your core craft, whatever that craft is. For a priest, it’s knowing the rituals. For a therapist, it’s understanding human behavior. For a programmer, it’s writing code.
My counterexample didn’t break the claim. It revealed that I didn’t understand what the claim was actually saying.
Then I tried to break the claim for real. When would “be good at technical work first” not be true?
The first answer came quickly: luck. Someone gets the right timing, the right exposure, and succeeds without being technically strong first. But as soon as I wrote that down, I realized it didn’t invalidate the claim. It just showed where it applies and where it doesn’t. The statement works in structured and predictable careers. It breaks down in chaotic situations where being early or well-connected matters more than mastery. That’s when I started noticing the claim wasn’t wrong, it was incomplete. It needed qualifiers.
The sharpest observation was when I turned the claim on itself. The author says you need to be good at technical work first. But nowhere in the article do they prove they are technically good at giving career advice. No credentials. No track record. No “here’s what happened when I tried this.”
By their own standard, I shouldn’t trust them. But then I noticed the last line: “This advice is like any other, fuzzy.” They admit uncertainty. And I had to ask myself: is that technical competence? Not overselling what you know. Being honest about the limits of your advice. Or did they just fail their own test and tried to cover it with humility?
I genuinely don’t know. But I wouldn’t have noticed the tension without interrogating it.
The final layer surprised me most. I kept asking why. Why does being good at technical work matter? Maybe you want to differentiate yourself. But why does differentiation matter? To keep learning and avoid monotony. Why does monotony matter? Because without learning, you end up doing average work. Why is average bad? Because exceptional work earns you respect from others and makes you feel great about yourself.
I kept going until I couldn’t go deeper. Self-respect. Social respect. Those are the things you can’t reduce further.
The career advice was actually not about career advice at all. It was about one specific path i.e. the professional path that connects to deeper human needs. Which means the claim has a scope I didn’t see on first read. It’s advice for people who want respect and meaning through professional excellence specifically.
One sentence that seemed obvious became six conditional statements, three scope limitations, and one existential grounding.
Before this exercise: one sentence that seemed true.
After this exercise: a claim that only works in certain contexts, with several unstated assumptions, from an author who may or may not meet their own standard, ultimately about a specific path to existential needs rather than a universal principle.
This is what playing with ideas actually looks like. Not highlighting. Not summarizing. Not nodding along because something sounds reasonable. Making every claim defend itself. Asking what has to be true for this to work. Looking for the boundaries where it breaks down. Checking if the author meets their own standard. Tracing down to what goal the advice is really serving.
Most claims that seem obvious at first glance turn out to be conditional once you interrogate them. They work in some contexts and fail in others. They rely on unstated assumptions. They have hidden scope.
Claims have always needed resistance from the reader. For a long time, I thought I was providing that. I was not. I was nodding at what sounded reasonable.
Maybe the claims were always testable. But I was not testing them yet.