Nice post from Joan Strassman at Sociobiology on the art of seeing the big picture, the forest for the trees. The way to do that is to have “blurry vision”, so that you can’t see individual trees at all. Read the whole thing.
Joan’s thoughts were prompted by attending a philosophy seminar. For a while now I’ve been meaning to do a post on a sort of implicit, running theme of this blog, the ways in which thinking philosophically can help you be a better ecologist. Must get around to writing that post at some point…
Oikos Blog 
[…] previous post referred to a philosophy talk about Robert MacArthur, his observations of feeding warblers, and the […]
By: Getting over Robert MacArthur « Oikos Blog on January 31, 2012
at 12:34 am
[…] previous post referred to a philosophy talk about Robert MacArthur, his observations of feeding warblers, and the […]
By: Getting over Robert MacArthur « Oikos Blog on January 31, 2012
at 12:34 am
Gee I hope maybe some of you come over to my philosophy of statistics blog for big-picture thinking!
errorstatistics.blogspot.com
(soon to move, but can track us there.)
Mayo
By: mayoerrorstat on January 31, 2012
at 3:23 am
I’ve previously encouraged my readers to check out your blog, and will certainly plan to do so again once you’ve finished the move!
By: oikosjeremy on January 31, 2012
at 4:09 am