In the first session of my first class in graduate school, the professor warned my classmates and I about the worst sin that a graduate student could commit: Trying to demonstrate how smart we were by savaging the books we were assigned to read.
He called this “the steam roller technique” and said pointedly that if those books were as flawed and defective as we thought, then we obviously didn’t understand or appreciate the authors’ arguments and contributions.
Worse yet, if the profession’s luminaries wrote such flawed works, how could we hope to do better?
