Maybe calling them "research memoirs" sounds too dry?
"research quest?"
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You certainly need a Cleric for a Research quest, but what will be the Barbarian's and the Rogue's role in it ?
What I really love about listening to how someone verifies, or finds errors in a popular fact is the way that it exposes how knowledge is produced.
Why is this ant on the list of "introduced species?"
Why do people say this town in named for this particular historical event?
Are babies REALLY naturally scared of snakes from birth?
There are so many layers to the production of knowledge and maybe I hope by knowing those layers I can better know the truth.
@futurebird I think there is an interesting reverse thing to this: When you look for the meanings of names, or popular terminology.
So this is called an "Indian Ant" because it was popularly believed to have come from India, but it wasn't
This town is called xyz becasue that is a corruption of the original name based on an assumption that it was involved in this.
The actual origin of names is fascinating, because it also shows how "knowledge" - or myth - is propogated.
The process tends to both leave me impressed with the way that the network of human knowledge can self correct, but it also exposes massive holes where false information can propagate.
And it exposes the limit of what we can know.
Could I time travel to Florida 3 million years ago and look for the ant and verify if it was new? Would even that be enough?
@futurebird
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Capybara lived in Florida through the Pliocene and most of the Pleistocene, so they would have been present in Florida 3 million years ago. But capybara went (locally) extinct in Florida during the last major glaciation of the Pleistocene, and there's no evidence of their existence in Florida between the late Pleistocene and about 15 years ago, when they got (re)introduced.
@futurebird you have quite a gift for exposing raw powerful questions and i wish i could be a fly on the wall in your classroom
@futurebird i consider the work of science to be determining whether and how a mechanistic model can represent an observed process (note that i don't say "natural" process). this is basically unheard of in the highly financialized tech sector
@futurebird Epistemological Epic