We didn’t always agree; even with this, I didn’t fully agree. But he helped me see a blind spot: I was gleefully making myself into a statistic; unique by virtue of the happenstance of my machinery; and risking the possibility of losing what’s there regardless of the machinery or beyond it.
And, I dropped it. just like that. Many months of work on understanding my background from a statistical point of view was and continues to be extremely useful but he reminded me not to stay in there, as he’d seen post after post after post of me writing about it for months as I researched — and he could see what I could not.