During my travels in the Netherlands I came to learn about stellingen; a fun tradition whereby Ph.D candidates curate a list of ten propositions—short statements the student can defend in front of their committee—alongside their actual dissertation. Propositions begin as statements about the student’s doctoral work, but end of the list tends to drift towards reflections on the culture of science, observations about life, or philosophy at large and they often take a turn towards the humorous (or even self-referential). I didn’t graduate from the Netherlands so I never got to make my own list as part of my work, but why let that stop me? And why stop at ten! Here you’ll find my own short-form propositions about the titular subjects.
Think of these as ideas I haven’t had the chutzpah to turn into fully-fledged blog posts (yet) with the disclaimer that I reserve the right to change my mind on them as time passes 😄