Week 2: Thinking Abstractly: Everything Is a Metaphor for Something Else

Week 2 — abstraction as a bullshitting technique, built on Mednick's claim that connecting remote ideas is a trainable skill, not a gift

1 March 2027

Mednick’s associative theory of creativity treats a good idea as two distant ideas dragged next to each other until they look related. That is also the whole mechanism of a strong bullshit answer, so this week takes it as theory before next week runs it live on an actual object.

Outline#

• abstraction as a hiding place, not a virtue, and how to tell the difference from the audience’s seat
• remote association, in Mednick’s sense, as the trainable skill underneath “it’s more of a vibe”
• the first fortnightly tutorial’s shape, and what “bullshitting” is being assessed alongside attendance
• reading before next week: whatever you can find that sounds load-bearing