Changing the interpretation of what someone said to fit your argument can be seen on the school playground and in Plato's Gorgias. It's not going away anytime soon.
Agreeing on an interpretation is the first step to conceiving an argument. Wrestling through this is a big part of having a discussion, and someone can always try to unfairly assume the interpretation that suits them, often the least charitable one.
However, if you go into the initial phase with a goal/structure in mind, you're going to be much closer to the final product after your first effort. Many, many writers use outlines/plans. Something that happens a lot in research is that articles are formulaic, they generally have the same sorts of content, so writing them actually becomes easier once familiarity with the structure is obtained.
I would say your approach could be useful for either an artistic format OR for someone who is severely writers' blocked. If you truly have no idea what to write, something is better than nothing. But generally speaking, having a plan/outline is very useful.
The only thing writers have in common is that they each have their own way of working.
Some plot meticulously, others don't plot at all. Some want to know where they're going, others prefer discovery and surprise.
Stephen King does not plot because he finds it boring. He does not want to know what's going to happen.
Here's Flannery O'Connor:
"When I started writing that story, I didn't know there was going to be a Ph.D. with a wooden leg in it. I merely found myself one morning writing a description of two women I knew something about, and before I realized it, I had equipped one of them with a daughter with a wooden leg. I brought in the Bible salesman, but I had no idea what I was going to do with him. I didn't know he was going to steal that wooden leg until ten or twelve lines before he did it, but when I found out that this was what was going to happen, I realized it was inevitable."
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/01/01/21/s...
https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/07/09/hacking-the-brain-sil...
This assertion is ridiculous; it could most certainly be a coincidence. I'd suggest the numerous locations around the world known for a period of drug experimentation that are not technology hot beds suggests it is.
Is it really worth sacrificing your health for? It doesn't even taste nice once you cut through the cultural programming to pretend otherwise.
Drinking poison that tastes like shit doesn't really happen without outside pressure. That's not true of every other preference and desire.
But keep lying to yourself, not my problem.
Citation needed. Maybe you just haven’t tried a good beer yet.
Your point seems really tied up in your own preferences and discounts other people’s experiences.
Or try quitting for six months and see how the body reacts to alcohol when reintroduced.
This post is about the author being against a thing that no one believes. It qualifies as a strawman, easily.
I can’t be the only person that did.
I'd never heard the advice before, but I'm pretty sure I'd have thought they were being literal, unless they also expanded upon the statement in a way that let me know it was a metaphor, not a literal statement.
There may be multiple effects, here: one, that there will always be people who like to drink and will latch on to any idiom that gives them a social excuse to do so. My ex, whose undergraduate degree was journalism, used to say this phrase in a HHOS (ha-ha, only serious) manner. In retrospect, she just liked drinking.
Another effect that comes to mind is that there will always be some small percentage of people who – for whatever reason – do not understand metaphors or jokes or subtext.
Finally, this phrase in particular seems likely to propagate on its own without being attached to the underlying wisdom that was originally intended.
(Of course, now that I think of it that way, it sure sounds like survivor bias... Exploring rather than exploiting is great if your exploration finds something!)