This observation distilled Greenfield's decades of experience watching politicians, pundits, and ordinary citizens filter reality through their preconceptions. As the editorial page editor of one of America's most important newspapers during the Cold War, Watergate, and the Reagan era, she had watched countless intelligent people misread situations because they were seeing what they expected rather than what was actually happening. Greenfield's counsel was not to abandon frameworks or theories — she was not anti-intellectual — but to maintain what she called a 'provisional' relationship with one's own conclusions. The graduates, she suggested, should cultivate the discipline of looking again, of checking their perceptions against evidence, and of being willing to revise their understanding when reality refuses to conform to their expectations.