“When I get sad, I stop being sad and be awesome instead. True story.”
— apparently from How I Met Your Mother, which I’ve never watched.
— but I have played League of Legends and heard this from Rakan.
In the a post on luck and hard work, I talked about how I’ve been thinking what exactly it is that people are doing when they attribute their life’s success to something or other and what is the arbiter of truth for such attributions. I did not give a causal analysis, even though that would’ve been natural since the language used is often causal. There are two reasons: first, what we are talking about don’t really fit the profile of causal analyses. Success stories are rarely about single events, which rules out most of the more classical or “metaphysical” theories of causation that rely on physical contact. Success stories are also about just one person, which rules out statistical conceptions of causation. Second, these stories are often not diagnostic, but prescriptive. The speaker usually isn’t trying to pinpoint the actual cause of their actual success, but express something that’s meant to apply also to the audience. So the audience has a voice in deciding whether an attribution story is “legitimate”. In a sense, when I give you a story about what makes *me* successful, I am giving you a causal story about *your success*. That’s why it struck me as odd.
I was reminded of this again after seeing two writing guides today, one on Daily Nous and the other on Philosophers’ Cocoon. To be honest, I didn’t know we were still doing productivity guides anymore. Last time the Cocoon (I think) published a “how to get a good job” guide, I thought it got sufficient pushback that we’ve agreed that this is not a very good idea. Apparently I was wrong.
The DN piece is very standard. You will have seen every part of it if you have ever read any sort of writing/ productivity guide. The basic idea is this: if you write slowly, you should try to write fast. If you don’t think you have time to write, you should find time. If you don’t think you have enough ideas, you definitely have enough ideas. Why do I know this? Because I DID IT! Also it doesn’t look like I am extraordinary in any of the commonly noted ways. So there’s no reason you can’t do it.
Very early on in this blog, I wrote a post on how I’m not a morning person. In particular, I spent some time researching reasons why people couldn’t get up early, and all I could find was that it must be because I didn’t get 8 hours of sleep or if my sleep schedule was irregular. Both were false. But that was the only thing that everyone said so I tried to implement a strict sleep schedule. It didn’t work.
Another thing that didn’t work was exercise. I was told that if I regularly exercised for 3 months it’d be a habit and it’d energize my day. So I tried it for 6 months. It never became easier. I never got better. Moreover, if I scheduled it in the morning, it would drain my entire day’s energy and I would get nothing done.
But there’s something alluring about this kind of advice. They look like magical bullets that will solve your longstanding, agonizing problems. Even when they fail catastrophically, it might still be more comforting to think there’s something wrong with me rather than that magical bullets don’t exist. That’s how they proliferate.
Another trap is that these advices put the onus on the reader to identify a reason for why they don’t work. And once one makes such an identification, one also provides the advice giver an easy way out. If I say “I can’t work everyday because I need to homeschool my children”, then the advice giver can respond with either “I also homeschool my children” or “I’m not writing for those who homeschool their children”. Both would shift the blame on me — in the first case, my excuse is invalid; in the second, I am the wrong audience. Moreover, if I don’t have this kind of articulable reason, if I can’t work everyday because I just can’t, then my complaint is doubly baseless.
The problem, I think, is this: advice is supposed to be factual, especially when it is in the form of “if you do X, you will accomplish Y”. It must be that some of them are true and others are false (“true” in an everyday sense). But 1) the way they are generated is rarely conducive to truth-seeking; 2) the actual success of the presenter (when this is the case) tends to count more towards the truth of the advice than any subsequent negative evidence.
A while ago someone on Twitter asked for advice as a WoC starting graduate school. I thought about it for some time and answered “my advice is to not take advice”. I don’t think it went over well and, in any case, I wouldn’t have taken it seriously when I just started. But that really is the most important thing I’ve learned. To be clear, I don’t mean that advice is never useful or people should never seek it. I think it’s useful to give & receive advice of the kind “here is this way of doing things which you might have never considered before”. That’s very valuable. I think they are often called “sharing experience” rather than “giving advice” now, with the implication that it is not expected that listeners would be able to do the same things and magically get the same results. But I don’t especially care about terminology.
Another kind of advice which I don’t mind is the kind that explicitly presents itself as factual. For example, as a woman in academia who has tried to do service, I have sometimes gotten advice in the form of “as someone who has done the exact thing you’re doing before, be careful, if you do X, Y will happen”. In this case, there is an explicit justification for the transferability of predictive knowledge (“you and I are relevantly similar in these ways”) and a specific statement that is falsifiable (“if you do X, Y will happen”). Very often, I would get the sense that if I did X anyway and Y didn’t happen, the person would readily admit that their prediction was falsified. It’s this feature that makes me think the advice is given in good faith. (Though, I also know people who dislike even advice of this kind.)
All of this is some thoughts I have about giving and taking advice. But it’s also about how people make, evaluate, and use causal attributions in social contexts. Nancy Cartwright and others have written on how Randomized Controlled Trials are ill-equipped in providing the kind of clear cut causal stories we expect. I think a similar thing is happening here. By many causal analyses, whether or not the statement “I am successful because I wrote everyday” is true depends on whether I would be successful if I didn’t write everyday. But is that really the relevant thing to consider here? Anyway, that’s all for today’s non-dissertation thoughts.
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