Crackpots #2: To Be A Bat (Patreon)

Hello,

Welcome to my kitchen. We have bananies… and avocadies. But seriously, folks — welcome to my newsletter. There are many like it, but this one is mine. This is Yung Chomsky, by the way. Had you already guessed? Well done.

First, I’ll lay out what you’re in for here, or at least my best guess at this point. If you’ve been paying attention for a while, you may have hunches. Perhaps you’re thinking: Will he write about nutrition and exercise? Men’s style? Programming? Electronic music? Signs point to yes. Will he filter and synthesize (pun intended!) all of those subjects through his unique, off-kilter philosophical lens? With any luck. Mostly I plan to give you a little peek at what’s been gnawing at me lately — the things that occupy my mind, grind my gears, and so on.

As a little introduction to some of those preoccupations, and a background for today’s rumination, you can check out some other essays that I’ve written, or watch my recent appearance on Joshua Citarella’s Doom Scroll podcast. (Did you know they make podcasts with video these days? If you ask me, that’s not what G-D intended, even if it is perhaps playing to our strengths in this case.) That material is not a prerequisite for this post, but I am going to expand on some ideas I’ve touched on in those places.

Today’s musings will be on the nature of advice. Here’s the deal: people ask me for advice sometimes, but the truth is I don’t like to give it. It’s not that it doesn’t feel good to be asked; of course it’s nice to know that anyone values what I have to say. It’s not about “gatekeeping;” I don’t think any of my knowledge is unique or proprietary, and I’m happy to see others succeed, even where I’ve struggled. And I can’t fault anyone for asking — if I’m public about my interests, it’s unsurprising that I’m sometimes asked questions about them. It’s more that I’ve come to view giving certain types of advice as a fundamentally misguided endeavor, better avoided entirely.

The internet plays an important role in facilitating this situation. Ever since it evolved beyond a place for academics to share documents, one of the internet’s main draws has been its ability to facilitate interpersonal connections, formation of communities, exchanges of ideas. In the old days there were listservs and BBSes, then web forums, and now social media platforms. The internet is good at connecting buyers with sellers, exhibitionists with voyeurs, and advice-seekers with would-be advice-givers. It makes the barriers extremely low. As a knowledge-preneur, it’s trivial to advertise one’s expertise, and thus their advice-giving bona fides, which can with some luck become a profitable asset. And as an info-sumer, there’s very little distance between reading someone’s thoughts and pinging them with a question about how exactly it all applies to their personal circumstance.

It is perhaps worth pausing here to draw a distinction between advice and recommendation. A recommendation is more of a signpost, a pointer to some third party. The recommendation may come packaged with an analysis, some justification for itself; it may come from a place of passion, and it may even be specifically formulated for its intended audience, but it ultimately exists at a remove from both the recommender and recommendee. Machines can, and these days often do, give us recommendations — they ingest data about what we’ve liked in the past and spit out a list of things we might like in the future. But I don’t think that machines can (or should) give advice, at least not yet.

Advice is weightier and more intimate than recommendation. Rather than the fleeting impact of the recommendation, the ramifications of giving or taking advice can be long-lasting. Advice by its nature tends to create a more substantial relationship between giver and receiver, a relationship which can carry with it an implicit responsibility. Hence the sort of disclaimers we’ve all no doubt come across on the internet or elsewhere: This is not financial advice. This is not medical advice. I am a lawyer, but not your lawyer.

And so we come to the first of my reasons for shying away from advice-giving: I don’t want to be responsible for what happens to someone else, least of all a stranger. It’s not that I’m particularly concerned about, for example, getting blamed for someone’s gym injury, or for an outfit that their friends made fun of, or for a bug they wrote due to ill-advised coding practices. Rather, this is more about my desire to avoid the frustration I’ll feel if my advice doesn’t play out as intended, and most especially if it isn’t followed at all. Giving advice, especially the personalized kind, takes effort, and it’s hard to put in that effort without caring about the result. But I’ve found that most often it amounts to nothing. Sometimes the roadblock is almost immediate — someone might ask “I want to lose weight. What should I eat?” To which I might reply, “Here is how I eat when I want to lose weight.” And then come the follow ups: “That would never work for me because I’m vegetarian and lactose intolerant and I don’t like beans and I have sensory issues and I don’t have a stove” and so on and so forth. It’s not that those constraints are illegitimate. But I think it’s a fundamental truth that no mentor or authority will ever be able to provide a surefire path to success that accounts for all obstacles. We simply have to work out the solutions for ourselves as we go, via trial and error. And in fact the loop of rejecting guidance for lack of hyper-specific personalization can quickly become a way to avoid tackling a problem at all.

Moreover, I’ve come to wonder whether there isn’t something intrinsic to this sort of relation between advice-seeker and -giver that necessarily tends to produce such an outcome. In other words, the same set of conditions that leads to a person seeking out advice (especially online) also means they’re unlikely to be in a position to implement it. Maybe there’s a correlation between how easy it is to shoot off a question in a comment section or DM and how easy it is to ignore the answer. Or maybe the scenario is circular, like a Möbius strip; it’s not that someone asks for advice and then chooses to disregard it, but rather that they simply lack the perspective to properly understand the situation they're in, which is also what led them to ask for advice in the first place. Maybe there’s no way out but through.

It’s obvious why we seek out advice — we want to benefit from the knowledge of others. This is after all one of the essential things that makes us human: we’ve developed technology to efficiently transmit knowledge across space and time, so that each generation can build on the discoveries of those prior. Barring a civilizational cataclysm, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel, or rediscover how to make penicillin. And yet there are limits to these technologies. For as much as has been written on the subject, people don’t seem capable of learning how to e.g. avoid heartbreak. Some things we simply have to experience for ourselves, because learning about them via external sources is fundamentally inadequate. We can be told ad nauseam to avoid touching the hot stove, but no warning can be as effective a teacher as burning one’s hand for the first time.

Here I want to discuss the idea of qualia. Qualia (the plural form of “quale”) are what philosophers of mind call the private, intrinsic qualities of experience. A thought experiment described by Frank Jackson in 1982 introduces the “knowledge argument” for qualia, which tends to spring to my mind first when I think of the subject:

Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black-and-white room via a black-and-white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes or the sky and use terms like "red", "blue", and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence "The sky is blue." What happens when Mary is released from her black-and-white room or is given a color television monitor? Does she learn anything new or not?

If we think the answer is yes, then we affirm the existence of qualia. I mention this to pose the question of whether the qualia of certain experiences could be what makes advice about how to navigate them moot. Think about exercise, and the familiar adage “no pain, no gain.” Some may view that phrase as merely passé machismo; they may say that the glorification of suffering it represents is actually counter-productive, and leads only to injury. But I think if we simply substitute “discomfort” for “pain,” we can do away with some of those objections. It’s probably less controversial to say that the intensity of effort required to produce the sorts of physical adaptations that exercisers commonly seek, e.g. fat loss, muscle gain, improved athletic performance, is necessarily uncomfortable. So we can say that pain is to be avoided, because it leads to injury, but discomfort is to be sought, because it leads to adaptation. How then is one to learn the difference between discomfort and pain except through direct experience? ♫ When the burn hits your quads and you’re cursing the gods / that’s a quale ♫ Taking active steps to avoid injury is an important practice, but progress only comes through exploration of our limits, and we can only know where our limits lie by pushing up against them, and sometimes going too far.

This line of thought can be extended to other realms. Many people turn to the internet for style advice. Learning about fashion can be overwhelming, especially for men who weren’t raised to value or understand it. The malefashionadvice subreddit has nearly 6M subscribers. Perhaps the most common type of post on there more or less amounts to “what should I wear?” or “where should I shop?” or “should I follow this trend?” Those with a little more self-awareness might ask something like “how do I develop style?” The answer, of course, is practice. Style is, in my view, fundamentally a way of seeing more than it is something one does. And if you want to develop an eye, there’s no way around looking at a lot of stuff, and then eventually trying to imitate it, and falling a little short of your intent, and then looking at more stuff and trying again. If you’re too afraid of making a blunder, you’ll never experiment and thus never grow. I believe a similar process applies to developing a voice or a style in any medium, like music, painting, or fiction.

But it's not limited to the realm of art, either. Similar questions abound on programming forums. Every day is a constant stream of “what’s the best way to start learning?” And the answer is almost always the same: read something (perhaps the official documentation!) and then try to build something. But that answer is rarely satisfying to askers. They want to short-circuit the process of choosing a project, going down dead ends, getting stuck. This is all as understandable as it is futile. Frustration is baked into the process.

It’s fitting, then, that this way of thinking about personal development took me some time to come around to. It is in some ways a frustrating framework for someone like me to accept. I’m a strong believer in the value of communication, of empathy, of learning and teaching. I want to think that people can meaningfully understand one another’s experiences even when they differ, which of course they always will, since on some level you’re always you and I’m always me. The logical endpoint of the alternative is that we are each living in our own universe of “lived experience” where we’re the absolute authority, but we’re all causally disconnected from one another, like two objects separated by space expanding faster than the speed of light. Never the twain shall meet! I don’t think that’s an accurate or useful model of the world, but it’s hard to know how to square this circle.

Dwelling on this only suggests more questions. If your brain is like mine, it might tend to serve up sudden, vivid flashbacks to terribly embarrassing yet totally inconsequential moments from your distant past unprompted, like when you’re trying to fall asleep at night. In such moments, I’m prone to wondering: what if I could go back and redo this or that situation, drawing on all the knowledge I’ve gained since? Would I be happier and more fulfilled? Would I have caused less hurt or offense to the people around me? If I knew from the beginning what I know now, how much more accomplished would I be? Would I now fall asleep more easily, my mind unburdened by my past missteps? Or is the question fundamentally incoherent, because the “me” who’s thinking about it right now only exists as such due to being shaped by the very experiences I fantasize about undoing? If I raise children, is my goal to somehow protect them from making any of the mistakes I’ve made, or would that be doing them a disservice, denying them opportunities for self-discovery and growth?

I am reminded here of a passage from the opening section of Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come. … There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, ‘sketch’ is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the ground-work for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture. Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.

In the end I don’t take quite as pessimistic a view as this passage. It is true that missteps are unavoidable; since we can’t know what the outcome of an action will be before we take it, we can’t even know how to define a misstep, let alone avoid it. Perhaps what seems like a mistake in one moment will seem like a blessing down the road. Errors are inevitable, but learning from them is not — and that’s where agency can be exercised. Perhaps the only true error is being so focused on finding shortcuts that we lose sight of the path we’re walking. The internet makes finding such shortcuts seem attractive and attainable. Why should I suffer the embarrassment of trial and error when I can draw on the instantly accessible pooled knowledge of humanity in order to avoid all possible pitfalls? When I was younger, I had few mentors for the things I was interested in, which frustrated me. So I aggregated my own from various sources and went around spreading the gospel as I saw it. These days I’m happy to discuss what I’ve done, but less interested in evangelizing. But I don’t know what the future holds, so maybe my perspective will change again. Check back with me in a few years — or maybe just next month.

Until then,

Yung Chomsky

P.S. For some further reading, here's the essay from which this post draws its title.