Extralogical Reasoning: Unidentified Misconceptions on Advisement
The following is dedicated to my bestie, Bex, for that very fact as well as catalyzing some of the thinking that went into this article.
A lot can be learned from receiving poor advisement. In fact, much of extralogical reasoning comes from the lessons I learned from my advisors’ mistakes. Much of what remains comes from the mistakes of advisees, including myself.
Most, if not all, the misconceptions discussed herein are “unidentified”: They aren’t necessarily things people truly believe, but enough of their unconscious’ do to impair their thinking. As ER often says, owing to a subconscious-dominate thinking organ, having a fully consistent belief set is a total impossibility, and whatever approximation can be realized never is. Few appreciate how much unidentified beliefs can wreak havoc on someone’s thinking.
Most advisory mistakes and misconceptions relate to general thinking and decision-making, which is covered in the rest of ER (see summary ER intro). But what remains--as far as advisement and in general--are, naturally, of great importance. Hence this article.
I will list several misconceptions before addressing a final concluding misconception and thesis. Note before proceeding, however, that the following assumes an advisee is credible enough and agrees with you enough to justify actively advising them in the first place—more on that to come.
Unidentified misconception one: I should advise anyone I care about and think would benefit from my advise
While there are arguments for why it’s unwise to utilize only those who almost always agree with you, you still need to agree with someone enough to form the basis of a conversation, enough that you can discuss a nominal topic and actually BE discussing that topic. I’ve had conversations where we’re supposedly talking about me, and I may as well be talking about polar bears in Alaska while they’re talking about alligators in Florida. Such conversations lead to little more than resentment.
It's been my experience that one of the most dangerous things you can do in a relationship—any relationship—is to try to reconcile irreconcilable differences of opinion. Don’t underestimate how few of a person’s total (including unconscious) beliefs are identified and much they reinforce each other, however inconsistently and illogically. It’s almost always easier to agree with someone in principle than practice. Even the wrong specific irreconcilable differences should give you serious pause.
If a person repeatedly makes the same mistake against your counsel, withdraw from advising them on that topic or all together. The standard definition of insanity is repeatedly doing the same thing after repeatedly getting undesirable results. Continued advisement means you’re taking on their insanity and inadvertently encouraging it (see article on irrationality/insanity). In this case, withdrawing is the best form of discouragement. An advisee that can’t learn is no advisee at all.
Lastly, the person must be credible enough that you can depend on them to give you accurate information so you can stay abreast of context. Remember, there’s no such thing as a good decision or conclusion without knowing the context. If you can’t stay abreast of context, you should not assume you can effectively advise them (or at least more than passively).
Unidentified misconception two: It’s okay (and possibly effective) to be disrespectful or manipulative if I genuinely believe I’m trying to help someone
The ends must justify the means. Most tactics of manipulation are learned unknowingly throughout life, and people often employ them half or less wittingly. A future post will be a treatment on defending yourself against sophistry, the art of manipulative argumentation. Many subtle tactics exist.
But the truth is, it doesn’t work as well as most think (or at least this is yet another unidentified misconception). You might get someone to act like they agree with you in THAT CONVERSATION, but that doesn’t mean the impression will last. Even if you succeed in getting them to START something—like college—that doesn’t mean they’ll FINISH it or put in a full effort, and in some cases, starting without finishing can be worse than never starting. And people can sense manipulation, even if they can’t put their finger on it, and it’s destructive to your credibility.
Unidentified misconception three: I shouldn’t take someone’s advice unless I agree with them
A major flaw of standard “thinking” is that it doesn’t actively distinguish between beliefs and decisions. Opinions are almost always optional—but your thinking organ’s cognitive reflex to jump to conclusions tells you otherwise (see summary intro). If you don’t understand something, you almost always have the option of not having an opinion, or waiting until you do. Decisions, on the other hand, are mandatory; understanding isn’t always possible; and there could be real consequences if you’re wrong. Judgment calls need to be made in areas you lack experience and knowledge. Sometimes, it makes sense to take advise from someone you trust even when you don’t entirely understand the advice (counterarguments will be given later). Don’t let your ego get in the way.
However, if your comfortability with the recommended solution effects your ability to execute it, it may make sense to disregard it. The importance of comfort in a solution should not be dismissed.
Unidentified misconception four: Credibility should be awarded primarily by how “successful” someone is
As a rule of thumb, assume a person with good judgment will want to earn credibility by teaching you things, especially about life, and simply giving you information that might be true without explanation isn’t necessarily educational. An advisor who doesn’t teach is no true advisor at all. But in some ways, the ATTEMPT is just as important as content. Even if you disagree with them, if they make a commendable effort to explain themselves, it can directly or indirectly pose enough questions to stimulate your thinking. That’s one of the beauties of ER: It doesn’t simply tell what to do or think, but HOW to do them and why; and this, if nothing else, catalyzes learning.
True learning doesn’t come from facts--but knowing how they fit in which each other and knowing what do with them. That’s the difference between knowledge, understanding, and proficiency; and wisdom means knowing what all these things are and how they, in turn, fit together. Taking people’s word for things is not a viable means to these ends. To learn, one must receive at least one of the following four things: a new fact, new opinion, or a new explanation or presentation of an old idea. It can be an old idea or even a cliché so long as it’s at least new in the explanation or presentation—but in the end, there still needs to be at least SOMETHING in its that’s new.
Always be wary of someone who brags and squabbles about who says what. Hubris is more dangerous than ignorance. In matters of judgment, I’d almost always rather deal with someone who’s just smart and knowledgeable ENOUGH but knows their limitations and is good at avoiding mistakes than someone who’s cocky and arrogant and overestimates themselves. People brag about intellectual things to compensate for lack of relevant learning or other insecurities and shortcomings. They brag about their supposed learning to create the illusion they’re enlightened enough to satisfy their egos. And confidence isn’t about thinking and acting like you’re wonderful at everything; it’s about healthy ACCEPTANCE, including the acceptance of one’s vulnerabilities and flaws. You can’t have genuine confidence without genuine humility.
No worthy advisor or advisee will be fooled by the “fallacious trappings” of confidence and learning. The definition of intellectual shallowness is believing that intelligence and learning automatically lead to wisdom. Bragging about intellectual things is what people do instead of giving you useful information. Be someone who gives useful information.
The less a person tries to earn their credibility, the less you should trust them. Again, an advisor that doesn’t teach isn’t a true advisor at all. A prospective advisor that doesn’t encourage intelligent skepticism is not to be trusted, either—which is the next unidentified misconception.
For me, general credibility is something I grant in exchange for learning, especially about life and life-related judgment. If someone had a PhD from MIT in physics and they didn’t teach me anything, I’d ONLY give them credibility in physics.
SPECIFIC credibility is different. I mentioned that hubris is more dangerous than ignorance, but that still assumes the person has a minimal level of knowledge. All the wisdom in the World is meaningless if you don’t have some basic knowledge of the relevant area—aside from the important exception of the wisdom to know the disadvantages of your lack of knowledge. I myself don’t have much experience in the professional world and always tell my advisees to get a second opinion.
I also have the orientation of a philosopher, which lends itself poorly to practical things. Yogi Barra once said that “In theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice, they’re different.” Bishko defined Biosap as the evolutionary precursor to beliefs too intangible to be right or wrong that animals use to unconsciously model reality. Beliefs are much newer, and resultantly, the human thinking organ remains biosap-dominant. Philosophers have different biosap and stricter principals than pragmatists, and their advice and decisions are subject to greater constraints. Once a philosopher excepts what they are, they should resign to teaching and passive counseling and generally steer clear of leadership, practical endeavors, and exclusive judgement-calling—which also means not having children.
Lastly, don’t confuse competence and judgment. While it may sometimes be practical to exaggerate judgment’s impact on competence, they’re often very different. Competence generally pertains to areas where someone’s understanding is subjected to testing and correction and training; making decisions with limited information. In most things, success can occur despite mistakes—on the contrary, it USUALLY does, even in the best of cases. Just because someone’s PACKAGE of methods works doesn’t mean you can say the same for the PARTS. It's sometimes hard to know what works and what doesn’t, for no area has unlimited self-correctivity—or ability to correct its own mistakes.
And ultimately, the World has evolved to accommodate the general population’s paucity of wisdom. It’s correlation with competence is nowhere near what’s generally assumed—especially by smart people.
Unidentified misconception five: People shouldn’t be (intelligently) skeptical of my advice
A few general points on skepticism:
Remember: Opinions are almost always optional, and simply taking people’s word for things is not a viable path to learning. Secondly, you shouldn’t just be skeptical because other people have certain flaws; you should also be skeptical of yourself because you, in one way or degree or another, have those very same flaws. Skepticism without SELF-SKEPTICISM isn’t skepticism; it’s ARROGANCE.
A person with good judgment comprehends the benefits of intelligent skepticism as well as what it means to be an intelligent ADVISEE; not expecting you to be prudent is a sign that they aren’t—or that they’re hiding something. And a prospective advisee who automatically trusts you is a sign they aren’t a worthy one (or at least not yet).
Unidentified misconception six: Advice and personal methods will always be sufficiently explained
Being good at explaining why your methods work usually isn’t a requisite for being good at something. Many things are—and, perhaps, ought to be—done by instinct, rather than by articulated, systematized methods; and it’s been my experience that people tend to be exceedingly inarticulate. Plus, people often do things one way, then when asked to explain them, give answers to meet social and psychological criteria.
But that still doesn’t mean their advice is wrong. Sometimes people believe the right things for the wrong reasons; they explain them poorly; they might be telling you what they think you need to hear; or you might misinterpret them. The advice’s explanation should be taken seriously, of course, but it may have more merit than your gut reaction suggests.
Unidentified misconception seven: An advisee’s beliefs and points of view that are wrong don’t matter
This a huge one. And it may even BE what some truly believe.
From a certain point of view, a person’s point of view IS that person. Saying you want to understand a person but not their point of view is almost like saying, “I want to understand that person, but I don’t want to understand that person.” Action is determined by perception, not reality, and there’s no such thing as a good decision or conclusion without knowing the context. A person’s beliefs and point of view dominates their perceptions and are major parts of the contexts of every situation they enter. Moreover, a person might be quite unrealistic about how and/or how much their beliefs affect their decisions, but there are other ways it can influence them and provide you with useful information.
And there’s still nothing stopping you from saying their opinions are shit.
Contrary to common misconceptions, if your advisee has bad beliefs, they’re MORE important. If you want to dismantle someone’s flawed logic, it helps to know what it is.
The fallacy of relevance occurs when someone dismisses a piece of information as irrelevant just because its relevance may be misunderstood. Many things can be important, and they can be important in different ways and to different degrees. When relevance is misunderstood, people are too quick to conclude the information is irrelevant, when it may simply be misunderstood. Just because something doesn’t mean everything or WHAT other people think doesn’t necessarily it means nothing, either.
For example, the term psychosomatic illness is NOT a contradiction in terms, and in some cases, the psychological ailment can be far worse than the physical. When teenagers say they’re suicidal, they almost certainly aren’t (or less than they say), but that doesn’t make the statement unimportant. As I’ve said in other posts: There’s a wide gap between everything and nothing, and when there’s an overreaction in one direction, it’s often countered by an overreaction in the other. IQ tests, the NFL combine (where athletes are tested for speed, strength, etc.), and preseason sports are other things where the fallacy has been committed.
Finally, asking questions and taking an interest in someone’s point of view is a good way to gain credibility. Not asking questions, making b-lines for dogmas or “go-to” advise, and not taking an interest in someone’s point of view are not consistent with context-based thinking and decision-making, nor appreciated by advisees. After all, disparaging someone’s credibility usually isn’t a good way to get theirs.
Unidentified misconception eight: The best learning occurs from success and positive examples
Obviously, you can learn plenty from success, but if you do things right, you learn more from failure: Beliefs unsupported by emotions and unconscious beliefs have little effect on people’s actions and general perspectives, and people are disproportionally affected by failure than success; and life-related judgment is more about avoiding wrongness and mistakes than being correct. You don’t learn from simply mindlessly doing what people tell you. Mimetic (or imitative) learning, unlike psychosomatic illnesses, is a contradiction in terms. If you fail to take the right advice, get burned, then make an intelligent assessment of what happened--you learn. This may seem contradictory to what I said earlier about how you don’t have to agree with advice to take it—but that’s why it’s called JUDGEMENT.
What I tell young people is that so long as they consider their parents reasonably credible, they should always LISTEN to what they say but only take their advice unless they agree with it. This may get them into trouble, but their parents should have faith that they’ll learn. Life is about being a work in progress—that’s the journey. The destination is coming as close to your potential as you can.
If you do things right, you also learn more from other people’s failures than successes. The rarity of wisdom disqualifies it as a human attribute, making positive examples less common than believed; and again, quality judgment is mostly about avoiding mistakes. And if someone lacks the wisdom to see them for what they are, they are not, or not YET, educable. That be the case, they either need to fail more to become so, or shouldn’t be bothered with. An advisee who can’t learn is no advisee at all.
Unidentified misconception nine: If I’ve known someone for a long time and have important information about them, I necessarily have enough information to form relevant conclusions
First off, a quick thought experiment: A thirty-year-old has lived over ten thousand days; even if you’ve known them for years, your total amount of time with them could easily be less than 1/2,000th the time they’ve spent awake since birth—which is infinitely more than you’ve spent inside their head. You may not have EVER observed them learning and performing at work or school; knew them in their formative years; or even observed them outside of a small group of people.
Having a complete thought process isn’t just about how well you’ve analyzed the information you have, but whether you’ve analyzed all the information you NEED (or at least can feasibly acquire). Knowing the wrong combination of important pieces of information about something can be extremely misleading. It’s very easy to mistake a piece of knowledge for the whole picture. You could spend ten years brilliantly analyzing the information you have but if it’s only seventy percent of the information you need, it could very easily lead you to wrong conclusions. In fact, the TIME that’s transpired from when you first received relevant information until the ultimate inference is only a HEURISTIC for judging whether someone performed sufficient analysis.
Naturally, questions need to be asked—which leads to the next unidentified misconception.
Ultimately, taking an interest in someone means taking an interest in their LIFE, not merely the tiny sliver of it you’ve personally observed.
Unidentified misconception ten: Something is only a mistake if there are consequences
Most people don’t know what a decision is. The quality of a decision is based on the analysis and information-gathering that went into it, not the consequences. After all, no one can see the future. People get lucky sometimes; unlucky others; or there were events that couldn’t have been anticipated. Looking at the consequences is a rule-of-thumb for surmising the prudence of a decision, not what determines it.
Many lessons are CONCEPTUAL. In a nutshell, life learning and rationality are the ability to connect individual flaws, mistakes, and misconceptions to general problems with one’s thinking, psychology, and life—in other words, learning from mistakes. A rational person knows that every time they make a mistake, even if it’s relatively trivial in itself, there’s still a decent chance they can learn from it. A person who can’t do this, who only looks at mistakes and misconceptions at face value, can’t learn from their mistakes—and is, therefore, insane.
Unidentified misconception eleven: If I ask a person a question or allow myself to receive a piece of information, I have to either believe the person, or draw some conclusion about it
How about you just TAKE THE FUCKIN’ INFORMATION. The very fact that the person chose to say what they said must mean SOMETHING. Bishko’s life engineering called concomitant information the information conveyed by the very fact a person chose to say what they said. For reasons already explained, asking questions is essential, and suspending judgment is perfectly possible.
Unidentified misconception twelve: A credible person’s opinions and reports should be automatically believed
A major ER axiom is that the suspension of judgment should be your default response to new information. Ascertaining correct answers is harder and less necessary than believed while wrong beliefs are more dangerous. Because everyone has a cognitive and emotional reflex to reinforce their beliefs, wrong beliefs tend to lead to more wrong beliefs. The causation bias, or tendency to be too quick to assume the relationship between cause and effect will ascertainable and satisfying, makes correctness seem easier to obtain and the cognitive reflex to jump to conclusions more necessary. You should both protect yourself from wrong beliefs, as well as not assume that anyone really understands themselves and their lives (few if any do).
Whenever and wherever possible, suspend judgment.
Unidentified misconception thirteen: People are fully capable of understanding themselves and each other
Only DEGREES of understanding of yourself and others are obtainable. This is not to say that what’s obtained isn’t advantageous—even essential--but in the end, despite all delusions created by your thinking organ and society, all you’ll ever get are degrees.
Statements like “I/they understand them ‘better’ than themselves” are for the obtuse, and the older I get, the more my response to the statement “I know myself very well” shifts toward the opposite.
Take a “realistically ideal” advisory collaboration between mother and seventeen-year-old son. Neither are brilliant nor exceptionally rational, nor is their relationship perfect; but all three are easily good enough to have a productive collaboration. The mother is much less unwise than the son, was able to observe him as an adult during his early formative years (while he was child), doesn’t view his life with the biasing filters of the son’s unconscious, and has SEEN him behave, which is hasn’t. On the other hand, she’s never been inside his head and only witnessed perhaps a quarter of his life’s wakening hours and perhaps none in certain significant areas, in addition to having motherly biases. He can fill her in on what she’s hasn’t witnessed—but only so much.
Each has significant disadvantages, and, if you understand extralogical reasoning, the “advantages” are really just pieces of essential information viewed through fuzzy lenses. Saying one’s overall understanding is “better” is almost meaningless and tantamount to denying the undeniable limits of their perspective. When making tricky consequential decisions, both are stupid to dismiss the others’ analyses, and both are stupid to view them without (intelligent) skepticism.
ER teaches that it’s wise to believe that the highest form of human self-awareness is awareness of one’s FALLIBILITY, and no advisor should think they can understand the advisee much better.
Final and concluding unidentified misconception: Advising a highly credible and minimally credible people are different
As you can see from the above, the same general principals apply to everyone it makes sense to advise. As said, it’s essential for context-based advisement and gaining credibility. And most of all, it’s at least wise to believe that the relationship’s based on learning. An advisor that can’t teach is no true advisor at all, and an advisee that can’t learn is no true advisee.
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