From The End of Wisdom - a book about why most advice is bullsh*t. This week, the chapter it opens with.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease. The nail that sticks out gets hammered down. Both are proverbs, both are true, and they tell you to do opposite things. Neither one tells you which situation you are actually in, which means neither one is giving you information.
Proverbs last because they compress. A real observation gets squeezed into a sentence short enough to repeat, and the squeezing throws out the part that made it true: who, when, under what conditions. What comes out the other end sounds like a law. A stitch in time saves nine is good advice before the injury and useless after it. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it assumes that nothing invisible is wrong and that nothing could be better. The proverb never tells you when it stops applying. It cannot, because saying so would cost it the brevity that made it memorable in the first place.
The book runs this as a small scene. A saver and a spender argue, one holding a penny saved is a penny earned and the other holding penny wise, pound foolish. They bring evidence. The evidence comes out even. They commission more of it, and it stays even. That is not a failure of research. It is what you should expect when two sayings are each correct in different circumstances and neither one says which circumstance you are standing in.
The tempting move is to arbitrate: work out the rule for when each applies, or argue that one of them beats the other in general. Graham Harman, in Weird Realism, points out that this fails in exactly the way the proverbs fail, by pretending a complicated world fits into one more sentence. Žižek makes the same point as a party trick. Preach seizing earthly pleasures and you sound profound. Preach renouncing them for eternity, equally profound. Preach the wise balance of the two, or the humble acceptance of the mystery, and you sound profound again. When a position and its opposite are both received as wisdom, the wisdom is not measuring anything.
We find proverbs quaint, and then take their business-casual cousins completely seriously. Ignore sunk costs, but commit to the long-term plan. Diversify, but concentrate your bets. And every graduate is told to specialize and to stay well-rounded, usually by the same person. Same structure, better tailoring.
So here is the test I would run on the next piece of advice anyone hands you. Does its opposite also exist as a saying? If it does, you have not been given information. You have been given permission, and it is worth asking what you were about to do anyway.
The End of Wisdom: Why most advice is bullsh*t. Paperback and Kindle.