OddThinking

What a grossly over-simplistic piece of trite. Okay, that’s not entirely true.

While these “pieces of advice” can be too simplistic to be useful, you are neglecting the context. They can also be a timely reminder depending on the situation or person.

If the “pieces of advice” were given as general advice, then yes, they would be too broad to be useful. If given to relate to a particular circumstance, then that could be useful – to help the recipient learn when to apply the advice, that is, when it is appropriate to overcome one’s in-built assumptions and when it is appropriate to come up with good assumptions. (Sorry about dodgy sentence structure – can’t be bothered fixing.)

Interesting theory though.

It seems my instinct is to be wary of agreeing with you, and my rational self agrees.

I don’t know how to break it to you, Cassie. You might want to sit down for this.

We are entirely in agreement.

What triggered this post was reading a book (which I am in two minds about reviewing here) which has a whole section recommending you trust your instincts in order to improve communication with your colleagues. My hackles were raised for the entire reading.

Similarly, people rarely admonish “Now that particular assumption wasn’t a safe one. You should be wary of that assumption, and similar ones, such as…” They commonly admonish “Don’t make assumptions.”

I think we are agreed: there’s a time and a place for both quick assumptions and careful checking of your assumptions.

“Don’t make assumptions” is merely missing an “untested.”

“Trust your instincts” is missing “when in doubt.”

“Grossly over-simplistic piece of trite” is missing “if you read it literally to try to prove a point.”

Psychology finds that humans are really good at making decisions about small, straightforward problems by thinking through all the factors, but really bad at applying this process to complex, multifaceted problems. Best results are therefore achieved by obssessing over the small stuff and going with what feels right for the big stuff.

Frankly, one can almost always find one wise saying to contradict another. “A stitch in time saves nine” vs “Let tomorrow take care of itself”, or “Many hands make light work” vs “Too many cooks spoil the broth”.

I draw from all this a similar moral to Aristotle: know your limits and do what seems best.

C’mon guys, this is going to be dull if we all keep agreeing with each other.

(Which brings me to two more examples for Alan: “Great minds think alike” and “Fools seldom differ.”)

I think we all agree that the raw stateents are flawed, and that if you tempered them, they are more satisfactory.

The only controversy here seems to be whether I have chosen a strawman to attack.

How can I prove that people offer this advice without sufficient context (e.g. without the caveats that Aristotle describes)? I think my best defence here is to cite detailed examples where people have done so. I have mentioned in passing a book, but I don’t have it in front of me to cite.

Failing that, I ask for some time to cite examples. If I don’t report back with concrete examples in a few months, I think it would be fair to conclude that I have attacked a strawman.

Julian, I don’t know if anyone is disputing you saying that people misuse these phrases so as to render them useless. I was just saying that that this is not always the case.

The “tempering” of the statements does not have to be in the form of a spoken proviso, such as the ones Aristotle suggested. It could just be in the timing and delivery of the advice, so that the implied meaning is obvious (“Don’t make assumptions” like that one, you stupid fuck!). So, when gathering your evidence, make sure you consider these things. If it was okay to ignore the context, then you might want to retract your “We are entirely in agreement” statement. I expect thorough research, including complete background checks on all useless advice offenders, victims and witnesses.

Do people other than primary school teachers use the “ASS out of U and ME” reasoning? That was the last time I remember hearing it. I figured they just wanted to be funny and show off to their young charges, who stand in awe, too mesmerised by this word prowess to consider the uselessness of the advice. When citing examples, you also can’t resort to them all being primary school teachers offering that advice. It’s just not representative of the general population.

About the book review, just trust your instincts.

Cassie, I always thought that the “ASS out of U and ME” line was from Benny Hill.

And, much as I would have liked to been taught by Benny Hill in primary school I regret to say that I wasn’t.

Ohoh, but “great minds think alike” and “fools seldom differ” are not at all contradictory!

As to the strawman, it is not your premise that these phrases are misused. I am sure that people misuse them just like they misuse any other idiom. (How many anecdotes do we know of managerial people mutilating sports metaphors beyond meaning?) The strawman is in ignoring any (approximately or entirely) legitimate uses of the phrases, whether with implicit or explicit qualifiers, and thence concluding that these pieces of advice are worthless.

If your angle of attack had been “these phrases need qualifiers but people keep stating them as unconditionally true,” well I think none of us would have done much other than nod.

Alastair, I guess that just shows my (somewhat youthful… or should it be youthish) age.

Aristotle, yes, I think that was along the lines of what I was thinking. I just got distracted a bit. (I had just been sitting on the train for 1.5hrs with a drunk guy who insisted on being recorded on the video camera I had, another drunk guy – the first guy’s brother – who kept speaking in rhyme, and another guy who wanted to “save” me from the first two but was weird and just as annoying as them. The joys of public transport… and being female.)

Cassie, I think you’ll find the correct word is “youthtastic”.

Or possibly “youthalicious”, my feeble senile old mind is leaving me.

Cassie: I assume you didn’t trust their instincts?

Thanks for the input Alastair, but youthtastic and youthalicious (like youthful) sound more like words to describe the prime of one’s youth. I’m a bit closer to the exit of youthdom/youthhood than that.

Aristotle, unsure about that – I don’t know if it’s their instincts that they were using. But I did trust my own instincts to keep the peace, despite how annoying that was. I just wanted to watch some video footage, then have a half-snooze. Is that too much to ask?

I seem to be losing the argument here, which is confusing me, because I also seem to be agreeing with everyone.

Let me number the propositions so people can tell me where they disagree:

1) These phrases need qualifiers.

2) Many people give qualifiers, either explicitly or implicitly through context. (Not in the original article, but happily conceded.)

3) Some people keep stating them as unconditionally true.

Did I miss or mis-state anything?

Aristotle,

Ohoh, but “great minds think alike” and “fools seldom differ” are not at all contradictory!

You are right. Literally, they don’t contradict. Perhaps I haven’t played properly by the rules of Alan’s game. Sorry.

However, if you look at how these idoms are commonly misused then they can be seen to be contradictory.

Let me give an example of how one might be used:

“Why don’t we take Leslie out to that new Mexican restaurant today?”

“What a co-incidence! I was talking to Leslie earlier and I suggested that we go there.”

“Wow! Great minds think alike.”

There is an invalid syllogism here:

• Great minds think alike.
• We think alike.
• Therefore, we are/have great minds.

To correct this error, you can either put the logic into syllogism form and try to explain the fallacy of the undistributed middle, or, more simply, you can quote the opposite phrase (“Fools seldom differ.”) and leave it to the speaker to realise that this would lead to the opposite conclusion.

In that, rather weak, sense the two phrases are contradictory.

Sorry again.

Hehe. That’s exactly why I like these phrases** – and always use them in conjunction, as an unstated question with a wink: are we both great minds now, or fools?

What’s actually happening is that the phrases are overqualified forms of the same tautologism: “alike people think alike.” The semblance of profundity is a consequence of needless multiplication of entities – strike another win for Occam’s Razor.

                                                 
** Greek has a nice term for these, ρητόν, which literally means “something that is said,” and together with connotations might translate as “a common notion that gets expressed by people.” It’s a pity that English has no equivalent; “set phrase” has large overlap but is not an exact match, and anyway noone uses that in informal settings, only when they’re trying to be precise in expression.

(One has to be a true multilingual, I think, to experience just how true the original Sapir-Whorf axiom is, that language shapes thinking. Anyway, sorry for digressing from the digression to the digression from your point.)

Did I miss or mis-state anything?

I’d quibble minorly with #3, that some people keep stating them as unconditionally true – I’d say many people run afoul of omitted qualification sometimes, but few make this mistake all the time (or even doggedly). They just… don’t think much about it. They usually instinctively use the phrases more or less correctly, but as with many things one doesn’t think about, sometimes they get it wrong (cf. managerspeak).

I seem to be losing the argument here, which is confusing me, because I also seem to be agreeing with everyone.

Your original thesis was:

“Don’t Make Assumptions” contradicts ”Trust Your Instincts.”

Everyone else’s response was that this is only true under omission of proposition #2, and that once you concede that and frame #3 in that perspective, you need to strongly moderate your initial position.

Julian, I think part of the problem was that your original post was committing the “sin” it was describing, that is, “people generalise”.

Way to say with a single sentence what took me three paragraphs, Cassie. I hate you.

Aristotle,

One has to be a true monolingual, I think, to find the laziest way of saying something… or from ancient Laconia.

I must admit that it’s very satisfying to know that my sentence stirred up such strong emotions in you. I think we’ve made a break through.

Clarity of thought was at issue here, not command of language. You abstracted just that little bit better. It’s like in maths, where a problem can take 9 steps or 209 to solve depending on whether you are clever enough to find a fitting simplification at the beginning.

To tell you the truth, I was having the same issue. I had many things to say, but was having trouble figuring out where they separated. In the end, I gave up, and just wrote about the most obvious issue in a simple format, hoping that someone else would write about the others.

Mmmm… maths. How I miss thee. Sort of. Sorry… was I drifting off?

I wrote 9 months ago:

If I don’t report back with concrete examples in a few months, I think it would be fair to conclude that I have attacked a strawman.

In that time, I have not reported back with any concrete examples so…

Sorry guys!