the strange beauty of logical positivism and popular and academic misconceptions about it

There are two common misconceptions about logical positivism. 1. the positivists, very much like self-righteous New Atheists, set out to prove that non scientific theories like religion and metaphysics, are false and only science can be true, and 2. Logical positivism fails at its own criterion of meaningfulness. 

(1) has got LP backwards. LP considers religions and metaphysical systems to be true, in fact necessarily true, while it's the scientific theories that are possibly false, not necessarily true at all. 

That's the strange beauty of LP. The difference LP draws between theories is not between the true or the false, but "meaningful" and "not meaningful", using a peculiar definition of "meaning".  LP doesn't touch on any other aspect or virtue of non verifiable theories, their aesthetic value, their mystery or charm or inspirational insight, their moral or social value. Just their meaning, where "meaning" in LP is used as a theoretical jargon for "phenomenal informational impact -- how the world of phenomena and events are and are not." The challenge of unpacking their use of "meaning" such that it isn't circular is the reason for (2).

(2) is flatly false. Apply LP to LP and it verifies. (2) also assumes that LP is a theory and not either a definition or description or an axiomatic system or merely a kind of practical advice like Popper's demarcation. 

The popular misconception has it that if LP is a theory it should apply to itself, but LP can't itself be verified. I think people who say this must not have tried to apply LP to LP, maybe because "it doesn't apply to itself" is self-reflexive and so clever-sounding that they don't bother to experiment to verify whether the clever is also true. Whatever their reason for why they don't apply it to itself, we can apply it here and now:

LP says that theories are meaningful (in the sense of "tells us how the world is or is not", "what's in the phenomenal world and what isn't") if their statements and predictions about the world are verifiable. Is this assertion verifiable? Sure. God is not a directly verifiable object. It's not meaningful in the LP sense of telling us how the phenomenal world is. Religion is meaningless in that sense. Are the bones of dinosaurs verifiable? Yes. Archeology is meaningful in the LP sense of telling us about the phenomenal world, in this case where to find dinosaur bones. LP is verified by both these cases. LP is meaningful in the LP sense of meaningful, telling us how the world is and is not. 

This is all crude and simplistic, but it shows how to apply LP to LP. Let's try again with something more substantial.

Creationism cannot predict the fossil record. There's no book of trilobites and dinosaurs in scriptures, and scriptures don't need them. It doesn't tell us how the world is, phenomenally. That's an unverifiable theory, and notice, it's a necessarily true theory -- no empirical evidence can prove it false. (The New Atheist will complain about it's internal contradictions, but those are logical disproofs, not evidential disconfirmations, and LP is concerned only with evidence. That's a huge difference.) Archeology does predict the fossil record. Treatises on trilobites and dinosaurs belong to science. Biology and archeology tell us what we will and will not find when we dig into the earth and find bones. Are they true? Well, not necessarily. They are the most likely theories of the topic given the evidence currently available. True? Who knows what we'll discover tomorrow? And that's one difference between the religious or metaphysical theories and the scientific theories -- according to LP.  What we discover tomorrow could trash our current science. It will never trash the religious or metaphysical theories. Are these differences between creationism and archeology verifiable? Yes, the difference seems to be verified. That difference is the LP criterion, the LP "theory". 

You may have already noticed that creationism is strictly ambiguous over verificationism, since it doesn't predict, so you could say verificationism can't apply to creationism. IOW, the problem is not that verificationism doesn't apply to verificationism -- it does -- it's that verificationism doesn't apply to the necessarily true and meaningless (in the LP sense) theories. If that's so, the creationist shouldn't care about evidence to begin with. It's a credo of faith, not evidence. No worries. 

Right at the outset, it's important to know that Karl Popper identified an essential flaw in LP. Verifiability runs into the inductive fallacy. Verifying a theory supports the theory but can't prove an explanatory theory. That is, it can't prove a theory that predicts the possible (as compared with post hoc descriptions of a closed set of observations). Popper replaced verificationism with falsificationism -- that a "meaningful" explanation must identify the conditions under which it would be false. The consequence is that scientific theories are never provably true, they are just the ones that haven't yet been proven false. (There are independent theoretical criteria, like probability, discussed here: entropy and truth.) There are weaknesses in falsifiability too, but it was an important advance over LP's primitive verificationism. LP was using its confirmation bias to confirm its theory of confirmationism. It's a typically human failure to use clear Bayesian reasoning, not looking for the useful evidence, looking for the useless instead. 

The weakness of LP is not alone its confirmationism. It also defined "meaningfulness" in terms of verificationism and vice versa. Their criterion of science was circular. That's because LP's use of "meaning" is not a theory at all. It's a definition or axiom or maybe a kind of practical advice. Definitions generally don't apply to themselves. The word, category or idea "blue" is not blue, and it would be irrelevant even if it were blue. "Blue" can be used as a kind of practical advice: you can view these objects as having this common property of being blue. "Look at these -- they all have a kind of similar hue. For convenience let's call them 'blue' so they're 'blue-ish'." That's all there is to a definition. And if you can provide for all or many possible additional individuals ("that newly discovered thing there should be included in the set") all the better. Most definitions don't apply to themselves, though some do: the set of definitions that define themselves, for example. Not very practical. 

Another weakness of LP, most obvious in Wittgenstein's Tractatus, was the belief that there could be atomic facts, indivisible facts independent of any other facts or ideas or theories. But facts are partly theoretical -- they are conjectural, dependent on the likelihood of the theory -- and like theory, their value is their falsifiability. There's a frequency theory of hues that classes navy blue with sky blue although Russians distinguish them as distinct hues. When I was a child I refused to wear anything navy blue so repulsive to me was this color. My favorite color was sky blue. Which fact is relevant -- that navy blue and sky blue are opposite ends of a single color or that they are two colors? Depends on the theory and its purpose. (See "true but wrong" on this blog.) "Whales are giant fish" belongs to a biological taxonomy that sufficed for the deity in the Book of Job, and that book makes effective, memorable use of it. I have no problem with the "whales are giant fish" theory. It's just not useful for science, a predictive theory of what's out there in the phenomenal world and how it got there. People can wear different hats, you know. 

The lack of conjectural theory in LP led to Wittgenstein's private language argument, a kind of reductio ad absurdum of his verificationism, applying verificationism to the mind. Can experiential states be verified, he asks. Well, on a verificationsit model of truth, no. Rather than seeing this as a disproof of the  verificationist premise, and rather than seek a better conjecture, he oddly, and perversely, embraced the absurd result that the experiential is meaningless, and advocated for a kind of behaviorism that prevailed in philosophy and the sciences until Chomsky in 1956 demonstrated that such a behavioral program couldn't account for the productivity and inventiveness -- the creativeness -- of speech, that the mind played a necessary role in behavior. Chomsky's program was a better conjecture that led to a better understanding of the mind. 

The common view holds that Wittgenstein's later views is a rejection of his earlier logical positivism. I think that's another misconception. His later views are, I think, best understood as pushing his earlier views to their extreme and often counterintuitive and even absurd logical consequences, an insistence on biting the philosophical bullets one after another. It's a wonder he had any teeth left. 

He did succeed in distinguishing language from philosophy, igniting a productive interest among language philosophers. They contributed a lot to the understanding of linguistic semantics, though maybe not to philosophy. It wasn't until Grice's work that the distinction was resolved. 

So much for the strange beauty and the misconceptions. 

In sum, "It doesn't apply to itself" sounds like a clever dismissal of logical positivism from those who don't know much about it or don't want to know about it or who'd like to dismiss it as mere scientism. Unfortunately, they miss everything interesting in it. There were a lot of flaws in logical positivism in its early efforts, but failure of reflexive application is not one. Those flaws are evident in Wittgenstein's early work and in his later work as well, where they produced logical absurdities when applied to the mind, leaving the philosophy of science in an impoverished behavioral model until Chomsky's 1956 Syntactic Structures. That that restrictive impoverishment led to extraordinary behavioral insights -- Ryle's criticism of the Cartesian ghost in the machine, Austin's speech act theory, among many many others -- might be a topic for another post. As Jerry Fodor often said, behaviorism was provably wrong, but brilliant. 

the illogic of utopia, the danger of utopianism, and Popper's alternative

If the goal of life were to be happy, no one would have children. 

That's if life had a goal.

When I first saw As You Like It, I was rapt by the first scene in the Forest of Arden. A random gathering of refugees of uncertain future, with diverse talents, backgrounds, personalities and dispositions, including at least one of no apparent talent, all making the best of their lot in the now, together. One, of course, has a lute -- someone always has a guitar -- and sings resonant songs; one is a philosopher enthusiastically espousing deep thoughts, another a young impulsive romantic and a bit stupid, and one, talentless and apparently opinionless who sits on a big chair at the center presiding over their little make-shift society, the refugee Duke, of whom nothing is asked and who asks nothing of his pretend-subjects. 

It reminded me of my very first job. It was in a retail store in Times Square, 1971, all the night-shift employees randomly thrown together with various talents and dispositions, the lively yet gentle, delicate and beautiful Cecilia and her handsome and dashing boyfriend, his comical and trangressively vulgar brother; and there was a young out-of-towner trying to make it in the Big City, impressed with all the craziness of New Yorkers including the local streetwalker who'd regularly traipsed by to entertain us and just before leaving, pull off her t-shirt to shock the patrons with her bare b**bs then run out the door; and the night manager, a wry, gay composer who wrote musicals for Andy Warhol's transvestite Superstars -- all facing an uncertain future, but facing it in the now together. As the youngest, sixteen -- they were mostly in their mid twenties -- I was treated as the mascot. Despite our limited paycheck means, we spent Saturday evenings after work very late at dinner together in a local bar & grill. 

If I had to spend eternity somehow, I'd choose that job. The day-to-day concerns and not knowing what life would hold were enough to engage all of us, and we all cared about each other, not in any programmatic or moral way, but the way kids who hang out together know and care about each other. 

I had the same reaction to the old black and white 1937 movie Stage Door and the 1960's L-shaped Room, both about boarding house life in which the characters are thrown together randomly and live their uncertain lives together. 

That's my heaven, but it's not happy. The option of perpetual happiness sounds to me in no way different from drug addiction. Is that what people want? Once hooked, maybe, and AI threatens to hook us all into indolence incrementally like frogs in a heating pot, but who would choose that hook aforehand?

Besides the utopian inclination to sacrifice the now for a distant future that cannot be predicted, utopianism is itself a dilemma -- it is either an impoverishment of human well-being (material goods or accomplishments or statuses) or, if it recognizes the richness of human needs, it's not utopian because some of those needs cannot logically be met -- what makes those needs fulfilling is that they are motivating wants, not accomplishments or gains.

I'm sure you all can think of examples of such motivating needs and wants that lead to engagement, absorption and fulfillment. A big part of what makes hunter-gatherer culture -- the culture that homo sapiens were naturally selected for through at least two million years of human evolution -- so idyllic (egalitarian, gender-equal, cooperative, no disciplining of children) is the engagement required to obtain their basic survival needs. And what is most dysfunctional in our society is excess supplying of needs (too much sugar, for example, or convenient transport instead of a healthy walk or climb up the stairs) and the property that follows from the surplus. "To each according to his [sic] needs" has failed us. We have to struggle against our desires now instead of struggling to fulfill them.

Karl Popper proposed an alternative to utopianism: a procedural model rather than the usual policy or top-down planned model. The ideal society, for Popper, is one which is a) highly sensitive to informational feedback of its policies, whatever policies are chosen; has b) the flexibility to learn from its mistakes and the agility to fix them quickly; c) responds to the needs and interests of its constituents. He thought liberal democracy was such a procedural ideal. 

Recognizing that the technologies of the future cannot be predicted and since technology is a socio-economic game changer, staunch ideologies and top-down autocracies should have no place in government. Holding onto ideologies will obstruct the responsiveness required of policy-makers. 

In this he may have been wrong -- the CCP seems to be more flexible, informationally sensitive and responsive than the US, an ostensibly liberal democracy, is. And the periodic, and apparently global, fashion for fascism and the polarization of the political realm tells us that the members of the society are neither informed nor rational in their understanding of the world. In an autocracy there's little point in holding strong political views so there's less social polarization, and besides, everyone more or less agrees on whether the autocrat is succeeding or not. Egyptians all recognize that their state is ruled by a military dictatorship. This does not produce polarization or rebellion. It produces general agreement, not with the gov't, but with the people who have to get by with their uncertain future, together. 

So utopia is a stupid idea. Even an anti-ideological, bottom-up program like Popper's won't work. It's time to accept that the future depends on technology we cannot anticipate and that technology of the future will be a morality and personality and values game-changer. And above all, let's not sacrifice now for a future we can't understand much less predict. Take things as they come. The craziness of now suffices for the day. 

It's hard to accept that the future is a foreign country. Doctors seem to have trouble understanding that their knowledge of today will be all wrong tomorrow. Can you blame them? What a sorry profession, dedicated to helping and never doing harm, yet doomed to doing harm. It's no wonder that deal has to be sweetened with so much money. 

student debt conspiracy theory and the "elites" fallacy

The belief that student debt was created by "the elites" in order to ensure that graduates would become yoked to the workplace as obedient, hard working labor, is not only widespread but is espoused even by prominent public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky. It shares two flaws of bad reasoning: ignoring the obvious and embracing positive evidence uncritically. 

[Disclaimer: I don't know whether their theory is true. Truth is almost always a bit of a mystery. What follows is an explanation why anyone who believes this theory hasn't bothered to think it through, and likely embraced it for the sake of some political or ideological bias, since the belief is contradictory and inconsistent in itself. IOW, it's a stupid belief, true or not, so you shouldn't buy it and if you do buy it it's time to reflect on why you're not thinking.]

First, the debtors, by assumption, must use their wages to pay off their debt rather than spend their wages elsewhere. So every dollar siphoned into paying debt is a dollar that is not being spent in the productive economy -- purchases of consumables or assets like a house. This debt servicing certainly benefits the financial interests, but not the interests of the productive economy or vendors of consumables or assets. The theory implies that corporations that make stuff and sell stuff are not among the elites. Musk, Bezos, Cook, the Kochs and the Waltons would then not be included among the elites. It also implies the "the elites" want to suppress the productive economy. No one who holds this theory has ever complained that the theory implies that "the elites" have as their intention to undermine the corporations that make and sell. But that's exactly what this theory entails.

Second, again by the theory's premise, if the debt did not exist, the graduate would simply work less. But is there any evidence that this is true? Would you work less, or would you spend more? Would you find an apartment without roommates or a larger living space or a nicer place in a more interesting neighborhood? Or would you stay where you are, deal with your four roommates, refrain from getting married and have kids, just to work less or take a pay cut for a more relaxed work environment? When choosing a job, which is more important, better pay or less work? Human desires are unbounded. Did the GI Bill result in lower work hours? On the contrary, veterans can't find jobs that match their level of education. They are not choosing to work for less, they're forced to.

Inflation, btw, belies the "more money, less work" prediction. It tells us, "more money, more spending". 

The underlying flaw in this conspiracy theory is the assumption that "the elites" are a monolith with a coherent program. That just isn't so. Debt benefits banks, but hurts the productive economy. Rents benefit landowners, but not the rest of the consuming economy -- that's an old Henry George observation. A burgeoning productive economy would benefit the banks, since there'd be more interest in investment and debt, and benefit real estate as well if wages rise. Everyone benefits from the productive economy -- the owners of capital, labor, finance and real estate. But student debt benefits only finance, not real estate, not the productive economy and certainly not wages or labor. So student debt is not a coherent program for anyone except banks, and banks would benefit without it anyway.

The divisions among "elites" extends further. Purchasing from Amazon is a loss to brick-and-mortar stores like Wal-Mart. Does that mean Wal-Mart is not among the elite? Or was it elite but no longer? GE used to be the giant among corporations, not anymore. And where are the railroad magnates today? They are not the owners of auto factories. Schumpeter described this ongoing shift among corporations, creative destruction. That's a good theory. And it's not a conspiracy of "elites". It's an observation of an emergent, distributed property, like the economy itself. Consumers like innovations that benefit them. No "elite" is forcing it on them. The market closely follows consumer desire, rarely the other way around. 

When someone blames whatever on "the elites", ask, "Which elites?" There are many. And the conspiracy theorist's favorite advice "follow the money" all too often looks only upwards, ignoring the vast aggregate distributed funds in the consumer's aggregate pocket. 

de-mystifying Wittgenstein (and a tribute to Chomsky)

Why is Wittgenstein so idolized? Could it be because he's misinterpreted?

A recurrent theme of this blog is observing, understanding and explaining the draw of the unknown or unpredictable and our drive to understand, explain, and predict and know -- the drive that natural selection gives us and that leads us to great species successes as well as to many cognitive biases and misinterpretations of the world, science and technology among the successes, superstitions among the cognitive biases. Mystery -- what we don't understand -- draws us towards some theory that will explain and predict. 

Seems to me that Wittgenstein tapped into this mysteriousness in his later thinking and that's why it remains admired and hyped, even though his later thinking, clearly understood, is unmistakably and merely an embracing of the logical consequences of his previous logical positivism, not at all a rejection of it, and even though Chomsky's 1956 Syntactic Structures disproved and debunked Wittgenstein's behaviorist reductio ad absurdum conclusions. 

The Wittgenstein admirers deplore the limitations of logical positivism, the limitations most evident in W's earlier Tractatus, and celebrate what they believe is his rejection of those views. Yet the later views are a drawing of the logical consequences of the earlier views, in the form of a reductio ad absurdum, which normally entails rejecting a premise of the theory, but with contrarian cleverness, Wittgenstein instead accepts the absurdity leaving us a philosophy at once mysterious, illogical, and, well, absurd. Like a religionist, he held to the doctrine, accepting the irrationality rather than accept that the irrationality disproved the doctrine, in W's case, verificationism.

What is the private language argument but a reductio of a behaviorist account of mind, leaving the mind as utterly mysterious? What is the questioning of mathematical method but a reductio of a behavioral account of math, rather than, say, understanding math the way most mathematicians do as just a made-up axiomatic system with well-defined functions?

This was the dispute with Popper. Popper argued that verificationism cannot escape the inductive fallacy. And, truly, verificationism is nothing but induction. What's needed for understanding, explaining and predicting, is what C.S.Peirce called abduction: conjectures that identify the conditions that would falsify them. 

You can see already that verificationism is a systematic failure to apply Bayesian reasoning, a case of confirmation bias, and verificationaism is not science at all. What's needed for science is conjectures, tentative theories that stand until proven false. Far from Wittgenstein's contrarian mysteries, Popper offered a straightforward program for theoretical progress. In 1956 Chomsky then demonstrated that the behavioral model didn't even adequately describe language behavior, much less explain it. His conjectures, right or wrong, restored the productive role of the mind that Wittgenstein had effectively banned from science on verificationist grounds no different from the Tractatus, just applying them to the mind. (More on this topic here.)

death so sweet

 (...if it's from old age. If it's a disease killing me, I'd feel robbed!)

Looking at suicide rates over the last decade I was touched to see that Covid pushed the rate up for age 85-and-above cohort. Touched, because I'm guessing that some of these are deaths of despair over the loss of a spouse. 

That was my first thought, but it's not likely to account for all of the uptick, since at 85, your spouse is likely to have died already before the pandemic. But imagine watching so many others in your assisted living facility dying. No one to talk to, play with, love or entertain. The thought occurs, well, better go, it's time. They are lovelorn. 

I don't know whether this is the explanation for the uptick, but the statistic seemed so sweet to me. When I think how hard it would be for me to give up on my life, the thought that one day I'll feel that there's nothing more to love, no one to engage with, and it's time to join the gone, that to me is sweet. 'Cause it's all about love, isn't it? It's all about love.

Forgive clinical talk now: if love is the driving emotion in a social species  then why shouldn't we want to give up when there's no one left to love, play and engage with? Anthropologists call it "cooperation" through our hunter-gatherer evolutionary period, but it's really just loving, wanting from each other. Let's be real, hunter-gatherers don't have a cooperation emotion, it's loving and enjoying and playing with and engaging with and endlessly talking to the members of their foraging band that is the emotion that natural selection has given them to keep them all together and survive. This uptick of suicides is the sweetness of our species nature. You ask (or let Lex Fridman the King of Kringe ask) what is the meaning of life? The answer is of course, love (which is probably why the Kringe King always asks it) -- wanting from each other. Even when we argue, we want something from each other, approval, agreement, respect. "Meaning" in "the meaning of life" is an abuse of the language (post on this a-coming), but still. Love and loss, and letting go. 

of mathematical beauty, crystals and potatoes: a Darwinian explanation

της τε ταυτου φυςεως και της θατερον (the nature of the same and the different) -- Plato, Timaeus

Potatoes are not pretty. They are also not mathematically patterned, not even symmetric. You may have noticed, they grow in the earth unseen, as if hiding how ugly they are. 

Well, that'd be one just-so story of why they grow unseen. Maybe it's not so silly. More reasonable would be the just-so story of natural selection to conclude that they lack mathematical order and its beauty because they grow underground where you cannot see them. Natural selection for patterns would be wasted on potatoes. True of all the roots, btw.

This is, of course, the key to why patterns are perceived as beautiful. Randomness is mostly useless for communication since you can't control the signal -- randomness can only communicate randomness, of occasional communicative value, but quite limited to signaling itself, "random", regardless of context. Only patterns can communicate distinct, controlled signals. To the extent that communication benefits species, patterning should be found throughout the biological realm of visibility. Natural selection has happened upon a means by which to communicate and even attract organisms, a simple means of patterning with simple recursive math. (Language, the quintessential communicative means, itself is a highly recursive mathematical patterning, and it's all about controlled signals -- super-controlled and highly distinct.)

So natural selection, which "had no option" of using randomness for communication, leaves all of us visual organisms susceptible to patterning. It might even explain why we love theorizing to explain patterns. The regularities are the only option for effective communication, and theories are a form of communication. We want patterns because that's all that's worth understanding, as I think we'll see. 

Randomness is not only uncommunicative, it's not predictive, and as temporal survival organisms, we want to predict future threats most especially, so we can avoid them. Natural selection again. Patterns, we love 'em. Randomness, not so much. It's nice for a change or a challenge. A mystery novel starts with the random, but we read to the end to bring it all into pattern. Timaeus' alternation of the same with the different, the pattern of the random with the predictable, has a special charm. We seem to be driven for prediction's sake to understand or find patterns in what seems at first random, but once understood, it's boring and we take it for granted. That's why news media leans towards threats and dangers, bleeding ledes. Cognition is not stable, it's a driven, impatient process. The familiar knowns are stable, and are soon taken for granted and forgotten, the oblivious obvious (post on this upcoming). The well of uncertainty that leads to distrust and fear seems bottomless: conspiracy theories are more fun than mere facts. 

You object, "crystals are highly ordered and beautiful to our eyes, yet they are mostly in the earth". Ah, but that's the perfect exception that proves the theory. Crystals are not organisms.

They can't intend anything, much less communicate intentions outside themselves. Lacking reproductive DNA, they don't engage in generational natural selection. They're stuck with fixed forms that either survive (continue to exist in their local context) or don't, no chance of evolving better. 

That crystals abound in the earth tells us that they are not signaling (and that organisms can, and can use patterning to accomplish this), they don't know what they're doing -- not a clue, and this is important for the panpsychists -- and that we're selected for liking patterns, that we see them as beautiful, or, to use more scientific language, we see them as attractive. It's a natural selection gimmick available only to reproductive generations. On this planet, that comprises the biological organisms. A distinguishing difference between the organic and inorganic is that inorganic patterns may be entirely unseen for their entire long duration; organic patterns are meant to be seen. 

To put it in the plainest terms, if crystals were organismic, they wouldn't be hiding underground, b****. :-)

the gnomiad: the science and sociology of life advice and their paradoxical puzzles

This post is a preliminary stub. I'm still working on the project, but here's a sketch of the science and sociology of gnomes (life advice). It's in three parts: 1) most surprisingly, the contrary pairing of life prescriptions show that they are empty, which implies that the benefit we seek from advice or theories of the world, while psychologically soothing or reassuring, is impractical and unaligned with the realities we actually face everyday; we seek a simplified, confirmatory world of fantasy while we actually make practical choices in reality, 2) the prevalence of one of the pairs, and absence of the other, in the culture raises many questions about cultural values or taboos or public reactions to those values and taboos, 3) most obviously, advice-giving influencers can be conveniently analysed politically and socially through their advice selection of one pair over the other. Finally, since philosophies and religions across the world are not only shot full advice but are often motivated by advice-giving and draw their audience from advice-seekers, the social psychology of gnomes affords a novel perspective on these theories and insights into their audiences' motives. 

"...mystery, miracle and authority..." -- the Grand Inquisitor 

1. the complementarity of gnomes

Life advice is everywhere on social media. It has obvious appeal, but an objective look at advice -- objective in the sense of not looking for advice but just looking at advice as a phenomenon or set of phenomena -- reveals paradoxes and puzzles. First among them is the pairing of contrary advice. A piece of popular advice and its contrary advice can both be equally useful, wise and true. "Better safe than sorry" is just as good a piece of advice as "carpe diem" (seize the day) or "fortune favors the brave" that is, don't be safe or you'll be sorry. Even more puzzling, why do people find any of these gnomes inspiring, when their opposite should be equally inspiring? 

A moment's reflection on this complementarity of gnomes -- their tendency to come in contrary pairs -- shows that gnomes are little more than familiar, even banal definitions. "Better safe than sorry" is little more than a definition of what "safe" means; "seize the day" merely defines, metaphorically, "opportunity". And yet more puzzling, every English speaker already knows the definitions of these words and are familiar with the ideas they denote. Everyone already knows the benefit of safety and when safety is useful, and the same for opportunity and risk. We all know that we must assess risk and safety case by case. So what is the appeal of the advice?? Is it like quoting one's favorite song lyrics instead of using one's own words? Or is there something more going on? More, no doubt, as we'll see.

If life advice adds no useful information in practice, is the appeal purely psychological? Suppose it's just a way to make life seem simpler even though it has no practical value in decision-making. It's a kind of psychological soporific, a soothing reassurance to smooth away anxiety just a little bit. Grasping one of the complementary gnome pairs provides a way through the complexity of everyday life. And choosing that principle no doubt confirms what one wants to believe about oneself and one's place in the world.

I think this is one of the revealing surprises of what I want to call the gnomiad, collecting the range of advice (tongue-in-cheek hat tip to Wolfram), and gnomiology, the study of advice. Gnomiadry -- thinking about gnomes and their world -- tells us that our imagination of life is distinct from the life as we live it and that this imaginary has emotional value even though it has no other practical value. Isn't that what religion provides as well? Could it be that philosophical and political systems supply the same confirmatory reassurance and soothing simplicity? And what about science and its laws dependent on ideal situations? Don't these theories or narratives, understandings and explanations of the phenomenal world reflect a deep and basic species need? Put into predictive mind (Friston, Clark), isn't this what defines an organism -- creating a theory of its environment & itself to predict its future and preserve its free energy? Ironic that for humans, preserving our free energy from the wastefulness of anxiety and stress leads us to false beliefs (like many political beliefs or fringe theories) and partial, one-sided beliefs like life advice.

So the pairing of gnomes lead us to understand them as vacuous, familiar tautologies and then to a question, what's their appeal? Gnomiology has an answer that reaches deeply into our organic nature. 

2. asymmetry of gnomes

Here's a second question. Many gnomes have contrary complements that do not have any appeal and are not to be found in the culture. There are dozens of versions for "be yourself", "don't measure yourself by others", "don't live by other's opinions", "don't live your life trying to be someone else", "follow your truth" -- this advice is everywhere. But "conform!", which is, if you  think about it, very good practical advice, is nowhere to be found. Why? Does that tell us something about our culture -- that we're narcissistic? Or does it tell us something about our resistance to our culture or upbringing or the oppressiveness of our culture? 

There are structural pressures on advice as well. People seeking life advice are for obvious reasons looking for personal solutions, so introspective advice "discipline yourself" , "be yourself", "know yourself" should be more common than say, Chaucer's "out of thy stall!" or Aristotle's "contemplate the universe" by which he meant, learn to understand the world outside yourself. The human inclination to confirm rather than to investigate the full range and experiment predicts that people looking for personal solutions will end up with introspective advice -- "stress is the source of your troubles", for example, not "introspection is a waste of time and a harmful aggravation of one's troubles; engage with the world or with others and you'll forget your troubles soon enough". Advice seeking may be a self-selection of introverted, self-affirming gnomes. 

3. advice-givers, the politics of the self-help industry

Finally, there are trends in advice unevenly distributed. So the anti-woke espouse stoicism which seems to be a philosophy constructed almost entirely of personal advice. Aurelius' Meditations is one gnome after another (and people love it for this!). The stoic trend is all very political, or more accurately, politically apolitical: its politics is, "don't be political; attend to yourself." It's consistent with a lot of Christian morality including "give unto Caesar what is Caesar's" and "my kingdom is not of this world", and you can see it in Jordan Peterson's confluence of stoicism and Christianity. And I'm not trying to be clever here. Peterson is quite clear that his apoliticist advice is political, especially when it comes to social justice and Marxism. He is a partisan anti-Marxist and anti-woke. Those are strong political stands, as stubborn as political stands typically are. 

So the choice of gnomes culturally and individually tell us a lot. In the case of individual choices we get a picture of our political divides. I'm not sure what the cultural selection tells us, but a sociology of gnomes promises to be revelatory as all sciences are. 

4. gnomes vs practical advice

All of the above gnomiadry applies only to life advice. Practical advice doesn't have any of these paradoxical puzzles. This again shows just how strange and useless yet appealing life advice is. 

Gnomes can even be empty tautologies. "Be humble" might be the most common advice on how to overcome confirmation bias. It's perfect question-begging rephrasal of the problem to be solved: "if you don't want to prioritize your own beliefs, don't". Here's a post on practical advice to overcome confirmation bias -- use Bayeseian reasoning by looking for the base rate, we tend to be oblivious to the    unthreatening normal so don't focus on the rare threat at the expense of the frequent, look for disconfirmatory evidence, not confirmation, question metaphors, assumptions and intuitions. That's a program. List the items and apply. Practical. 

An instagram video gives this advice to those who ask "what kind of gloves should I buy for street calisthenics". The answer:

"it doesn't matter what gloves you wear, it's what's in the gloves that matter." 

Now, that's a kind of life-advice, frequent among exercisers: it's a form of "just do it!" (It's also a faint hint of an insult: You are asking about trivialities. Be a man and get down to your 6,000 push-ups!) The contrary complementary advice to "Just do it!" might include "discipline -- struggling with yourself -- is a losing battle, but simply structuring your time to include exercise may help you get you to it". But "What gloves should I buy" also has a practical answer without any contrary complement. Here it is:

For calisthenics you should buy gloves with a grippy palm on the outside and also on the inside so the glove will not slip on the bar and your hand won't slip in the glove. Warning: avoid cheap rubber that will degrade quickly into a sticky surface, which will stick the glove to the bar. This can be lethal if you wear them while riding your bike as the gloves will stick to the handlebars whenever you try to lift a hand from the handlebar, and that will unintentionally steer the bike (and you) unpredictably into a truck or over a cliff or other places you'd rather not be. 

Such practical advice has no contrary. It's not empty tautologies like 'if you want to do calisthenics, just do it!" It's substantive, if boring, practical advice. It's the kind of good advice you look for in consumer reviews. Some pithy gnomes are practical: use it or lose it (referring to movement and flexibility exercises). There's to complementary contrary unless it's "die young and leave a good-looking corpse" which lies on the border of cynical warning or sarcasm. 

What's so interesting about gnomes is their bizarre paradoxical puzzle and appeal. Useless, its opposite just as useless, and yet appealing. It has the mystery of religion, hasn't it? What did Ivan's Grand Inquisitor say, "mystery, miracle and authority"; that's what we're all looking for. Gnomes, not the plain bread of practical advice.

Gnomiology also plays into cultural confirmation and confirmation bias. A lot of calisthenics advice extols discipline -- do it even though you don't like it. The complementary contrary is equally sound and maybe even more practical "discipline is a battle with yourself that you will lose; if you enjoy something, you'll do it; if you don't enjoy it, find something that you do enjoy". Discipline, the strength to overcome one's weaknesses, is consonant with our gender norms. Enjoyment isn't. Discipline plays on the inspiration of being masculine, and, no surprise, that's a lot of what calisthenics is for. 

the morality of gnomes?

"Health is wealth", popular among the calisthenics movement, seems undeniable and without contrary until you realize that health actually isn't wealth, and lack of money-wealth statistically leads to poor health, and money-wealth correlates with better health outcomes. But there's no gnome, "wealth is health!" 

There's something morally prudish about all of this. "Fortune favors the cut-throat competitor" and "money will bring you health" seem too crass and crude, let alone "fortune favors an a-hole". They violate our be-nice morality. The cultural notion of wisdom and sagacity are inconsistent with crassness regardless however practical. Even "Just do it!" doesn't imply any harm to anyone. "Cut in line if you can" might have practical value, but unless you're Peter Thiel, you'd never publicly advise it. It's anti-social. And yet, "be yourself" is hardly social. It's again the self-selection of self-help that underlies much of the gnomiad. Is "nice guys finish last" advice, a complaint, a cynical condemnation of the world we live in, or a lament for our best moral advice? 

a dynamics of advice?

Contradictory pairs of advice are by nature structured as a decision tree. Go with daring then you've abandoned safe. Since time is unidirectionally always forward, this decision tree looks Markovian -- that is, it goes from one position to another and can't go back without loss of time. 

It already seems that the role of time plays a really important one, and generates its own advice. "Time is money." There's no regaining time. And there's no complementary contradiction to that one unless it be the empty truism "live in the present" or "don't fret over spilt milk", both imperfect complements. "There's no regaining time" is itself a truism. Does it imply "choose carefully" or "follow your gut instinct"? "Don't fret over spilt milk" also has a complement, "learn from your mistakes". 

But is the tree really Markovian? What if the choice of "be brave" applies only to youth? We need a push-down machine for this tree and a time tracker. 

Of course I'm plagiarizing Chomsky and Wolfram, but these are the tools available. Maybe we can discover more as we go along. 

You can imagine what's next. Contexts other than youth/age can apply -- "daring" might apply to careers, "safety" in relationships or marriages. What about long-term goals, ends prioritizing all other decisions? And "keep your yes on the prize" contrasts with "be flexible" and "life is what happens on your way to your goal". These also depend on time and context. At what point should you abandon a goal and "cut your losses" instead of "be constant, perseverant, dedicated"? 

Work on these contradictions begins to seem futile. All the advice is like conflicting religions. From afar, they all seem foolish since they each purport to be true, but deny each other. "Don't heed advice, learn for yourself!" of course is the paradoxical limit. It seems on the face of it an empty truism -- one can't learn for someone else without learning oneself. But there's always the contrarian "be skeptical" and its paradoxical complement and consequence "be skeptical of being skeptical". Aristotle the Wise: moderation in all things. It sounds like a cop out too good to be true, but moderation has the virtue of being without paradox. But he should have said, moderation in most things. Which things? We still need context. 

When asked for life advice in an interview, a famous actor replied, "I don't give advice. People have to face things themselves." Respect.