August+September 2020 updates
Hey!
New Writing
Every thought about giving and taking advice I’ve ever had, as concisely as possible
The advice we are given is systematically biased not only because people are just bad it figuring out how shit works but also because advice can’t be isolated away from the relationships we have. If a friend suggests you to drop out of school and start a startup or write full-time, they will partly be to-blame for what happens to you when you make that decision (and unconventional life decisions do often end poorly). Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM applies to advice too and advice you receive will be systematically biased in favor of safe choices.
One way out of this is to perhaps explicitly ask something along the lines of “what’s the most outrageous advice you can come up with? what advice are you scared of giving me because you think I’ll blame you if it fails?” and to remember to try to figure out why they believe the things they tell you, why the made the decisions they made, and why they tell you these specific things whenever someone shares advice with you.
Miscellanea
I recently realized that most of my subscribers have never read most of my older posts. Thus, a newsletter that sends 3 selected posts from guzey.com every week, (until running out of posts). Subscribe here.
Best of Twitter for week of August 31, 2020 was particularly good
I updated my best tweets to include summer 2020 — this is one of the highest signal/noise ratio pages on my site!
Quote of the month is from Psychoanalytics Diagnosis by Nancy McWilliams (very much recommended):
It is the appreciation of oscillating patterns that makes analytic notions of character richer and more clinically germane than the lists of static attributes one finds in most assessment instruments and in compendia like the DSM. People become organized on dimensions that have significance for them, and they typically show characteristics expressing both polarities of any salient dimension. Philip Slater (1970) captured this idea succinctly in a footnote commentary on modern literary criticism and biography:
Generations of humanists have excited themselves and their readers by showing “contradictions” and “paradoxes” in some real or fictional person’s character, simply because a trait and its opposite coexisted in the same person. But in fact traits and their opposites always coexist if the traits are of any intensity, and the whole tradition of cleverly ferreting out paradoxes of character depends upon the psychological naiveté of the reader for its impact. (pp. 3n–4n)
Thus, people with conflicts about closeness can get upset by both closeness and distance. People who crave success the most hungrily are often the ones who sabotage it the most recklessly. The manic person is psychologically more similar to the depressive than to the schizoid individual; a compulsively promiscuous man has more in common with someone who resolved a sexual conflict by celibacy than with someone for whom sexuality is not problematic. People are complicated, but their intricacies are not random.
A few of my tweets from August and September:
Not announcing the big project I hinted about just yet.. Have a great October!