How Wonderful That Someone Is Wrong on the Internet
Everything on the internet is an experiment wrapped in an ideology with sides of self-promotion and claims of credibility. The experiment is what matters.
One time I went to a workshop in SF on using language, invited there by a friend. The facilitator said something obviously stupid, and I challenged him. He was obviously not used to having his presentation challenged, or handling hecklers, and my hostility was probably an unfortunate distraction to the audience.
The guy had some good points. He had just extrapolated them beyond usefulness. And I was blinding myself to understanding how his points could function well within a limited context of application because of the sheer stupidity of his universal framework.
Turns out that people aren’t often flat-out, completely, and utterly wrong. Something worked for them, and they wouldn’t be writing or talking about it unless it did. They may misunderstand the useful context of application, the reasons why what they did worked, or be full of an obnoxious vibe about how great it all is. But beneath all of these is something that worked for them.
I was reading a book the other day; I could break down its contents into these categories:
Descriptions of a method
Claims about what that using that method would result in
Explanations of how the method works
Claims about how awesome the method and its result were
Attempts to borrow prestige from science by inserting claims that something scientific was support for the method.
Lovely pictures of people applying the method.
From a pragmatic point of view, whatever people are saying about what they are doing, in practice they are either explicitly or implicitly describing what they are doing, plus some other information or color. And, when applied in a different context (the context of your life), the experiment of doing that same thing may be of value even if it does not provide the claimed results.
If you undertake a lot of life experiments, you can develop a sense of which ones might have interesting results. You no longer need to be concerned with “Is this person a crackpot? Are they right? My god, this all completely wrong!”. Seeing the implicit suggestions of experiments requires, however, finding a sense of relaxation around the other stuff.
I had a friend and mentor, once, who had really good ideas for life experiments. That person, at some point, declared himself a fully realized being, left his wife for a young nymphet, burned down someone’s house, ended up in jail, and hasn’t been remotely trustworthy to contact since. Just another in the long history of completely insane and perhaps malicious teachers whose students are able to use their teachings fruitfully.
An interesting bad idea may be put to more use than an uninteresting good one. Don’t overlook gems just because they are buried beneath piles of bullshit.