on qualities of wisdom and information

[memevector]

Some circumstances leading to an interesting-to-me train of thought:

I own the house I live in, which I would say is both a privilege and a responsibility. Yesterday I was thinking about house maintenance (as in the fabric of the building), which is something I don't think I've ever managed very well. Specifically, at the moment the outside woodwork is long overdue for painting and the putty is falling off the windows as a result, and I feel upset about that because as a general rule I am all for planning ahead and "a stitch in time saves nine" and all that, so it doesn't meet my standards to lapse into negligence in that way with my possessions.

And so then I was thinking about some specific things it would have been useful to know "up front" when I first got the house. And I had this thought like: there should be a manual - a book of "Things to know if you own a house". Like a chapter on renting rooms if that's what you want to do (although by now I've learnt a lot about that by experience), and a chapter on the different maintenance things and a chapter on insurance and so on and so on. Not just what needs doing but how to go about it, like how to find tradespeople you can get on with (which was probably the main underlying factor in why I didn't already sort out the painting - if I had someone I could just ring up and say "come and do it", I probably would have done that). And for instance although it's not like I didn't know that it needed painting, it hadn't dawned on me at first that paint on external woodwork is the waterproofing, and if it gets as far as cracking, there will later be water damage to the wood or putty.

And then I thought: but there probably is a manual like that somewhere. Or at least all the information I needed is probably out there somewhere. And then at first I felt a bit of a fool and incompetent, because of all the information I probably have had about this kind of thing - how could I have failed to act upon it? ("any fule kno")

But then I realised that what's lacking isn't information: it's reliable information. Which is a whole other kettle of fish.

Huge amounts of information or advice which I have been told in all seriousness (whether in person or in books, let alone magazines) has in fact turned out to be utter bollocks which it has served me very well to disbelieve. The many wise things which have been said to me over time are like specks of gold in acres and acres of dust, some of which is goldish in colour :-)

(This ties in with a theme I was mining a while ago about "Going my own way; but what is my own way? because sometimes I don't know yet". That had a catchphrase "Received wisdom that isn't very wise".)

E.g. in the areas of gender, sexuality and "how to do relationships": large percentages of disprovable "facts" there, as well as things which are valid for other people and not for me. But also misreported science and the like.

So what you might call my "default attitude" is of scepticism about almost every alleged fact that comes my way. And I know to expect that most of the advice I encounter will be inapplicable to my circumstances or just plain wrong, although the ratios vary depending on the source.

That doesn't mean that I can only learn from my own personal experience. I get a lot of ideas by reading. The way I read "how to" books (and to some degree all books) is to trawl for things that ring true for me. And for instance if someone writes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 things, and they're all things I have experienced and I recognise the accuracy in how they describe them, then I am likely to pay more attention to their 9, 10, 11 than I would otherwise. But I'm still listening for any jarring note in 9, 10 and 11. In that sense I take very little on trust.

(Trust - there is another subject. My default is to trust people's goodwill, and mistrust, or at least withhold judgement on, their competence.)

So then it ought to be predictable that sometimes I will miss things which are in fact wise.

And some of the stuff I have taken on and tried to make work for me (e.g. different people's theories about organising yourself or time management or motivation) has later proved to have been a wrong track. So on average I may still be erring on the side of acting on stuff which later proves to be false or misfitting-to-me, rather than failing to act on stuff which later proves to be true.


A couple of times recently I've entertained this thought like "I wish I knew someone who was, like, ten times wiser than me, that I could go and ask about such-and-such a question or issue".

Even if I did know a ten-times-wiser person, I'd still have to test what they said against my own internal intuition about whether it's right for me. (And of course if they were that wise, they'd expect that and encourage it, and they wouldn't try to tell me to do anything which didn't ring true to me.) So it wouldn't be a way of abdicating responsibility for my choices.

But it would just be so luxurious to be able to start from "Here's a load of really wise stuff, now I just have to validate it for myself" instead of always having to sift out the wisdom from the enormous pile of dusty "Received wisdom most of which isn't very wise" :-)

Comments

[memevector.livejournal.com]

Yes, I have been a past lurker and occasional questioner on uk.d-i-y - very entertaining I agree :-)

(thanks for the reminder though)

I've got several questions I've been meaning to ask there actually, about glue and varnish and suchlike things...