Seth’s blog

A long post by Ben Casnocha tells how to give advice. The subject fascinates me because I’ve noticed what a strong tendency I have to give advice when told of this or that problem — yet I also realize that advice giving is usually obnoxious. I think this is why Ben’s post is long: It’s a difficult problem, like an addiction: The bad consequences are hard to avoid. Why do I have this tendency? No obvious reason. It certainly isn’t learned or copied or sustained by reward. Why is it obnoxious? Again, there’s no obvious reason. Giving advice has good and bad aspects: trying to be helpful (good) and acting superior and ignorant (bad). Why the bad seems to predominate I have no idea.

This is one reason I think Jane Jacobs’s you can only change what you love is usually true: because in your communication with someone you love (or at least respect) there will be enough positive in the whole message to overcome the negative of the advice itself — so that the advice doesn’t push the person away. (Another reason I think she’s right is that to give good advice you usually need to know a lot about the person you are advising.)

At a bookstore reading, I learned that Elizabeth Pisani wrote The Wisdom of Whores — about doing HIV epidemiology among sex workers — because she wanted to have more of an effect on HIV prevention programs. Scientific papers didn’t have much effect unless a journalist wrote about them.  Journalists, she found, tended to focus on the exceptions rather than the rules. The exceptions — e.g., sex trafficing — were a poor basis for policy, of course. So she did what drug dealers call “jump the connection”: She wrote a book about the rules, illustrating them with good stories. Speaking directly to the public. It seems to be working, she said.

Jane Jacobs (whom Pisani hadn’t heard of) said something enormously relevant to her enterprise. I think it was in an interview. “It’s a funny thing,” Jacobs told the interviewer. “You can’t change something unless you love it.” What a broad statement, huh? Could it be true? HIV prevention programs, in Pisani’s experience, have mostly failed. She was hopeful that private foundations could do what governments could not. The Gates Foundation, for example — could they crush HIV the way Microsoft crushed Netscape? Jacobs would have been skeptical: Is the usual attitude at the Gates Foundation to love, or at least respect, sex workers? Well, probably not. Indeed, the closer Pisani got to private foundations, the more skeptical she became. They were getting advice from former CDC bureaucrats and the like, full of the same ideas that had already failed.

Pisani held up one country as an example of how to do it right: Brazil. Why Brazil? I asked. Funny thing: In Brazil, they respect sex workers. Unlike everywhere else. In this case, at least, Jacobs was right.

More: Here’s one version of Jacobs saying this: “I think people [who] give prescriptions, who have ideas for improving things, ought to concentrate on the things that they love and that they want to nurture.”

In the 1920s a young woman moved to an isolated North Carolina town in part to oversee construction of a church. When she suggested that it be built out of stones from a nearby river, the locals laughed. It wasn’t possible to build buildings out of stone, they said. Their ancestors had done so (in Europe); they had forgotten. Jane Jacobs tells this story in Cities and the Wealth of Nations.

Unsophisticated villagers, huh? Yesterday I went to a high school graduation. A private high school in Los Angeles. There were six speakers: two adults, the school’s headmaster and a history teacher, and four students. Here’s what was so strange: No one told any stories. (One of the students told the beginning of a story.) The headmaster speaks at every graduation. The history teacher has given hundreds of lectures. Neither of them, apparently, knew to tell a few stories in that situation. No wonder the students didn’t know. Long ago, before cheap books, I’m sure everyone knew this basic point about public speaking. Now it’s as if no one knows it. What a vast forgetting!

I was surprised, but maybe I shouldn’t have been. Made to Stick sort of says the same thing. One of the authors, a Stanford professor, asked his students to rate a bunch of short talks. Their ratings had no correlation with how memorable the talks were. In other words, the students had no idea what made a talk memorable. They thought a good talk meant you told a joke. What actually made talks memorable were stories, the research showed.

Even Edward Tufte, a presentation expert, seems to not understand this. In his complaints about PowerPoint, he doesn’t tell any stories, doesn’t say anything about PowerPoint’s lack of encouragement of stories, and doesn’t say that students should be taught to tell stories (preferably by example).

I’m giving a talk next week. It’s going to be one story after another, which is not what I would have said before that graduation.

Why did Chinese immigrants to America start so many restaurants? Because Chinese cuisine is glorious, right? Well, no. Chinese immigrants started a lot of laundries, too, and there is nothing wonderful about Chinese ways of washing clothes. As Jennifer Lee explains in this excellent talk, the first Chinese immigrants were laborers. They were taking jobs away from American men, and this caused problems. Restaurants and laundries were much safer immigrant jobs because cooking and cleaning were women’s work.

A character in Jane Jacobs’s The Nature of Economies says this:

This is why societies that are oppressive to women and contemptuous of their work are so backward economically. Half of their population, doing economically important kinds of work, such cooking and food processing, cleaning and laundering, making garments, and concocting home remedies, are excluded from taking initiatives to develop all that work [that is, start businesses] — and nobody else does it, either.

My grandparents, Jewish immigrants, were in the garment industry. Now I can guess why.

Soon after it was published, I listened to an audiobook (abridged) version of Collapse (2005) by Jared Diamond. It is about how several societies destroyed their ecosystem and died. One example was Easter Island; the islanders cut down all the trees, and disappeared. The whole book was meant as a warning, of course: This can happen to us. At first I liked it — interesting stories. Then I heard that Jane Jacobs didn’t like it. I was unable to find out why. I began to wonder what I’d missed.

Now I can guess what she’d say: “Collapse doesn’t make clear that overexploitation has been avoided countless times. That is the usual outcome. Even before cities, humans were constantly creating new ways to make a living, which decreased reliance on the old ways.”

I could make a video that shows Michael Jordan missing 20 free throws in a row. Every moment would be true but the whole thing would be false. That’s not far from what Collapse does — at least the audiobook version.