In Scott Alexander's review of Twelve Rules for Life he discusses how Jordan Peterson and CS. Lewis seem to have the ability to express cliches in ways that don't feel cliched.
Jordan Peterson’s superpower is saying cliches and having them sound meaningful. There are times – like when I have a desperate and grieving patient in front of me – that I would give almost anything for this talent. “You know that she wouldn’t have wanted you to be unhappy.” “Oh my God, you’re right! I’m wasting my life grieving when I could be helping others and making her proud of me, let me go out and do this right now!” If only.
This seems like an undervalued skill, particularly within the rationalist community where the focus tends to be on the new and flashy and exciting.
This may sound absurd, but I see it as entirely possible that there may be more wisdom in what we already know than what we don't know and that we just need to learn to extract it. After all, we should expect that almost all the low hanging fruit has been picked by someone in at some point and that if it is broadly applicable, that it'd spread. But if that's too strong, perhaps it might be true after someone has read a few personal development books and spent a few hours on understanding a couple of different religions. In any case, this theory seems worthy of attention as if it were true, then the consequences regarding how we should go about self-development would be truly momentous.
So if platitudes contain deep wisdom, why are they so often derided? Is it that everyone already knows them and so hearing them for the thousandth time is a waste?
I think it is related to idea inoculation. If you are convinced that you already know a concept but your understanding is incomplete then it becomes almost impossible to teach you.
There are many reasons why cliches fail to land:
- Cliches are favoured by unoriginal thinkers who can't think their own thoughts. The low intellectual status of these thinkers attaches to these cliches
- Someone who repeats a cliche demonstrates a low social awareness and this low social status attaches to the cliche
- Unoriginal thinkers and people with low social awareness are less likely to express these thoughts in ways that are either original or which are persuasive
- Once something is derided as a cliche there is social pressure to dismiss it
- Many cliches can only be understood with life experience and when people first encounter them they are likely to lack this experience
- When platitudes become a common response, people are likely to use them in a careless or insincere manner
- People have an incentive to dismiss platitudes as a way of signalling their greater intelligence and social awareness
- Even if someone does find a way of expressing a platitude in a way that gets around people's caches, it is very hard for listeners to transmit this to other people since this is usually dependent on communicating this in a very particular way. So these original expressions are unlikely to spread far enough to replace the general understanding of an idea as cliched
Being able to communicate old ideas in a way such that they seem original is an incredibly valuable skill and one worth developing further.
Originality makes you take it seriously or engage with it more whole heartedly but I think the good property isn't "feeling original" per se.
Part of the problem about such tibits of wisdom that they are about big swath of experience/information and kinf of need that supporting infrastructure. When they are being developed or when they are prepared for transport they might be crystallised into single sentences or such but they need their prerequisities. That tip of the iceberg needs all that other mass to support that final insight.
Some times this is even semi-intentional. It can be beneficial to give someone an encrypted "spoiler" and then have them experience related stuff and then "get it". Good communication even has useful applications for the sayijng on different levels of understanding. Like "treat others as you would yourself" for a low level understanding can guide to introspect how you would feel in that situation. For more advanced understanding "in their shoes" considerations would come in that you can imagine if you were not you but had different upbringing or was in a particular situation (which is actually different to imagine how you would with your real characteristics act).
In preparing such "learning paths" it might be that some frasing is ultimately true but at low understanding face value suggests a wrong direction. For learning path needs having the impact be closer to zero rather than negative would be an improvement. And something that points in the rigth direction early might be confusing at higher stages. As there are usually many ways to frase insights over long time those that tend to lead to prosperous lives might be selected for. Some selection effects are stronger when transcending the learning period of a single human. If someone takes a insight and has perverse results then somebody else is likely to issue with that position/theorethical framework. Thus something that is "technically true" but requires to take many concepts in a very particular way is very fragile under cognitive diversity. But things that are robust under cognitive diversity are likely to be poor fits to particular cognition styles or stages.
One of the features of platitudes is that they are safe to be misunderstood. A person with only shallow understanding can be a host for the idea for succeful transport. But the idea itself is valuable enough that forgetting it would be punishing. Some other knowledge can rely on epistemic authority. But wisdom nuggets can be verified by the receiver over an unreliable network to be good ideas. Thus they need insight to "unlock". They are even so true and useful ideas that the method of proof can be left open.
Thus in a place where you would spit out a platitude the effectiveness can be increqased by making it particular or finding what in this particular life would function as the proof of the idea. The particulars will have different kind of evidentiary proof where a generic thought lacks it. "He would have wanted for you to live on" migth be generically or probabilistically true but "He would have wanted for you to keep kajaking" is dependent on hobby profile. And maybe some forms of living are genuneley less or more important for the emotional resosnance or genuinely why the lifes are important. ONe could try to lie about what the deceased would have wanted. But just asking about what the deceased did think probably gives multiple avenues for true particularised opinon how things should go post-humously.
In the book "the giver" a dedicated rememberer is asked whether a plane on a coliision course should be shotdown. When he advices that it should not be shot down and it later turns out they had a medical emergency the advice-seekers ask how did the expert know that would be the case. The answer was that he did not know, but knew how things go wrong if they go wrong and go right if they go right. So in a sense he did not posses information about this particular case and in one sense it was baseless speculation. On the other hand the opinion was informed by mountains of evidence about the patterns of that kind of life.
Off course the other side is that if you have very good data about what particular case you are in then trying to come up with robust and general generalization sis less attractive.