Ouroborus

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 t