On giving advice
Francis Bacon wrote that “the greatest trust, between man and man, is the trust of giving counsel.” Having received advice I did not want, or heard advice given I thought inappropriate, I aimed to organize my thoughts, to ensure I give advice well, and deserve that trust.
We give advice for at least five reasons. The first is a position of power or authority that requires rendering opinions. It is the duty of the doctor and the rabbi to say what you should do.
The second reason is special knowledge, from firsthand experience or from research. When I need to do something about my car, I ask my dad. He will have fixed this very problem before, or will have read more about it than I will ever care to.
Third, wisdom. Most human difficulties present different faces but have the same body. They are not matters of contingent correct or incorrect, but of universal right or wrong.
The fourth reason is to be a mirror, and a guide to wise thinking. We prize decisions made in accordance with our inner wishes. If the difficulty in question is not a matter of correct or incorrect, or of right or wrong, it is a matter of what is right for us. We train ourselves from an early age, asking children their favorite color or what they want for dinner, to know our inner wishes. But this training is imperfect, and adults need friends to help remind them of the colors they could like, or the things they could eat for dinner, and why some colors or dishes are better or worse than others. Your friend may need you to give advice at random, and react well or poorly to it, to know their own mind.
The fifth reason is biography. The contours of our lives are simpler and smoother, observed from outside our minds than from within. Facing a weighty dilemma, I called a friend. He saw a trivial decision. “Curiosity and growth is your whole deal,” he told me, “so of course you’ll take the path that optimizes for those.”
The final reason is to make a place in the space of deciding, merely for the purpose of standing in it. A request for advice sometimes is a request for companionship: do not imagine what you would do if you were me, but simply imagine being me, so I can share the weight of the decision I must bear alone.
Advice, knowingly given and knowingly received in one of these six modes, is a service or a gift. Beware advice given in one mode but received in another, and beware advisors who suppose they are giving in one mode but are in fact giving in another. A call for patient companionship, answered with analytical rigor, is disappointment. A composure of special knowledge, that masks the manufacture of hot takes, is discredit. An external composure of wisdom that emanates from an internal but empty expectation of wisdom, a person who believes their words are weighty merely because the words are theirs, is dereliction.