Meet Your Heroes
Fellow Inkhaven resident Linch says to Never Meet Your Heroes. I don't necessarily think that it's bad advice1, especially if you have a temperament like his, but I have different advice that might work better for other people.
My advice is:
If someone is still a hero to you, like, three years after you discovered them, you are doing it wrong.
Is that advice? Eh. Let me tell some stories and then we can circle back a bit.
Dan Carlin
The first living public intellectual I really felt drawn to was the podcaster Dan Carlin, who produced Hardcore History. I was in high school, I had a twenty minute walk to and from school each day, often I listened to podcasts each way. Hardcore History was my favourite. He was open about the fact that he was only an amateur historian, but he clearly did a lot of research for each episode (which were typically 4-6 hours long, and only dropped once every six months or so). He frequently read entire passages from books so you got more than his own viewpoint, was interestingly opinionated about various historians' strengths and weaknesses, was careful to signal when he was giving an opinion versus giving you the facts. He gave me my first taste of just how much the past was like a foreign country.
He also had a contemporary politics podcast, where he stridently refused to define himself by party lines, and instead just focused on the facts, and historical analogues. I listened to this podcast even though it wasn't as good as Hardcore History, because it came out more frequently than twice a year and I wanted more of his content.
But it was here that the cracks started to show, because I was also reading a little Chomsky and a little Judith Butler, and sometimes he would say something that went against what these other guys said. Eventually, he went from being a brilliant, insightful guy who had a level of knowledge that I could never hope to match, to someone who... yeah, was still very smart and obviously knew a lot about the world, but also sometimes fell into subtle traps because refusing to be defined by something can constrain you much like toeing a party line could. The first time I listened to a podcast of his and felt a sense of disagreement instead of just being overwhelmed by his knowledge, I felt a sense of pride. It was evidence that I had grown.
The Unit Of Caring
theunitofcaring on tumblr was a voice of sanity through the social justice heyday of the mid-2010s. She is much more central to me eventually falling in with the rationalists than Scott Alexander or EY was.
Her old posts hold up, and her current work continues to be very good. She was the one who taught me, example after example, that people who are angry are often in pain, and that while you should always respond with true things, you should put in the work to do so in an empathetic way that meets them where they are at whenever possible. I learned that when you are responding to someone, you are doing it for the audience of lurkers more than you are doing it for the person you are responding to. I learned that it is valuable and honest and admirable to express your emotions along with the facts. One of these days I am going to go through her entire backlog and shuffle it all into my queue, because so many of her posts deserve to be recirculated.
At the same time, I saw the way that engaging this way over time limited and shaped her thinking (or, more accurately, the thinking of her public persona). And I saw admirable missteps, when she continued to give people the benefit of the doubt long after they have shown that they do not deserve it, to her own exhaustion.
One day a few years into following her, I was reading an exchange and I had the thought "man, this is admirable but maybe you should give up on this one guy in particular." And I think this was a good thought! I had developed a fine grained sense of exactly where on the charitability scale I wanted to be, and it was different from hers because we are not the same person.
Etirabys
Etirabys was another user active on tumblr in the mid-2010s, and only slightly older than I was. They were very similar to me in temperament and in how we made sense of the world. To have someone who was so similar to me blog about college admissions a year before I was facing that, and adjusting to university life a year before I was facing that, and all of the bizarre and despair inducing bits of cubicle life one undergoes when one is working for a paycheck... The edge that this gave me made my life more manageable in a hundred tiny ways. I feel very lucky that they were blogging then.
They were also more in touch with their emotions, and their offhanded little posts helped me process some anger and shame and stress and fear that I would not have been able to name without their help.
Idk, this one is kind of weird because eventually we started hanging out online in some discords and then IRL, and these days I just think of them as my friend who's kind of a goober. And this process definitely took closer to ten years than three, but it was made possible because I stopped being entirely star-struck by them before this point, and instead had a model of them (if one that is parasocial and low-fidelity) as a human being that was good at some stuff, but also had flaws, and also had things that they considered interesting and are always happy to talk about, which you can just like, talk to them about?
But this is a really good move if you can pull it off, 10/10 would recommend. I am in the process of doing this to more guys.
Meet Your Heroes
Anyways what was my point. Okay I think these stories actually cash out to a few different ones.
First, heroes are often avatars of traits that you admire and perhaps want to have for yourself. It is useful, if you are cultivating that trait, to notice the ways that your hero falls short. This is not to like, dunk on them or anything, but to get a better, more textured sense of what it actually means to have that trait that you desire.
This can help you avoid subtle traps: Dan Carlin was an early paragon of truth-seeking for me, but by refusing to let himself have takes that he deems too ideologically legible, he ended up being biased away from truth in a different way. Perhaps doing the opposite thing is worse, but it's good to have a clearer picture of the trap regardless, and to think about if you can refine your own process to avoid or minimize the failure mode as you reach for perfection.
It can also help you understand what it means to actually reach that trait, even imperfectly; the bullets you must bite if you want to go full humanist, or full internet discourser, or full whatever else, and the kinds of problems and complicated questions and tradeoffs that you must contend with. And perhaps with that information, you can decide you want to go just a step more that way, or 50% of the way, or 90% of the way but no further. Or you can decide to go all the way and chomp all the bullets, that's also fine, even then it's nice to get a heads up about where the bullets are aimed.
Another point: the level one take about parasociality is something like "parasociality can be bad and unpleasant for both the person being parasocialized and also the person doing the parasocializing". Perhaps if you don't want to think about it further because you have more important things to ponder, the correct piece of advice is just to never meet your heroes. But there are more ways of dealing with it, you know?
And like, if your hero is your hero because they are good at doing a thing that you value and are improving at (which is often the case), one day you are going to meet them as a peer, or something closer to a peer than a worshipper. You're gonna find them at your writing retreat, or they'll slip into your conversation circle at a conference, or they'll cold email you one day because you are now better than them at some sub-skill they are working on and they would like your help.
And on that day, it will be much easier to talk shop with them (and absorb more of their power 😈) if you can be chill and normal in their presence. And I find that modelling your hero as just another person is a good way to be more normal about them, and to have good conversations with them from the get-go.
But even if you're never gonna get on their level because you are just not going to read three billion history books or be a math genius, I feel like there's something kinda here. Perhaps another way of framing this is that maybe you can just get better at being parasocial? If you think that shiny person from the internet/from writing the good books is your friend, you should know more stuff about them, including:
- Stuff they are good at
- Stuff they are bad at
- Stuff they are currently working on/thinking about
- Stuff they like talking about
- Stuff they used to like talking about but are now kind of sick of
- Stuff they are prickly about
- Their good takes
- Their bad takes (everyone has these, except me)
And then, like, if your buddy Ted Chiang has a bad take, you can just be like, ah yeah that does in fact seem like a bad take that is consonant with their who they are and what they're prickly about, makes sense. And then it doesn't have to ruin the thing you actually admire them for, the same way your buddy Craig sometimes gets too drunk at parties and this is annoying as shit but that doesn't mean they aren't a great listener when you need them to be or they don't have excellent taste in pants.
I used to give myself a soft deadline of three years2 for undergoing this process, but at this point I don't really require a forcing function anymore. When I encounter a new person who has a trait or a feature I admire, I just kind of just think to myself, "alright, this is a normal guy, and in three years you're gonna run into them somewhere. What's required for you to have a fun conversation when that happens?" And then I just git gud/start reading their stuff with a more critical eye. So far, it's worked out pretty well!