Advice Isn't Neutral

Years ago I came across an interview with Jaron Lanier (possibly on Edge.org), where he argued that we should stop fetishizing the 'neutral' point of view; that even its existence was a fantasy, so we should stop trying to elevate or attain it. Instead he thought that we should keep pursuing  and publishing all our own personal points of view, and call them as such.

I tend to agree with this. At least as a reductio, getting to a neutral point of view requires stripping out all the personal, all the value judgements, and essentially abstracting or deconstructing everything. If you go too far with this, you're likely to be left with nothing of instructive or integrative value. The only way to still have something worth reading or discussing is to not quite go all the way, but of course this still leaves in some sort of perspective, which is necessarily non-neutral. So at least let's be transparent about it!

Another way of thinking of this is that people are sort of the implementation layer of any kind of ideas. So if you want to write about ideas in a completely abstract and neutral way, you can't really touch on the implementation layer, which is of course the most interesting and instructive layer. It's the one that embeds actual experience, which is principal thing we want to communicate in the first place.

Reminds me of something Agnes Callard said: any useful advice is necessarily personalized. For me to give you useful advice, I need to know about you. Conversely, to best understand my advice, it would help greatly for you to know about me, and to recognize that my advice is informed by my personal experience, and reflects my own perspective. There's no way to strip out the personal perspective without obfuscating or confusing the advice – that is the implementation layer. And there's no sense in pretending that the advice is somehow neutral, because it simply isn't.