How to Seem (and Be) Deep

It is roughly correct, different neurons propagate signals at different speeds but it is in the ballpark. However, the brain is massively parallel so the slow clock is not evidence for it precomputing stuff.

I remember more than a few all-nighters, back in my college days, on big papers due the next day. Nevermind that I'd neglected to start them earlier; the problem at hand was coming up with a thesis that was provocative enough to be engaging on two fronts. First, it had to engage me in order to keep me writing. Second, the product of my writing had to engage my professor in order to stand out from the pack. Being "deep" was an easy trick to accomplish both degrees of engagement.

I didn't have a conscious method at the time, but when I look back at my madness, I see a few oft-used patterns. The first was to pick a statement in a text -- preferably one held as common knowledge about the subject -- and disagree with it. Another technique was to take that same statement, and graft on some out-of-left-field, tangential implication from it (my college pal Mary Jane was great at helping me with this kind of thinking). Yet another trick was to take two authors or arguments believed to be in opposition to one another, and claim that both were more closely aligned than commonly assumed. There were endless variations on all of these methods, but all of them shared the same logical scaffolding outlined in this article.

All of them were problematic.

You see, when you start with the explicit goal of "being deep" or "making a provocative argument," you run a huge risk of bullshitting for bullshit's sake. And if you're a great speaker, or a deft wordsmith, your bullshit will sound clear and striking enough to convince anyone who hears it. Even yourself. Soon enough, you become the sort of person who can start with pretty much any claim, no matter how superficially absurd, and then bend sources, and arguments, and logic, and everything shy of thermodynamics, to prove it out. This is intellectually lazy, because the entire point of writing a paper, or proposing a theory, or researching a topic, is to do the up-front legwork of hypothesis-test-refinement. Deliberate provocation skips the "test" portion of that pattern, opting instead for style over substance. It predetermines a conclusion, then makes the conclusion so shiny and pretty that everyone assumes a great deal of thought went into reaching it.

All of this is, of course, tangential to the author's point. It's also based on personal experience -- though I have been around enough wise-ass buddies in my day to know that I'm not the only world class bullshitter ever to hammer out a college paper. But my point is that I find the idea of setting out to be "deep" a bit troublesome. Deep thinking is fantastic. But "deep" presentation is easy to achieve without deep thinking, and it passes muster 99% of the time. It's like Frodo's ring: very powerful, very easy to slip on, and very hard to take off.

What? This article should be titled how to sound sophisticated (possibly pretentious) but not "deep".

You want to talk deep? Think things through. Go for the WHY of everything - from technical systems to relationships to art to everything else you can see, touch, feel, and comprehend. After some time, you will develop basic foundations of why and how systems (technical and people) work. Then you will want to generalize everything into rules and laws. After that into natural laws. Pretty soon you'll be seeking the first principles in everything. Only then can you be deep.

Once you have some understanding of the world around you, you'll want to apply it, test it out. See what works and what doesn't. DO THIS! In fact, this is arguably the basis of an entrepreneurial mindset.

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"Seem" deep?! YA OK.

Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself. -Doris Lessing

Thank you.

The big moral challenge for me was not that I could bullshit my way, quickly and successfully, through any single paper. Rather, the problem was that this type of work became very easy and, eventually, routine. I found myself applying the principles of "deep" bullshit to my actual problem-solving in real life, and they led me astray more than once. I had to take conscious stock of what had become a subconscious pattern, excise it painfully, and learn to rebuild my thought process.

So I guess my overall point is that "How to Seem Deep" and "How to Be Deep" can be two very different things. The trick is recognizing when one is seeming deep, and when one is being deep, and not letting the ease of the former replace the hard work of the latter.