"When you encounter seemingly good advice that contradicts other seemingly good advice, ignore them both"
About this Quote
Al Franken riffs on a familiar human predicament: the world overflows with tidy maxims and confident gurus, yet for nearly every shiny rule there is an equally shiny counterrule. Think of the dueling proverbs that sit comfortably in the same cultural toolkit: "Look before you leap" versus "He who hesitates is lost", "Many hands make light work" versus "Too many cooks spoil the broth", "Absence makes the heart grow fonder" versus "Out of sight, out of mind". Each sounds wise until its twin steps in and flips the guidance on its head. Franken cuts through that stalemate with a punchline that doubles as a principle: when authority cancels itself out, step back.
The humor lands because the target is not wisdom but the habit of mistaking slogans for wisdom. Advice is a heuristic, not a law. It compresses experience into a catchy form, and that compression throws away context. What looks prudent in one domain or moment becomes catastrophic in another. By advising us to ignore both sides when they clash, Franken urges a reset to first principles: define the goal, consider the constraints, examine the evidence, and make a decision that fits the actual situation rather than the nearest aphorism.
There is also a media-savvy edge to the line. As a comedian turned senator, Franken spent decades around punditry and political spin, where authoritative voices confidently offer opposite prescriptions within the same news cycle. The absurdity is not just that both cannot be right everywhere, but that their performative certainty crowds out the patient work of judgment. Refusing to pick a side between dueling cliches resists the pull of confirmation bias and forces a more grounded inquiry.
The deeper counsel is to distrust the comfort of prefabricated answers. When slogans collide, they illuminate the limits of one-size-fits-all guidance. Wisdom begins where platitudes end: in attention to context, proportionality, tradeoffs, and the particular texture of the problem at hand.
The humor lands because the target is not wisdom but the habit of mistaking slogans for wisdom. Advice is a heuristic, not a law. It compresses experience into a catchy form, and that compression throws away context. What looks prudent in one domain or moment becomes catastrophic in another. By advising us to ignore both sides when they clash, Franken urges a reset to first principles: define the goal, consider the constraints, examine the evidence, and make a decision that fits the actual situation rather than the nearest aphorism.
There is also a media-savvy edge to the line. As a comedian turned senator, Franken spent decades around punditry and political spin, where authoritative voices confidently offer opposite prescriptions within the same news cycle. The absurdity is not just that both cannot be right everywhere, but that their performative certainty crowds out the patient work of judgment. Refusing to pick a side between dueling cliches resists the pull of confirmation bias and forces a more grounded inquiry.
The deeper counsel is to distrust the comfort of prefabricated answers. When slogans collide, they illuminate the limits of one-size-fits-all guidance. Wisdom begins where platitudes end: in attention to context, proportionality, tradeoffs, and the particular texture of the problem at hand.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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