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greyenlightenment  investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...  20hr ago (greyenlightenment.com)   550 thread views

Why does advice work so poorly?

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Because fuck you, that's why.

I'm serious. Too much "advice" is given as a command. The link between "advice" and "order" is increasingly blurred. Especially in our current media environment of public/private partnerships to craft information narratives that change behavior society wide. Psyops about having less kids because of the climate crisis, eating less meat because of the climate crisis, not lifting weights because toxic masculinity, I could keep going. And probably the most toxic form of "advice" every young man receives is the state approved messaging about how to date women. They'll probably fail with that for about 10 years at the most before they wake up to the fact that these mother fuckers are lying to them, possibly on purpose.

It hasn't been uncommon in my life for people to give me "advice" and then get really annoyed to angry with me when I proceed to not do it. Usually doesn't help when I tell them "The best part of free advice is I'm free to ignore it". Half the time these people are giving advice that is counter to my goals, but they don't even realize it.

I can't help but be suspect of "advice" anymore. All I see is a demon wearing layers of mask going "...would you kindly..."

I think this is because a lot of advice is extremely non-specific. General advice is not helpful for most people: you either need to modify it for your personal situation (or have the advice come from someone who knows you).

The article is a bit all over the place. In my worldview advice for "goal achievment" (such as fitness, career) usually places itself on a spectrum between one-size-fits-all, but easily implemented and on the other end nuanced, but harder to implement.

The difficulty to effectively (thus correctly) implement advice IMHO relies on entirely separate traits of the recipient:

  • level of prior competence
  • level of "ability to comply", aka willpower, aka conscientiousness
  • level of self-criticism, aka ego, aka parts of neuroticism

Thus a one-to-many advice approach will deliver mixed results at best. Competent teachers and coaches through talent and experience are able to identify these levels in their clients/students and will adjust advice accordingly. In the age of social media in most places online, advice will be captured by the masses, who are most of the time, very incompetent and very weak-willed. An example of this is the so called "beginner-trap" in fitness content with 80%-90% of monetarization targetting beginners.

The best people at giving advice in my experience are sports coaches because most of the job is giving advice, so I'd look at coaches who were successful at building programs into contenders to see if there is anything they share as possible ways to make advise work better.

I don't think you are wrong, and at the same time if you look at the NFL the majority of the coaches are quite obviously awful.

Is giving advice just that hard?

My sense of the thing is that a lot of advice fails due to the advice being hard to actually do. For example if I wanted to lose weight, the actual advice is the same for almost everyone: fork put downs. That’s it. If you want to lose weight, you have to eat less than you do now (for general health it’s also good to eat better foods and exercise). But of course this is hard to do. You have to resist the urge to eat, probably a lot. You have to be hungry at times. You probably are going t9 be working out a lot and thus be tired and have sore muscles. In short following the advice sucks. And if you’re busy it’s probably going to be hard to resist the drive thru on the way home, or easy to skip the gym. Is the advice wrong? Not really. But people have a hard time sticking to the “suck” until they make the habit stick.

The advice for school success, again, is pretty universal. You have to study, do lots of practice problems, read the textbook, write those papers, and in general apply your ass to chair and grind. It’s easy advice to give, and much like dieting, if you actually do it, you’ll see results. The problem, again is that doing that sucks. You can’t game as much if you’re studying and writing papers and doing practice problems. You miss out on parties. Maybe you can’t go on as many dates. Resisting those things is hard. Forcing yourself to work when you don’t feel like it is hard. And eventually most people fall off, maybe excusing a night or two for fun. Maybe not doing quite as much homework or researching just a little less. And most people won’t stick it out through the suck to get the results. Again, the advice isn’t the problem. It’s the person not sticking with the advice long enough to make a good habit and see results.

I mean, "work harder and smarter" is good "advice" in this sense for at least 95% of people. Heck, "Make all the right decisions and don't make mistakes" is even better; 100% of people would benefit from that.

Advice is more than just [things it would be good if people do]; there's a sense in which it actually has to be useful, insightful information. In this much more relevant sense, most advice is bad, because it's not useful or insightful.

Cialdini's Influence is about why people don't listen to advice. Hickman on Twitter wrote:

Many times, "advice-giving" has little to do with advice, and more to do with posing thought experiments that expose weakness in men.

The guys with energy, who got "the juice" say OK, you're right, go try it. The low-energy types just get madder than hell, seethe over the advice, say it's "bad advice" but can't say why -- and the guys who don't need the advice are perfectly secure, well-aware they don't need it.

Summary:

There is an extreme amount of intraindividual variability, yet advice tends to be one-size-fits-all. This is especially relevant for fitness and dieting advice.

Advice does not work as well in adversarial situations, in which both parties are applying the same advice.

Too many people applying the same advice dilutes it effectiveness. This is seen in college admissions, where everyone follows the same essay-writing advice.

Survivorship bias may make some advice appear better than it actually is. Those who are successful at applying advice will tell others. The majority, who fail, will just go away.

Other advice is time sensitive or topical, and what worked in the past will not work now or in the future. 'Value investing' worked great for much of the 20th century, but became less effective in the 21st century.

Can I ask how old you are?

I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but this reads like something I might have written between 20-25 or so.

I think a big part of transitioning from the academic universe to something approximating the 'real world' is that no one is going to walk you through life.

It's on you to pull out the bits of advice that resonate with you and decide to try those out, then decide which of those you want to keep trying, which of those you want to stop trying, and what you want to try out that no one advised you to do.

You get to decide the itinerary, you get to decide the score card too.

Aight, I let it through. But you should probably put the submission statement in the body of the post, probably easier to parse once people start commenting. You can do both that and include a link without issue.

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