site banner
greyenlightenment  investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...  1mo ago (greyenlightenment.com)   1746 thread views

Why does advice work so poorly?

greyenlightenment.com
2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

There are different types of advice, and some of the threads here bring up different criticisms of each thing, or ignore other things.

  1. A hard thing is worth doing. - "Tough Love"
  2. How to make a hard thing easier to do. - "Fun Facts"
  3. How to be better than others at a thing. -"Winning"
  4. A thing you might like to do or want to do is a bad idea - Warnings

Tough Love advice is something I only give heavily caveated as "this worked for me". If it isn't something I've done I avoid giving this kind of advice to anyone outside of family and very close friends. For dieting this would be me suggesting that people cut out sugar or go low carb. It's worked for me, but it wasn't easy and it may not work for everyone (see the caveats).

Fun facts might already be known, or too broad to be useful. If someone I don't know asks for advice this is generally what I'll try to give them. For dieting this would be me mentioning that hard liquor and bacon generally don't have much sugar or carbs (unless it is added).

Winning advice becomes worthless when adopted too widely. I generally offer this advice not as a personal experience but as an example of someone else I know doing well at it. If you offer this as personal experience it just sounds like bragging. "Yeah I did much better at dating after I started working out and getting a good haircut" vs "My friend saw his dating prospects improve after he started working out and getting a nice haircut".

Warnings need to have clear consequences laid out. And people need to believe you about those consequences. "Ingesting a large amount of cyanide will painfully kill you" Otherwise warnings just sound like threats. Sometimes warnings are just threats. "Trespassers will be shot". Warnings where you personally suffered the consequences are better than the alternative "I drank a lot of soda and ate tons of sugary food and got diabetes by age 30"

Giving good advice

There does seem to be a lot of blame going around for people not taking advice. But giving good advice is a skill too. I see it as an important life skill, because I'd like my friends and those I care about to do better. When giving advice you should consider why you feel the need to give the advice. Unsolicited advice is rarely received well. Advice that is just meant to put down the receiver or build up the giver isn't much help, and possibly doesn't even deserve the label of "advice".

There are only three people in the world that I think should definitely listen to all of my advice, and those three people are my kids. If I'm not making a warning/threat about defending myself then my advice is mostly informational, you can take it and account for it in your actions but I see no reason for you to be obligated to follow it, or even believe it is correct.

There are some people that treat advice as a full on gift giving process. They expect accolades for giving the gift. They expect the receiver to at least pretend that they liked the gift. And the gift they'd always like in return is for the receiver to act on their advice. This seems like a toxic approach to me.

Giving good advice starts by making the person feel good about accepting it. If your advice sounds like a reproach, if the advice is framed in a way that makes the receiver feels stupid for not knowing before, it won't be accepted. Your "Fun Facts" and "Winning" categories are easier to give accepted advice in because they are not inherently negative. But if negativity cannot be avoided you need the insulate the reciever from it; such as you did in the "Tough Love" example, by saying it may not work for everyone, because if you didn't you'd be implying that they're lying if they percieved themselves as having tried it and the results didn't follow. If insulating the person doesn't work, or cannot work because the advice inherently implies that they've been deluding themselves, then you need to put yourself right there next to them taking on the implication, so that they don't feel it's their personal failing. So instead of saying "you think you're cutting out carbs but I've seen you eat tons of sweet desserts", go with "when I was trying to cut carbs, even when I thought I was doing it properly, I wasn't counting my desserts properly and turns out they amounted to more than I thought they did".

There are some people that treat advice as a full on gift giving process. They expect accolades for giving the gift. They expect the receiver to at least pretend that they liked the gift. And the gift they'd always like in return is for the receiver to act on their advice. This seems like a toxic approach to me.

As an aside, this seems like a toxic approach to gift-giving, not just advice-giving. The entire point of a gift is that you're giving it to someone without expectation for anything in return; that's the very nature of the gift that makes it a gift, as otherwise it would be an implicit bribe or payment. The gratitude and pomp and circumstance can be pleasant and even appreciated when they're there, but expecting it in return for a gift means that it wasn't a gift in the first place, it was a payment, in order to get the receiver to play-act the part of "grateful gift recipient" for the gift giver's satisfaction.

I'm not willing to say it's an all around bad practice with gift giving.

As corvos points out quite a few cultures adopt a more transactional nature for gifts. I feel that even the standard American culture has some aspects of gift giving that feel more transactional in nature. Wedding gifts are often basically a ticket price for attending the wedding. I currently have young kids everyone buys cheap crap for each other's kids, and then gives out gift baggies of cheap crap for the party. The kids barely know each other well enough to buy meaningful gifts. They certainly don't have some idealized understanding of gift giving. Tipping at restaurants which is supposed to be a gift is often just an assumed revenue stream for servers.

Tipping isn't supposed to be gift giving it's supposed to be outsourcing the quality control of service provided to the lowest cost evaluator. That's why their base pay in the US is traditionally so low. Rather than having inconsistent service or having more management time/secret diners reviewing service and charging more for the higher wage/management cost.

In some cultures this is of course the point - giving a gift is implicitly initiating a reciprocal relationship. And may be resisted for that reason.

Advice works poorly because of attitudes like those evinced in this article.

Or maybe we can just blame Martin Luther, if we don't want to pick on my friend @greyenlightenment. Possibly Bruce Lee.

People generally don't follow advice, even obviously good advice, because doing so would conflict with their ego. Taking advice, really taking it to heart and following it, requires a radical act of submission foreign to the modern mind. To truly accept advice, one must first place oneself below the advice giver.

Most people fail when implementing advice because they fail to truly implement the advice. They give it a half-effort, they don't persevere long enough to see results, they don't really feel the advice. Because they don't really respect the advice giver. You have to start by submitting your own will and intellect to the superior, to the rabbi or the guru or the priest or the professor or the doctor. And that act of submission is radically antithetical to the modern mind. We want to pick and choose, Jeet-Kune-Do style, take the best of all aspects of all advice and combine them, rather than take the advice of our superiors. Every one of us is trying to run our own custom set-up of values and cherry-picked advice, our own unique choices. Not to pick on @Pitt19802 but this is emblematic, saying the adulthood is all about realizing:

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.

If you are always keeping a part of your mind detached, observing, assessing whether the advice is working or not, then you're never really following it. At the first sign of failure, you are ready to jump ship, you have the lifeboats already inflated, you're already writing your clever comment about how the unsinkable advice sank.

When you look at cults like People's Temple, Synanon, NXIVM, or Gwen Shamblin; ok yeah they end up drinking the kool aid or murdering journalists or stealing money or abusing kids. But first, they work as self-improvement. Every cult story is full of people who join the cult, submit their will to the leader, and they get off drugs, they work hard at cult activities, they become functional members of society, they lose weight. They did all these things easily, like it was nothing, no big deal. And the key element is the submission, the surrender of will to the leader. This is why any effective advice program, like Crossfit or TRP, starts getting accused of being a "cult." When we see progress coming from submission, we defensively call it a cult, rather than question our own determined independence. I'm guilty of this myself: I disdain basically all self-help books on the principle that the person writing it doesn't impress me enough, and I giggled at Evola eviscerating the existentialists as pasty philosophy-professors who lacked real world experience while citing Nietzsche of all people.

Let's talk about fitness examples, since those were used in OP, and are also my favorite.

In the OP:

Even the best advice will still be constrained by one’s innate limitations. In my post “Individual differences of metabolism are real and matter” I give a real-life example of someone who despite only eating 1,800-2,000 calories/day, which he carefully tracks, and doing cardio, is still overweight at over 200lbs at 5’10”.

Genetic limitations are real, genetic limitations are an infohazard that prevents you from making progress. Both these facts are true. Once you are aware of and accept the idea that your genetics might be special and unique and prevent you from progressing based on basic advice, particularly where information on "slow metabolisms" or "hardgainers" is presented without a percentage-rate of the population, everyone wants to jump ship on the simple-but-difficult advice in favor of anointing oneself a hardgainer or having an unspecified and undiagnosed thyroid or metabolic problem. Some people are harmed by trying to follow advice that won't work for them because of their genetics, vastly more are harmed by not following basic fitness advice because they've given up and decided they are a special snowflake who can't follow basic advice.

This is why there is so much fluff in so many popular fitness programs. The actual program could be communicated in a spreadsheet; why do the authors give us treatises on physiology that don't matter, or stories about the athletes or champions or movie stars or secret-commandos or Soviet scientists that built or followed the program. Sometimes you get a mad-libs pile on: JALEN HURTS followed a workout program developed by SPETZNAZ COMMANDOS using hitherto ignored SCIENTIFIC PRINCIPLES that were discovered by EASTERN BLOC COMMUNIST SCIENTISISTS. And you get 20 pages about Jalen Hurts performance in the NFL, how badass the spetznaz commandos are, the intense scientific research sponsored by the USSR to develop athletes, how revolutionary these scientific principles are...and two pages with the actual program you need to follow. All the fluff is designed to get you to buy in, to actually follow the Program as written, to swallow your ego and accept that the Program and its creators are better than you and you need to follow their advice.

It's easy to dismiss the fluff as unnecessary, just give me the program, but it is probably the most necessary thing. A theoretical program with zero fluff, just sets and reps with no testimonials and no confusing pseudo-bro-science arguments about why it is effective, is unlikely to be followed by many people, a program offered with no story will not persuade people to try it. The story is necessary to convince people to do the work. A perfect program with no story probably has no adherents, or if anyone tries it they quit lacking a reason to continue when they start to dislike it or it gets hard or something seems to go wrong. A workout program that is distinctly sub-optimal, but with a narrative attached that convinces everyone who reads it to commit to doing that sub-optimal program with 100% compliance and effort, would deliver huge results.

This is all an act of self-criticism, Pride is a flaw in myself that I am struggling with in my efforts to improve in life and to find my way back to religion.

Learning jiu-jitsu has required me to radically submit, at age 33, to people I would normally avoid going to for advice on other topics. The head coach/owner at our gym is a Puerto Rican guy with barely a high school education*; though at least he has the job title "BJJ coach," most of the other upper belt teachers are blue collar by day, factory workers or in construction or government social work. They're not, broadly speaking, people I would normally seek out as my intellectual superiors. But in the gym, they know vastly more than me, and trying to exercise my own intellect, to pick and choose what I think will work, is a road to nowhere. Luckily, the demonstration of superiority is frequent, rapid, certain, violent, and kinetic. And at that point, if I can soothe my ego past excuses like "bjj is stupid and gay anyway" or "I'm [genetically weak/too old/unique and the advice won't work for me;" then I can make progress if I accept that the guys who beat me up probably have something to teach me, even if I'd smoke them on the LSAT. And without that respect, I probably won't learn anything. But even within the gym, we see the same narrativizing, the same devising of stories and lineages to techniques, used by the professors to hammer home that this move works. It was a favorite of Marcelo, or Renzo, or Gordon Ryan. It's the oldest trick in the book, or it's the brand new meta-game solution that's taking the competitive scene by storm. Because they need to convince the students to study the move diligently, and apply it with confidence, or it won't work, and will be discarded as useless advice.

Because as the Buddha tells us there are:

“Three kinds of wisdom: wisdom from hearing (suta-mayā paññā), wisdom from thinking (cintā-mayā paññā), and wisdom from development (bhāvanā-mayā paññā).”

And while I might have wisdom from hearing, or even wisdom from thinking, until I reach their level I will lack their wisdom from development, the true understanding that makes the advice part of my being.

*Though, realistically his education level does not reflect his genetics. He has two sons, one just became an anesthesiologist, the other is teenage but seems very bright, gets good grades, and is a nationally competitive BJJ phenom. Evidence that ethnic minorities are still working their way through the Great Sort?

It’s actually pretty fascinating how few things there are that offer real, tangible, and difficult to oppose feedback.

In gaming for example, despite claimed common frustration with trash teammates, team games are quite common. Because you can blame them, in part! StarCraft for example is the complete opposite. It’s a 1v1 format, and you can play “ladder” which ranks you and gives you a matched skill opponent. The fact is that the game is pretty well balanced. If you lost there was almost certainly a reason, that was your fault. You didn’t scout well enough, or missed a build timing, or didn’t adapt your army composition in time, or controlled them poorly, or made a poor decision about where and when to expand to a new base. And surprise surprise, it’s not that popular, because again you can only really blame yourself. Even “cheese” strategies that leverage an unconventional and seemingly unfair method often have glaring weaknesses to accompany them.

Now to be fair, implementing advice has more drawbacks than mere effort or unbending of pride. You can get stuck in a dead end, you might have difficulty deciding when to bail, and deeply implementing a program often has switching costs if you later decide to do something else. But yes, on balance most people are better off committing to something rather than spending a lot of time waffling, at least in our modern society.

The pure example of the Baridan's Ass sort of problem I'm talking about: it's good to have a sacred day of rest each week. The best way to achieve this is to have it as part of a religion, a dictate of said religion, that one does not work on the sabbath. It's really irrelevant whether your religion picks Sunday, Saturday, Friday, or Wednesday for that matter. But society has to commit to it, and not welch on it, or it doesn't really work.

But there's lots of cases where the quality of the advice is much less important that dedication to following the advice. I know a lot of people who are very out of shape who would benefit from doing any exercise, even a stupid program. Who would benefit from implementing any diet, even a bad one, versus eating whatever junk they see. Who would benefit from religion, even if they don't pick the exact type of Catholicism I happen to prefer.

Because not moving also has drawbacks.

I don't entirely disagree with negative traits of modern people, but resisting submission does make sense from one perspective. Think of it like an immune system. Most people who preach something merely want your money. Most people who do speeches merely want you to invest in their cause. Most charities are scams. Everything competes for our attention and uses advanced techniques to manipulate us for the sake of making money.

Over time, one learns to have one hell of a strong defense mechanism. I can drink alcohol until I struggle to stand, and I will still remain rational. I'm immune to hypnosis, I sometimes notice that I'm dreaming because I realize that something is wrong. I've been suicidal and I've been rather manic, and in both cases, those around me wouldn't notice unless I told them.

To trust somebody with all your heart, to give yourself to something else, to invest 100% in one thing, to let down your guard entirely, these are all powerful choices, and people who can choose them tend to be wonderful people, but life simply teaches us that this is naive and dangerous. So we become superficial narcissists who don't commit to anything unless it offers immediate rewards.

I hope to be more healthy, but it requires staying in a healthy environment, and there's less of these by the year.

You can't make all advice part of yourself, though. For the same reason that you cannot be every class at once in an RPG game. There's very much "paths" to take in life, and advice which is good for some people, but incompatible with ones path. "one man's meat is another man's poison" and such. Nietzsche seems to value a sort of purity when he says "With fifty blotches painted on your face and limbs, thus you sat there to my amazement, you people of the present!". He certainly seems to advice against nitpicking a bit of everything and plastering it on yourself.

You can't make all advice part of yourself, though. For the same reason that you cannot be every class at once in an RPG game.

Agreed, you can't be universally naively trusting. You can end up following really bad advice, or you can end up endlessly switching paths as you are persuaded by new advice. In an RPG, if you never specialize down any skill tree, you never reach the higher level skills that make the whole thing work.

I don't entirely disagree with negative traits of modern people, but resisting submission does make sense from one perspective. Think of it like an immune system.

What do we call someone with an immune system that attacks vital organs? Sick or healthy?

Most people who preach something merely want your money. Most people who do speeches merely want you to invest in their cause. Most charities are scams. Everything competes for our attention and uses advanced techniques to manipulate us for the sake of making money.

Was this less true in the past, or is it merely that the grifters of yesteryear have mostly been forgotten?

It's perhaps true that much of the clergy was cynically parasitic on the medieval body politic. But that's a different question from whether they were net positive!

I don't think humans really attack themselves, they just close themselves off of the world in a manner which is unhealthy. It's like dying of thirst in front of a puddle of dirty water (edit: Or just water which you don't know the purity of before you drink it). Nietzsche advocated isolation for the purpose of growth, but he also wrote "whoever would remain clean among human beings must understand how to wash himself even with dirty water". I wonder if he thought of this as being possible.

It was much less true in the past, I think (at least, in our own communities. I'm not sure about our relation with strangers/outgroups). We've become much more exploitative, we're also more prone to look for the worst in others, as well as to look for weaknesses which can be exploited. I don't think old people are easier to scam because old people are dumb, I think it's because society has gotten less honest faster than old people have managed to adapt to that fact.

We're in the age of resource exhaustion, and "trust" is no less of a resource than oil is. Even "dignity" and "reputation" are resources. Companies like Blizzard are currently burning these. Resources like honor and respect are nearly depleted in the western world in my opinion. Mathematically, I think the solution is to optimize for the long-term rather than the short-term. If you optimize for an infinitely long period of time, it appears to me like you're immune to all social dilemma's and things like Goodhart's law and other harmful incentives. So the entire problem seems to be excessive short-term optimization.

Perhaps current parasites are no worse than those of old, but there seems to be many more of them now that we're all global rather than members of small local communities. And being "local" had advantages, I think it's the cause of the whole "high trust society" thing. A king would suffer if they hurt their own kingdom, so incentives like that protected against evil somewhat. But now, you can earn money by hurting somebody 1000s of miles away.

I'd ask "Which is best, to adapt well to a sick society, or to adapt poorly to a sick society"? Personally, I'm not entirely sure.

Good post.

I think where a lot of people get stuck is in waiting for the perfect piece of advice.

Line I read that stuck with me that I think applies beyond the specific instance - "Too many get stuck in analysis paralysis, worrying about the “right” source of knowledge: CLRS, TAoCP, Sedgewick, Skiena, Roughgarden, Dasgupta… you don’t need to obsess over these. Just pick something, get a foundation, and immediately move on to practice. You will learn everything from pattern recognition" (its from https://www.bowtiedfox.com/p/faang)

It's what I was trying to get at, but am not quite eloquent enough to put into words well, I think when you're young (at least I did when I was young), there's this mindset that if I follow out suboptimal advice, I'm wasting my time or I'm screwing myself over.

Being older, I think you learn a lot just by iterating over a lot of different things.

I should exercise and eat better than I do, that said, unless you're a professional athlete, starting down any path is 80% of it.

Analysis paralysis is definitely a part of it. I feel like there are twin traps, one of analysis, the other the fact that continued inaction seems to have a momentum all it's own. Analysis paralysis might get you into the trap of inaction, but inaction's own gravity keeps you there.

But there is also this aspect where our modern society seems to be producing and entire oversocialized professional and expert class. They're risk averse and initiative averse to a degree which stifles all human actions, and they are supposed to be our betters to whom we listen.

I would trust the blue collar BJJ coach who barely graduated highschool far more than the PhD trying to give me advice. And on a lot more than BJJ at that.

And on a lot more than BJJ at that.

I realize I'm doing that annoying thing where I tell a story and then add details to it in a later reply, but you'd be very wrong to do so. The amount of absolutely horrifyingly bad advice on divorce, real estate purchases, finances, and car repair...it's actually shocking.

The others I can see but car repair? I'm curious!

A trivial example is "You should learn to repair your car" while ignoring that we don't live in the 90s anymore and most new cars cannot be repaired without special tools and software (sometimes even by third party professionals).

Define "new"? I personally tend to drive pretty old things, but my spouse has had a 2015 and 2022 that I've never had to outsource anything on.

  1. Standard American redneck brand loyalty. One guy is convinced that Jeep makes reliable vehicles, like the grand Cherokee.

  2. there's a guy who literally didn't believe in oil changes. He has bought a long series of PoS $3k cars that all inevitably quickly break down irreparably within a year or two. Oil changes are a ripoff! The mechanic just wants you to throw away good money for no reason because the car is going to break down in a year or two anyway!

  3. On the opposite end, some truly poorly modified civics and f150s

  4. Some awful and idiotic ways to rip off your insurance company or auto repair shops.

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 masks going "...would you kindly..."

Psyops about having less kids because of the climate crisis

This is just propaganda. It's often said in a condescending and accusatory tone, along the line of "do X or you're a bad person". You can recognize this sort of thing by its use of manipulation methods like guilt tripping, instilling fear or insecurity, or making you feel like the world will be against you if refuse. Advice should benefit you and want nothing in return. I find older self-help books (pre-2000) to be rather enjoyable

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.

Competent teachers and coaches through talent and experience are able to identify these levels in their clients/students and will adjust advice accordingly

yeah there is a "you get what you pay for" rule in regard to advice quality

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?

I think at the pro level it's not just giving advice it's also serving as mediator, strategist, advisor and sometimes main talent evaluator that really is too much for most coaches (especially at the NFL level). Plus the salary cap comes for the best players and often the best schemes to make use of cast off talent.

One of the reasons I didn't use Phil Jackson as my example is I don't think he was that much better at giving advice, but he was really good at managing the egos and team dynamics of all his players better than most (I think that's clear from his success with both the MJ Bulls and Kobe and Shaq Lakers).

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.

I mean sure, but most advice isn’t “just do the right things.” It’s generally at least something the person understands how to do. Work smarter, not harder is advice if you define or explain what that means. Setting a specific goal using SMART frameworks is good advice.

But assuming the advice is actually good advice as in useful to the person receiving it, a bigger problem is that the person doesn’t want to do the work, doesn’t want the grind, doesn’t want to miss out on fun to reach the goal. Quite often they blame the advice when it wasn’t bad advice so much as you made excuses for not doing it. I think there are plenty of things I could be getting better at, I know exactly what to do, but it’s just hard to follow through. And if I don’t, it doesn’t mean that the advice sucked. The advice is fine. The problem is me, and placing the blame in other places is not helpful.

It’s generally at least something the person understands how to do.

My point is that "just work harder" is to some extent something people (me) don't understand how to do, so everything that hinges on this (most advice) falls into this category. There is a lot more to discipline and human psychology than just flexing your indomitable human spirit if you want something hard enough.

"Work harder" isn't bad advice so to speak but it's not that useful. So, by extension, "Just wake up every morning and exercise for 30 minutes" is also not necessarily that useful.

"Work harder" isn't bad advice so to speak but it's not that useful.

This gets into the core problem with much advice: It is rarely actionable and usually of the form "you should be like this" instead of "you should do this specific thing that you both know how to do and are capable of currently doing".

A classic example is "eat less to lose weight" which isn't actionable for most people (they'll just get hungry and fail to eat less) as opposed to for example "log every meal and snack you eat to make it easier to avoid pointless eating and try to eat these sorts of foods that keep you satiated longer".

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.

I sorta see what you mean. Personally, I have learned give and take little advice. People generally do not want unsolicited advice. Good advice is typically very specific and by an expert ; for example , an academic advisor.

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.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats