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greyenlightenment  investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...  4mo ago (greyenlightenment.com)   1975 thread views

Why does advice work so poorly?

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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.

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