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Why does advice work so poorly?
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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:
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:
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:
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?
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.
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.
What do we call someone with an immune system that attacks vital organs? Sick or healthy?
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.
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