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greyenlightenment  investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...  1d ago (greyenlightenment.com)   814 thread views

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:

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?

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!

  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.

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