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greyenlightenment  investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...  3mo ago (greyenlightenment.com)   1832 thread views

Why does advice work so poorly?

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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".

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