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greyenlightenment  investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...  3mo ago (greyenlightenment.com)   1833 thread views

Why does advice work so poorly?

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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.

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