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greyenlightenment  investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...  3d ago (greyenlightenment.com)   1279 thread views

Why does advice work so poorly?

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There are different types of advice, and some of the threads here bring up different criticisms of each thing, or ignore other things.

  1. A hard thing is worth doing. - "Tough Love"
  2. How to make a hard thing easier to do. - "Fun Facts"
  3. How to be better than others at a thing. -"Winning"
  4. A thing you might like to do or want to do is a bad idea - Warnings

Tough Love advice is something I only give heavily caveated as "this worked for me". If it isn't something I've done I avoid giving this kind of advice to anyone outside of family and very close friends. For dieting this would be me suggesting that people cut out sugar or go low carb. It's worked for me, but it wasn't easy and it may not work for everyone (see the caveats).

Fun facts might already be known, or too broad to be useful. If someone I don't know asks for advice this is generally what I'll try to give them. For dieting this would be me mentioning that hard liquor and bacon generally don't have much sugar or carbs (unless it is added).

Winning advice becomes worthless when adopted too widely. I generally offer this advice not as a personal experience but as an example of someone else I know doing well at it. If you offer this as personal experience it just sounds like bragging. "Yeah I did much better at dating after I started working out and getting a good haircut" vs "My friend saw his dating prospects improve after he started working out and getting a nice haircut".

Warnings need to have clear consequences laid out. And people need to believe you about those consequences. "Ingesting a large amount of cyanide will painfully kill you" Otherwise warnings just sound like threats. Sometimes warnings are just threats. "Trespassers will be shot". Warnings where you personally suffered the consequences are better than the alternative "I drank a lot of soda and ate tons of sugary food and got diabetes by age 30"

Giving good advice

There does seem to be a lot of blame going around for people not taking advice. But giving good advice is a skill too. I see it as an important life skill, because I'd like my friends and those I care about to do better. When giving advice you should consider why you feel the need to give the advice. Unsolicited advice is rarely received well. Advice that is just meant to put down the receiver or build up the giver isn't much help, and possibly doesn't even deserve the label of "advice".

There are only three people in the world that I think should definitely listen to all of my advice, and those three people are my kids. If I'm not making a warning/threat about defending myself then my advice is mostly informational, you can take it and account for it in your actions but I see no reason for you to be obligated to follow it, or even believe it is correct.

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.

Giving good advice starts by making the person feel good about accepting it. If your advice sounds like a reproach, if the advice is framed in a way that makes the receiver feels stupid for not knowing before, it won't be accepted. Your "Fun Facts" and "Winning" categories are easier to give accepted advice in because they are not inherently negative. But if negativity cannot be avoided you need the insulate the reciever from it; such as you did in the "Tough Love" example, by saying it may not work for everyone, because if you didn't you'd be implying that they're lying if they percieved themselves as having tried it and the results didn't follow. If insulating the person doesn't work, or cannot work because the advice inherently implies that they've been deluding themselves, then you need to put yourself right there next to them taking on the implication, so that they don't feel it's their personal failing. So instead of saying "you think you're cutting out carbs but I've seen you eat tons of sweet desserts", go with "when I was trying to cut carbs, even when I thought I was doing it properly, I wasn't counting my desserts properly and turns out they amounted to more than I thought they did".

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