I commented on Zvi's post linking to this, but I guess I should comment here as well:
I think this piece is missing what to my mind is the largest reason why advice isn’t helpful: Because the advice is just expressing one side of a generic tradeoff that you already know about and isn’t presenting any new considerations. More generally, they’ve heard it before and believe themselves to be already accounting for it.
When you’re trying to figure out how to trade off between two things, just being told “too far that way is bad!” isn’t helpful. Yeah, I know that, but where do I strike the balance? Such advice is helpful for people who weren’t aware that there was a tradeoff there, that there was anything to beware of on that side, but if you already do, it tells you nothing. If it brings in a new consideration — a new reason that too far that way is bad, that you weren’t previously aware of — then it can be helpful, but often it doesn’t.
(Your initial mythical example can easily be read as an example of this — “Yeah, I *know* war is destructive and that mutual annihilation is a possible outcome! What else is new?” If it’s not tailored to or backed up by an analysis of the specific situation, just saying “you’re going to get the worst-case outcome from your plan” isn’t helpful.)
The problem is that what you need is a target to hit, but the way people will express these is instead as a direction to push in. And this is made more difficult to make sense of because people will express the target as a direction *relative to their own idea of baseline*. But what that baseline is varies! So two people might actually agree on the best way to handle a given situation, but one tells you “look before you leap” while the other tells you “he who hesitates is lost” because what they’re thinking of as the baseline is different. (This is related to and overlaps with your “lived experience” category, I guess.)
(I guess it also overlaps with the “they don’t understand it” category. But it’s worth noting that once again that you seem to be discussing *generic* advice. The way to get past this barrier is to actually analyze the specific situation and back up what you say in terms of it, rather than presenting general considerations that your audience has probably heard before!)
So that’s why so much advice ends up useless — because I know that you should look before you leap, and I know that he who hesitates is lost, but how do I trade off between these (or whatever I’m trading off between) in this particular situation? So much advice fails to answer this!
Thanks for this. I'm not sure I agree that this is the largest reason, but I think it's *a* reason that helps explain some failures of advice, and one that I didn't clearly articulate. As you note, it's related to some of the existing categories ("it's too hard", "people are different", "people don't understand it") but I think it's distinct enough that it's probably best thought of as category of its own. And I would have made it a category of its own if I had thought of it!
I commented on Zvi's post linking to this, but I guess I should comment here as well:
I think this piece is missing what to my mind is the largest reason why advice isn’t helpful: Because the advice is just expressing one side of a generic tradeoff that you already know about and isn’t presenting any new considerations. More generally, they’ve heard it before and believe themselves to be already accounting for it.
When you’re trying to figure out how to trade off between two things, just being told “too far that way is bad!” isn’t helpful. Yeah, I know that, but where do I strike the balance? Such advice is helpful for people who weren’t aware that there was a tradeoff there, that there was anything to beware of on that side, but if you already do, it tells you nothing. If it brings in a new consideration — a new reason that too far that way is bad, that you weren’t previously aware of — then it can be helpful, but often it doesn’t.
(Your initial mythical example can easily be read as an example of this — “Yeah, I *know* war is destructive and that mutual annihilation is a possible outcome! What else is new?” If it’s not tailored to or backed up by an analysis of the specific situation, just saying “you’re going to get the worst-case outcome from your plan” isn’t helpful.)
The problem is that what you need is a target to hit, but the way people will express these is instead as a direction to push in. And this is made more difficult to make sense of because people will express the target as a direction *relative to their own idea of baseline*. But what that baseline is varies! So two people might actually agree on the best way to handle a given situation, but one tells you “look before you leap” while the other tells you “he who hesitates is lost” because what they’re thinking of as the baseline is different. (This is related to and overlaps with your “lived experience” category, I guess.)
(I guess it also overlaps with the “they don’t understand it” category. But it’s worth noting that once again that you seem to be discussing *generic* advice. The way to get past this barrier is to actually analyze the specific situation and back up what you say in terms of it, rather than presenting general considerations that your audience has probably heard before!)
So that’s why so much advice ends up useless — because I know that you should look before you leap, and I know that he who hesitates is lost, but how do I trade off between these (or whatever I’m trading off between) in this particular situation? So much advice fails to answer this!
Thanks for this. I'm not sure I agree that this is the largest reason, but I think it's *a* reason that helps explain some failures of advice, and one that I didn't clearly articulate. As you note, it's related to some of the existing categories ("it's too hard", "people are different", "people don't understand it") but I think it's distinct enough that it's probably best thought of as category of its own. And I would have made it a category of its own if I had thought of it!