[HN Gopher] Why doesn't advice work?
___________________________________________________________________
Why doesn't advice work?
Author : yarapavan
Score : 195 points
Date : 2024-07-30 15:07 UTC (7 hours ago)
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| cm2012 wrote:
| Yes. One of the big reasons I got into direct response marketing
| (surprisingly) is that I'm obsessed with the truth. Why do people
| really make decisions? What are the actual levers that get people
| to take action? In DR marketing, you either figure this out or go
| out of business.
|
| I'm really good at getting people to put advice into action in
| real life because of my marketing experience. I've helped
| multiple friends get jobs or change their lives. But I only give
| advice if I really think it's going to be impactful, so it's
| rare.
|
| The biggest impact on whether your advice will be taken (or your
| ad will work) is giving specific examples rather than platitudes.
|
| Also, obligatory Tolkien:
|
| "Elves seldom give unguarded advice, for advice is a dangerous
| gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run
| ill. But what would you? You have not told me all concerning
| yourself; and how then shall I choose better than you?"
| browningstreet wrote:
| > Maybe we get stuck inside our heads.
|
| In my experience, when people ignore good advice, it seems like
| there's always a "z" factor keeping people off the line of advice
| and onto something else: waiting for another moment, or a desire
| for a different outcome, or a notion that there's something else
| that will reveal itself or alter the given path.
|
| The challenge is finding/honoring the critical moment when the
| action in the advice has to be taken or a new set of
| circumstances establish themselves and the advice needs to be
| updated.
| anovikov wrote:
| Cuban Missile Crisis is a bad example. In a hindsight, advice by
| Taylor and LeMay for airstrike was spot on. That would be the
| best way to solve Soviet problem once and for all.
|
| Back then, no one could precisely know, and on a tactical level,
| advice was bad - the missing thing is that Soviet nuclear weapon
| stocks especially mated to delivery vehicles were many times
| smaller than believed, so any probable scenario lead to either a
| clean U.S. victory/Soviet capitulation and dismantlement of
| Communism, or simply thorough elimination of all Eastern Bloc.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| How would that approach avoid escalation?
| anovikov wrote:
| It wouldn't. Just go straight on.
| culater wrote:
| I think people avoid taking advice because taking advice is
| actually really difficult. Nobody has actually "been in your
| shoes." You have to try to understand why they said what they
| said, then try to apply it to your situation. Not a trivial task.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| > Nobody has actually "been in your shoes."
|
| If you're seeking advice, I've found many people who have "been
| in my shoes" in regards to a specific topic and found their
| advice extremely helpful. In a few cases it completely changed
| my life. The problem is everybody else.
|
| "Do you know what the difference is between your advice and
| this coffee? I asked for the coffee."
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Advice is complicated. The article does a good job opening up the
| topic.
|
| Advice has the connotation of being the conclusion of the
| discovery of the problem. When the recipient doesn't understand
| or won't act on the advice, it should be the start of the
| conversation, more questioning than stated suggestions, like in
| the hinting examples about coffee. In most situations, a lot of
| that conversation will be about getting the advice recipient to
| agree there is a problem to solve. Not everyone will be willing
| to have that conversation long enough to see there is a problem.
| debacle wrote:
| Most people, in my experience, not only do not think logically
| but actively eschew thinking logically, making long term plans,
| goal setting, etc.
|
| I don't know if it's an intelligence thing. I don't _think_ it
| is. I have met not so smart people that are incredibly goal
| oriented and very smart people who piss it all away.
|
| I'm at a point in my career/life where I often find myself giving
| advice to people who aren't interested in it. I've learned to
| limit the extent of the advice I give until people show that they
| know how to take advice. There are also likely strategies for
| giving advice depending on who you are talking to. I find that,
| especially for my spouse, direct advice is useless (...and that's
| when the fight started) but winding parables and directed self-
| learning are incredibly impactful.
| silverquiet wrote:
| This statement seems highly abstract - what sort of goals and
| long term plans should people have?
| debacle wrote:
| Homeownership (or a more city-oriented construct), civic
| impact, career growth, retirement, family planning, marriage,
| growing a business, investment, becoming a grantee, doing 10
| pullups, you name it.
| silverquiet wrote:
| I suppose for me, it's finding some sort of meaning in life
| - it's been rather elusive, and makes it hard to care about
| any of those; though I can do ten pullups.
| sickofparadox wrote:
| Some combination of the above list should at least give
| an approximation of meaning. Or keep you busy enough you
| don't notice its absence.
| silverquiet wrote:
| Somehow the nihilism always creeps in - the older I get
| the less I seem to be able to believe in anything, as the
| evidence accumulates that no one else does either. I
| suppose I'm one of those smart people who the OP
| suggested has pissed it all away, but I never really got
| what it was I was supposed to be doing.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I never quite understood nihilism as a problem. Why
| doesn't it mean that someone has a blank check to impose
| their own subjective meaning on life?
| silverquiet wrote:
| It doesn't feel like a blank check. You still gotta get
| up and go to work every day to pay the bills and then do
| whatever chores you can muster up the will and time to
| take care of.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I was thinking about meaning. My understanding is that
| nihilism is more about a lack of higher purpose, opposed
| to a lack of action.
|
| I agree that work and chores are tough if you don't have
| a reason to be doing them. Similarly, will and motivation
| also require a goal, so that would be a challenge without
| one.
| keybored wrote:
| > Why doesn't it mean that someone has a blank check to
| impose their own subjective meaning on life?
|
| I never understood Existentialism as a serious proposal.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| For me, goals and meaning are less an innate property,
| but things that are built over time as the result of
| positive feedback from direction and momentum. I didn't
| start with them, but as I try things, my identity changes
| to hold a goal more deeply.
|
| An analogy is a rock at the top of the mountain. It
| doesn't have much direction but maybe vague sense that it
| could be nice to go somewhere and do something. If it
| moves around a little, it starts to be pulled in a
| direction, ever so slightly. The Further it goes, the
| characteristics of the rock change, pulling it more, and
| repeating the process.
| mrweasel wrote:
| It makes a lot of sense, to me. The internet is full of "How
| do I lose weight", take "Ask Reddit", it's at least once a
| month that there's a "People who lost weight, how did you do
| it?" Come on! You know how they did it, they adjusted their
| eating habits and started exercising.
|
| That just not the answer people want, they want to hear stuff
| like: "I eat half a lemon every two days" or "I stuffed a
| peeled potato up my butt to absorb nutrients slowly through
| the day".
|
| Some advice is ignored because people don't like the answer,
| right as it may be.
| keybored wrote:
| I'm one of those people because this comment gives me the
| heebie-jeebies.
| okr wrote:
| I generally do ignore advice, unless i ask for one, like when i
| have a problem or when i feel helpless. I just leave people
| alone and expect the same from them. Everyone is on their own
| journey, i do not know about theirs and they do not know about
| mine. Mostly people give under-complex advice, that do not take
| my situation into account. It always feels out-of-touch. But
| that is just me.
| Jensson wrote:
| Advice we learn from we only hear once, advice that doesn't
| help us you hear over and over so it is easier to remember.
| So likely you just don't remember all the advice that helped
| you as you only needed to hear it once.
| dotancohen wrote:
| > winding parables and directed self-learning are incredibly
| impactful.
|
| For those of us with a spouse for whom direct advice is
| useless, please go on.
| debacle wrote:
| Ha. I have a very conversational thought process. Often
| times, giving my wife direct advice would give her anxiety or
| make her feel like I was giving her directions, rather than
| direction. "Maybe you should..." would be heard as "I want
| you to..."
|
| I've found that providing access to unopinionated information
| ("Here's a study related to that thing you are worried
| about"), bringing attention/space to the problem (without
| creating stress), or encouraging her to speak with friends
| who have had similar issues who I know will give her good
| advice will help her come to her own conclusions, at which
| point she will come to me and discuss her findings and the
| direction she wants to go in.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| It sounds like the author is coming from a places of intellect
| and might be missing more of the emotional reasons people don't
| follow advice.
|
| Intellectual-emotional dissonance is one of the biggest reasons
| people don't do things they know they _should_ [1] be doing. We
| often have the mistaken approach that if we pile on more
| intellectual reasons why we should take the advice that the logic
| will outweigh our emotions and we will take the advice. But this
| isn't true at all.
|
| Piling on more intellectual reasons creates a _bigger_ gap
| between emotions and reason making the situation feel even more
| distressing. It 's usually much more effective to find a way to
| help people's emotional sides keep up with their intellect, but
| we often devalue emotions so much that we even devalue
| approaching them at all even if it's to ameliorate them.
|
| How to do this, is another comment for another time, but it's
| rewarding, as it helps us understand more about what makes us
| tick.
|
| 1. Ostensibly. Should statements themselves have their own
| issues. https://www.thinkingbugs.com/should-statements
| squigz wrote:
| I'd be interested to hear more on how one does this
| takinola wrote:
| Imagine a patch of ice on a busy sidewalk. You can put up a
| sign that says "be careful, icy path" but lots of people are
| still going to slip and fall. The advice (ie the sign) can only
| do so much as long as the hazard exists. The challenge here is
| the hazards are your mental models so they are a lot harder to
| clear than an icy patch.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| > the hazards are your mental models
|
| Yep, and almost everyone thinks their mental models
| accurately reflect reality. If they didn't, surely they would
| change their model, right? ;) Sometimes, even, folk's mental
| models become so important they try to force reality to
| conform to them, often with disastrous results.
| sharmi wrote:
| Wow! This is something that's been rolling about in my brain but
| the author has elucidated it in a way beyond the thought and
| attention I gave this.
|
| Anecdotally, I have seen and `read` multiple founders' posts and
| comments detailing the mistakes they have made, year after year,
| month after month.. and I went and made most of the mistakes all
| over again. I still see others follow the same path.. But why
| don't we apply the advice we read so often and makes so much
| sense?
|
| I believe while the reading the articles, the advice resonates
| and makes sense but when we go into real world, it gets messy..
| It is harder to notice the patterns. But one thing is true, when
| we do make those mistakes, we can then hark back to that advice
| and realize the wisdom in them. Atleast after that, it gets
| easier to not fall into those traps again and the advice is
| internalized.
|
| So, what is the use of writing about your hard-learned advice,
| you ask?
|
| 1. We start noticing the patterns earlier thanks to the memory of
| the advice humming there at the back of your mind and so the
| learning is faster. 2. It gives one courage and confidence to get
| up, dust oneself off and try again, cause others have done that
| before me or you.
| mecsred wrote:
| I think this misses a really important political dimension to
| advice. Sometimes people tell you to do things _they_ want you to
| do for their reasons, instead of what 's in your best interest.
| It can be really hard to tell when that is happening sometimes. I
| find my advice is dropped most often when I present it
| analytically, like people believe there's some hidden motive
| that's not worth searching for. I get way more engagement by
| presenting the same advice as charismatically as possible, with
| simple justification and a big smile.
| kstrauser wrote:
| "My situation is new and unique and no one's ever faced it
| before!"
|
| That's pretty much it.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I think what most people actually want, when they ask for advice,
| is to be told that they should do what they're already doing, and
| therefore that it isn't their fault that things aren't working
| out. Problem is, that doesn't actually get them to anywhere
| better than where they currently are.
|
| > If you really want to have impact, focus on giving advice that
| is easy to follow.
|
| Interesting. Tweaking it slightly: advice that is easy _for the
| person you 're advising_ to follow. This requires actually
| knowing them enough to know what would be easy or hard (including
| emotionally) for them to do. So, maybe if you don't know them
| that well, you should be cautious about giving advice...
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Maybe that ending question of "why won't you do obvious-thing-
| that-solves-the-problem?" is the best thing in the entire
| article. But only if you ask it literally, without irony.
|
| My guess is that each time somebody ignores a good advice, they
| do it for different reasons. So discovering the reason is the
| most impactful thing you can do.
| jprete wrote:
| I think that can work if they really are convinced you're not
| going to judge them for it. I have friends I can ask such a
| question; if I'm asking more distant friends or acquaintances
| then I'm going to make it really clear that I want to know and
| not use it as a springboard for expressing my own opinion.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| > discovering the reason is the most impactful thing you can do
|
| Most people do this by trying to give you more advice once they
| think they understand your problem, often before you finished
| explaining.
|
| Being bipolar, I deal with this this all the time. It would be
| funny if it wasn't so frustrating. It would be a lot easier if
| people simply took my limitations for granted instead of making
| me explain until they realize they have no useful advice.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > And for producers of advice:
|
| Step 0 I think should be "maybe don't give advice". You want to
| help, you think you're really good, you think it will improve
| things, but that's not how other people see it. They may seem
| like they need advice or seem like they are asking for it between
| the lines, but they just really want to unload or chit chat, or
| share some difficulty. The answer to that is sometimes to listen
| and not give advice.
|
| Yes, if someone asks for it, and they seem like they really are
| interested in it, by all means, give it to them. But in many
| cases, spraying advice around can be frustrating for both the
| givers and the (often unwilling) receivers of it.
| Craighead wrote:
| these people are boring, words spent talking about nothing is
| akin to throwing fresh food away, I'm not a psychologist and I
| have my own problems, why should I have to listen to others
| drone on about nothing when we could be working together to fix
| either or both of our issues.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Because much of the time you just haven't realized yet that
| you don't really know shit about shit, and good friends
| communicate in a variety of different ways about different
| subjects, sometimes just listening, sometimes actually
| helping someone with an issue they've asked for help with.
| Lack of versatility in that area means one will probably
| struggle to form more than the most superficial of
| relationships, because ironically it ends up being more
| shallow to think you're in a position to do something more
| impactful than offering your time to listen.
|
| It's like coming onto a new team as a junior software dev
| thinking you'll introduce whatever hot new build tool or
| refactor the code that sucks that someone wrote 15 years ago,
| and then getting fired because you're clueless.
| resource_waste wrote:
| I agree.
|
| My wife basically never gives people feedback unless its
| positive. She is a people pleaser, popular, all that stuff.
| No one asks her for advice.
|
| I am much more controversial. I have to ignore emails and
| text messages of people asking for advice because it happens
| too much. (I'm busy with my own life, the people asking for
| advice are low-mid tier and wont follow it, people are asking
| for my expertise for free)
|
| I've actually hired other people to be a second brain because
| my wife cannot give negative feedback.
| fragmede wrote:
| Fascinating. Can you say more about that? How did you find
| them and vet them?
| pdimitar wrote:
| Will second that many times. As a fairly proactive guy who
| almost never leaves any loose ends in his relationships, I
| overdid giving the advice and some people started avoiding me.
| I was bitter about it until I realized they did not want their
| problem fixed, they sought sympathy.
|
| Nothing wrong with that, it's just that my mind immediately
| jumps to potential solutions.
|
| But I was severely humbled on that front after I have allowed a
| super dark period in my life (7-8 years, still ongoing but is
| now being actively attacked and positive signs are starting to
| get visible). I began to understand that there are also
| situations where you can't do almost anything but you still
| need a kind word.
|
| So I started giving that and only vaguely hinting at the
| potential of an advice (so subtle that most people missed it
| which I am very okay with) and lo and behold, the new people in
| my life love chatting with me.
|
| We have a saying in our country: "You can't force-feed wisdom
| and shove it down people's throats like you would do for a sick
| person who still needs food".
| gedy wrote:
| > until I realized they did not want their problem fixed,
| they sought sympathy.
|
| That goes both ways, as many of the people I've run into who
| just want sympathy, can bring a lot of stress on the
| listeners. E.g. I can't take hearing complaints about abusive
| partners, etc so that they feel a little better for the
| moment, then they march right back to them.
|
| Growing up with a serious complainer caused me to
| instinctively try and fix issues, and to avoid if you don't
| want that type of help.
| lazide wrote:
| Yup. Sometimes all the listening is doing is enabling a
| very dangerous situation.
|
| If someone is the recipient of that kind of complaining as
| a kid from a parent, it would also explain some 'don't even
| try that towards me' reactions.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Absolutely. No one can listen or provide sympathy
| indefinitely. Trying to is a short path to burnout. Almost
| everyone could benefit from being listened to, but I have
| to remember, it doesn't always have to be me
| pdimitar wrote:
| Quite true. I am not advocating for "always listen" and
| even if that brands me as a monster I very often do NOT
| advocate for "always be kind" -- there are many people
| whose problems I have zero patience for.
|
| My bigger point was that if you consciously chose to sit or
| take a walk with that person and if you truly care then you
| should make sure they feel listened to and understood
| before giving advice -- if you give advice at all.
|
| This presupposes that you care about that person which I'll
| immediately agree is not a given for most people you'll
| ever meet.
| resource_waste wrote:
| I was at a bakery grand opening from an uneducated rural
| family.
|
| Plenty of their rural friends listened to the difficulties,
| wished them the best.
|
| Bring in the MBA + Industrial Engineer, and tell them some
| advice on processes, economics, and as a bonus, I was an
| Electrical Engineer for a few years so I had some advice on
| their oven problem.
|
| What is better? The person that says "You look beautiful", or
| "You have a piece of fuzz in your hair?"
| stavros wrote:
| Sometimes I want to hear that I'm beautiful, even with the
| fuzz in my hair.
| MikeTheGreat wrote:
| Thank you for sharing! Based on your last sentence I think
| we're in agreement that it's probably not great to give
| someone unsolicited advice (but it's fine if we disagree). I
| wanted to throw out a couple more thoughts:
|
| I think that having experience in the business (or not) is
| important. I think that sometimes giving advice on an area
| that one doesn't have experience in can be a weird way to put
| oneself in a 'one up' position. Kind of a "Look, I don't even
| do your job, but let me tell you how to do it better" kind of
| statement.
|
| I'm not saying that this was your intention or your effect
| but I think it's something engineers are prone to - I know
| I've done this. Wasn't there even a name for this? Something
| about "dinner party advice"? If this rings a bell for anyone
| I'd appreciate the help about this.
|
| Sometimes I've found that if I have experience in the area I
| can suggest a small change with a substantial benefit
| (because I've actually done this enough times to know that
| the advice will actually help, actually) but even there I'd
| be really hesitant to offer unsolicited advice.
|
| And, as an added bonus, consider that they may have already
| committed to what they're doing. In which case, even if
| you're right, you're basically telling them that they've done
| something wrong - maybe they can fix it (with more effort
| and/or money) maybe they can't, but that's gotta be an extra
| burden for them.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| https://books.google.com/books?id=uJQbhDs4dMMC&pg=PA47&lpg=P.
| ..
| sqeaky wrote:
| Depends on context.
|
| If someone just needs the emotional energy to get back into
| the fight then a compliment is often what is needed.
|
| If someone is about to do something imminently that you see a
| correctable fault with and they don't then pointing it out is
| likely correct.
|
| So many people up here thinking there is always 1 exactly
| right course of action! Why?! Why do so many otherwise smart
| people fall back to the silliest of binary thinking and
| heuristics?
| dakiol wrote:
| > So many people up here thinking there is always 1 exactly
| right course of action! Why?! Why do so many otherwise
| smart people fall back to the silliest of binary thinking
| and heuristics?
|
| I was one of those. I know the answer: I wasn't/I'm not
| that intelligent. I learnt that being technically right is
| not as important as I thought (and I also learnt to care
| less about it specially when I'm surrounded by other
| technical people).
| sqeaky wrote:
| Reflection is a form of intelligence. Being able to
| acknowledge you were once wrong is not a skill everyone
| has (and being technically correct is a super important
| part of being smart at least in tech). I hope you see how
| smart you are and keep getting smarter.
| Jensson wrote:
| > I learnt that being technically right is not as
| important as I thought
|
| Only in discussions, whenever you do anything being right
| is the most important thing as doing the wrong thing is
| just contra productive, being right saves a massive
| amount of time and work.
| sqeaky wrote:
| Careful to not get sucked into a binary trap. Most (but
| not all) problems exist on a gradient you can often be
| "right enough", "fast enough", and as uncomfortable as it
| seems we can be "correct enough" or even "coherent
| enough" to succeed.
| dakiol wrote:
| I think there's a difference between being right and
| being technically right (I wrote about the latter). For
| example, being technically right could mean not to lend
| money to your best friend because you have historical
| proof that the money will be lost and you won't get paid
| back. Being right in this scenario means: give that money
| to your best pal because that's what best friend are for.
| I could be getting this wrong, though (bear with me).
|
| I don't want to be technically right 100% of the time
| (it's hard for me because of my background, I tend to
| think in analytical terms first, and in humane terms
| second). Obviously this doesn't apply to every scenario,
| but I think the audience gets the idea: there are people
| out there (me in the past) that go 100% of the time the
| "technically right" way, no matter what and you cannot
| convince them of doing the opposite because they can
| prove it to you that they are "right"
| lmm wrote:
| > Only in discussions, whenever you do anything being
| right is the most important thing as doing the wrong
| thing is just contra productive, being right saves a
| massive amount of time and work.
|
| Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes doing it the way people
| expect will be better for future maintenance. Sometimes
| doing it the way that makes your boss look good will be
| better for you. All interesting decisions are close and
| uncertain.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Im on the opposite end. I wish people gave more unsolicited
| advice, or at least asked if I wanted it. I look around and
| think there is a dearth of advice and opinions. People are so
| cautious about giving subjective feedback that they dont offer
| it at all, leading to detriment.
|
| I think advice is an important part of a community and a
| support network, and am exceedingly grateful to those who have
| offered it to me.
| crngefest wrote:
| You can instantly improve that situation by asking for advice
| and feedback.
| soheil wrote:
| Advice giving is a bit overrated, lots just want validation,
| not solutions
| TheCleric wrote:
| This is spot on. I took a few counseling courses in college,
| and the thing I remember most was that we were instructed to
| never give advice. Ask questions, get clarifications, repeat
| back information, but don't say "Here's what I would do.."
|
| In many ways it was similar to rubber duck debugging, as the
| goal seemed to be to facilitate the person being counseled on
| finding the solution on their own by seeing the problem with
| fresh eyes.
| nox101 wrote:
| My daughter said she's planning on going to try heroin,
| fentanyl, and meth this weekend with some friends. Should I
| give her advice?
| rdtsc wrote:
| If you're reading and asking HN to find out, it may already
| be too late ;-)
| fragmede wrote:
| You're not actually a parent, are you?
| asdfman123 wrote:
| Nine times out of ten, people want to give advice to either 1)
| to feel cleverer than the person receiving it or 2) get them to
| stop talking about their problems.
|
| If you're struggling with a problem, do you usually need
| someone to act smarter than you or tell you to be quiet?
| yibg wrote:
| Or sometimes worse: Person genuinely wants advise for a real
| problem, you give advise, which they take, and it turns out
| badly. Now it's your fault.
| daniel-thompson wrote:
| I think it's a pretty simple, and timeless, aspect of human
| nature:
|
| "People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they
| have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the
| mind of others."
|
| - Blaise Pascal, 1670
| pixl97 wrote:
| The trick is suggesting something to a person in a manner so
| they thought they came up with the idea itself.
| syndicatedjelly wrote:
| Seriously, this was like the biggest epiphany I had out of my
| 20s. The way to convince anyone of anything isn't to beat
| them over the head into submission. It's to drop the idea off
| casually, let them ignore it for a while, and watch them
| slowly come around to this strange idea sitting around that
| actually seems to work...
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| The way i've heard this described is "place your truth,
| gently, next to theirs". Then walk away. No pressure, no
| sales, nothing. That's the only way it can be adopted.
| tnel77 wrote:
| I love the movie Inception.
| passion__desire wrote:
| > themselves discovered
|
| Do you think people consider recommendation systems (feeds
| which inform their worldview) to be a part of natural order of
| things so they don't suspect it. Even if they know it to be
| algorithmic, nudges can be inserted at appropriate times when
| our guards are down.
| ryandrake wrote:
| This is one of the ways people can go down the rabbit hole of
| conspiracy theories. They think they "discovered for
| themselves" some secret truth that "the elite" or "the
| experts" don't want them to know. Then they find a community
| of similarly-awakened people who lower their guards even more
| and point them to other "alternative truths" that they can go
| DiscoverForThemselves(tm) too.
|
| Probably the same psychology behind those obnoxious AI-
| generated ads that say things like "Here's the secret about
| gut bacteria that doctors don't want you to know!"
| duwease wrote:
| This is exactly the reason QAnon took off. It evolved from
| ARG-ish games without the goal of being persuasive about
| real-world things. But a participant back then realized how
| people enjoyed figuring out the 'puzzle', and how to lead
| them to the conclusion without telling them, and once you
| add political agendas we got what we have today.
| ysofunny wrote:
| absolutely, but I consider that as the "environment" of
| cultural evolution so to say
|
| meaning as we collectively get used to a technology we figure
| these kinds of things out, and even become desensitised to
| them.
|
| of course people got taken by surprise at first (e.g. first
| trump campaign's use of those kinds of manipulations over
| recommendation feeds) but culture (youths and other children)
| do adapt and react to the "environment" or landscape
| Balgair wrote:
| Two other aphorisms come to my mind:
|
| - Persuasion is pegged to a person.
|
| In that, it's not that the person hasn't heard the arguments
| before, it's that they haven't met the right person to say it
| to them. Often, that person is in the mirror.
|
| - If you want money, ask for advice. If you want advice, ask
| for money.
| csours wrote:
| Stories are more real than facts.
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| Stories are understood better than facts.
| knighthack wrote:
| Inception.
| jprete wrote:
| I wonder if the problem is that, when you give someone advice,
| you're not giving them the whole thought-structure you've built
| that strongly implies the advice - you're just giving them the
| result. So they don't have any of the ideas that support the
| advice, just a blind aphorism.
|
| Maybe it would help to only give advice in long discussions
| where you show someone all the structure under the advice and
| then poke at it together to see where the weak spots are.
| rcy wrote:
| sounds like therapy
| Timon3 wrote:
| This is a theory of mine for which I haven't specifically
| looked into evidence, so take it with a grain of salt - but
| I'm convinced that this is why storytelling exists, and
| specifically why the Hero's journey is so common: stories are
| essentially beneficial viruses. They exploit our innate
| desire for discovery by packaging the information into a
| format that is interesting in the moment, and because we see
| someone else learning the lesson we are meant to learn, we
| feel as if we've discovered it ourselves.
|
| This would also neatly explain _why_ we discovered
| storytelling in the first place, and why so many story
| elements have changed little over thousands of years -
| stories "evolved" with us to become more and more effective
| at inoculating us against dangers which we can survive
| through our intellect.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > I wonder if the problem is that, when you give someone
| advice, you're not giving them the whole thought-structure
| you've built that strongly implies the advice - you're just
| giving them the result. So they don't have any of the ideas
| that support the advice, just a blind aphorism.
|
| I'm skeptical. My observation is that it's the messenger that
| is ignored. Ignoring the advice is simply a side-effect of
| this.
|
| Consider how many people pay therapists many thousands of
| dollars to simply hear what their spouse was telling them for
| years.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| > Consider how many people pay therapists many thousands of
| dollars to simply hear what their spouse was telling them
| for years.
|
| An independent professional can confirm real problems.
| Sometimes they're significantly more useful than friends.
| Sometimes less.
| stonethrowaway wrote:
| Clicking on the thread I expected this to be the top comment
| because of how low effort and high brow it is (comments write
| themselves around pop topics, I find). You can go so far as to
| skip reading the article. But there is no real way to verify
| it. It sounds good and gives whoever says it a sense of
| smugness ("pretty simple, and timeless"), but that's about it.
| The person saying it has no idea either way.
| keybored wrote:
| > Maybe your advice requires a lot of willpower.
|
| Is willpower even a large factor in habit formation? Isn't that
| just a myth?
|
| > Why? Probably because running is hard. I maintain that if you
| run the right way, it isn't nearly as hard as it first seems. But
| it's still hard. Buying headphones or installing an air purifier
| is incredibly easy.
|
| Yeah running is hard. That's what I thought for the first 38
| years of my life. I was "running hard" like you're supposed to.
| Then I overheard that, for aerobic fitness, it's best to stick to
| "Zone 2" for maybe 80% of your running time. What, really?
|
| So much more comfortable. In fact it can be invigorating.
|
| So why did it take so long (and happenstance) to figure this out?
| When this is apparently what serious aerobic runners do nowadays?
| On one hand I'm not that surprised when I look at _fitness_ (not
| sports, just recreational fitness) itself: lots of ego and self-
| identity around having the willpower (allegedly) to stick to
| their particular fitness regime, which includes othering those
| who do not.
| nemo44x wrote:
| > Is willpower even a large factor in habit formation? Isn't
| that just a myth?
|
| I'm not sure, but I do believe there is a difference in what it
| takes to form a habit by having to _do_ something as opposed to
| forming a habit by _stopping_ doing something. I think one of
| them takes willpower but not sure which one.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe]
|
| Some more discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40936357
| elchief wrote:
| I only take advice from people that are successful in that domain
| (sometimes people that suck at something still give advice on
| it), and are similar to me (I don't want exercise advice from my
| grandmother)
|
| Even when I'm giving advice on a domain that I'm successful in,
| to a person that's similar to me, they rarely take it, so I've
| stopped giving it
| giantg2 wrote:
| What if your grandmother was fit and knows what she's talking
| about? Just because someone isn't currently successful doesn't
| mean they weren't successful in the past.
|
| Many _experts_ have differing opinions (especially in the
| expertise space). It also depends on how you define experts.
| Just being successful in the domain could be a result of luck.
| redhed wrote:
| Honestly, after giving and taking a lot of advice in my life, I
| think the problem is people have something (A) they want to do in
| a situation, they then ask all their friends / family / mentors
| for advice, and even if 9/10 say to do B, they listen to the one
| person who says to do A. So it's not that people don't listen to
| advice, they just shop around and listen to somebody's advice
| that fits the desires they already have.
|
| This has lead me to think the best thing you can do for yourself
| is to just ask a select few people who you really trust for
| advice. You still might not listen but at least you'll go into a
| decision knowing you're not listening to any of the advice you
| received.
| keiferski wrote:
| In a lot of situations, it is a social expectation to ask for
| advice, even if you have no intention of following it.
|
| At the same time, it is socially inappropriate to tell someone
| you don't want their advice because you disagree with their
| opinions/life decisions/etc.
|
| Which is why, as a general rule, I think you should only take
| advice from people that have the same situation that you want to
| have - unless it's negative advice not to do what they did.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| This lines up with one of the best pieces of advice I've ever
| received: if you want to accomplish something, find someone
| who's done it successfully, and do what they do.
|
| Basically, follow a proven recipe for success. Don't try to
| figure everything out yourself, pretty much _anything_ you
| might want to do has already been done, and done well, by
| someone.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > if you want to accomplish something, find someone who's
| done it successfully, and do what they do.
|
| This is poor advice: every person accomplished in $FOO has
| had a large component consisting of luck.
|
| You can do everything Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or Obama did,
| and still not get anywhere close to accomplishing what they
| did.
| keiferski wrote:
| No, you can't teleport back to the beginning of the
| computer revolution, so you can't "do everything Steve Jobs
| or Bill Gates did."
|
| Nor is this advice typically intended for some extreme
| example like becoming a billionaire or president. It's more
| like: if you want to have a successful marriage, imitate
| the guy that's been married for 25 years, don't listen to
| the advice of the twice divorced guy (unless he's telling
| you what _not_ to do.)
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| The thing is, even if someone listens to you with great intent,
| their life experience will usually preclude them from having to
| give any actionable advice. That's why, if someone is seeking you
| out for advice, you might want to stop and take the time to talk
| to them about their issue. They're seeking you out because they
| feel that your experience and problem resolution could
| potentially be valuable to them.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I persuaded one person to start nasal rinsing and another person
| to start singing.
|
| That is my list of successes at 45 years of age.
| rightbyte wrote:
| I noticed my brother had tied his shoes the wrong way his whole
| life (grandma knot). He was grateful when I showed him the
| proper way.
| mindaslab wrote:
| I don't like this guys advice.
| nemo44x wrote:
| I think about this sometimes and I think the article is on to
| something when they point out that often advice is describing the
| outcome, not really how to get there. You see this often is
| sports training.
|
| For instance, in golf you'll often see instructors on YouTube or
| in a blog say that you need to "create lag" and to have "shaft
| lean at impact" when describing the ideal state of the golf swing
| at certain intervals. But these are missing the point entirely -
| you don't force lag or shaft lean. They are byproducts of other
| swing mechanics and will occur when those mechanics are performed
| well and in proper sequence with good timing.
|
| You see this happen where the effect is mistaken for the cause.
| So of course the person doesn't _take the advice_ because they
| fundamentally misunderstand the problem to be solved or the
| actions required to get into the state that indicates good form.
| The outcome is mistaken for the process.
| Adrock wrote:
| "Move your feet up" is a cue. It's shorthand for something much
| more complicated that you've already learned and need to be
| reminded to apply in the moment.
|
| When squatting, someone might tell you to "drive from the hips"
| or "knees out." When singing, someone might advise "diaphragm!"
| When coding, "DRY!" The obvious interpretation of these things
| don't stand on their own.
|
| Cues aren't advice.
| rmacqueen wrote:
| Yea this is a good point. Same with "lean forward" during
| skiing. It's only really helpful for someone who already knows
| why you need to lean forward (and is able to do so) but just
| had a momentary lapse.
| seymore_12 wrote:
| An important reason for intergenerational conflict is that older
| generation offers mostly advice, while young generation expects
| an examples.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Old geezer angles: There's a long and winding road between "they
| followed your advice right away" and "giving them advice had no
| effect". Your advice, or some of it, could become their Plan B.
| Or something that they try a time or few in the future. Or
| something they pass on to a third person. Or a memory of your own
| preferences. Or part of how they start behaving when they're in a
| different situation, or getting up toward your age. Or an
| anecdote when they're speaking at your memorial.
|
| And the tone and perspective of your advice counts for at least
| as much as the advice itself.
|
| ADDED: How you react to people following, or not following, your
| advice is part of that "tone and perspective" stuff.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| The advisor must work out a compensation to the 'advisee' if his
| advise didn't work. Most advise would be acted upon.
|
| Of course in practice most advisors won't do it which essentially
| means that they do not know or have cared to understand all
| nuances involved.
| bityard wrote:
| I guess this is entirely tangential, but one of the stories in
| here resonated with me.
|
| I had much in common with a childhood friend. We bonded over
| similar interests in electronics, then video games, then
| computers in elementary school. He was definitely smarter than me
| when he could motivate himself to learn things. But in
| retrospect, I had dogged persistence on my side. As we moved past
| high school, I went into the military but kept my computer
| interests while he went to an art school and sort of floundered
| for a number of years. Getting into and out of minimum wage jobs
| and various MLM schemes. After I got out of the military and
| starting my first IT job, I tried to convince him a few times
| that he would be awesome at the same things I was doing at the
| time and would make a lot more money than he was at the time. But
| I guess it just wasn't what he wanted.
|
| Fast forward a decade or two and he now owns a very successful
| potato-chip distributing business where he lives and bootstrapped
| a second side-business doing video drone photography for real
| estate listings. I think we make about the same amount of money,
| except he doesn't have a desk job, gets many more vacations, and
| doesn't have to sit through multiple hours of meetings a day.
|
| So it seems he turned out alright for him despite not taking my
| advice. (Or possibly anyone else's!)
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Tough to change a persons nature, advise are like stock tips
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I love good stock tips. I wish I got more of them.
| eastbound wrote:
| Going to an art school sounds very hard, because the measure of
| success is very erratic, so you can never congratulate yourself
| or hold yourself to a plan. Maybe he has as much grit as anyone
| and such studies aren't good for motivation.
| mvkel wrote:
| I try not to ever give advice, even if someone explicitly asks
| for it.
|
| I try to share my experience, or a story, and hopefully some of
| it resonates.
|
| The most annoying thing I'd hear from other business folk when I
| was running a company was "you know what I think you should do?"
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The author uses rock climbing as an example. Notably, in most
| climbing circles there is an almost universally disliked
| personality type - someone who runs around a gym or outdoor
| climbing area shouting advice at climbers on routes. Most people
| find this annoying, distracting, and also it ruins the fun
| involved in figuring a problem out by yourself. Thus the rule to
| learn in climbing - if you want climbing friends and partners -
| is to _never_ give advice to someone on a route unless they
| explicitly ask for it.
|
| The clear exception to this rule is when you see that someone has
| done something that might get them killed - forgotten to tie into
| the rope, clip into the anchor, etc.
|
| This also applies to laboratory and manufacturing work with
| dangerous chemicals and equipment. If people can't follow
| protocols designed to keep them from serious injury, even after
| it's been explained to them repeatedly why those protocols exist,
| the only advice worth giving is 'find another career where you're
| less likely to poison/maim yourself and your co-workers.' This
| tends to cause interpersonal conflict, so such people are often
| instead promoted into a position where they can do little harm.
| Some people even game this, hoping a display of incompetence will
| keep them from being assigned difficult work.
|
| It's thus usually best to keep your advice to yourself when
| dealing with other adults, unless they come to you and say "I'm
| stuck, what do you think I should do with this problem?"
| toast0 wrote:
| > the only advice worth giving is 'find another career where
| you're less likely to poison/maim yourself and your co-
| workers.' This tends to cause interpersonal conflict, so such
| people are often instead promoted into a position where they
| can do little harm.
|
| I mean you say they should find another career where they're
| less likely to cause harm, and yet you're upset when they
| obtain a position where they can do little harm.
| csours wrote:
| Good Advice is Contingent
|
| Someone wrote a post that I can't find right now with a title
| like that - good advice accounts for the target's personal
| situation.
|
| Good advice is not a list of winning lottery numbers, it's a
| description of a state transition; some state transitions are
| really hard and scary.
| rudasn wrote:
| "State transition" is very well put, as in that's almost always
| the end result of either seeking advice, receiving it, or
| giving it.
|
| Thanks.
| firefoxd wrote:
| When I was leaving for America, my aunt pulled me aside and had a
| serious talk with me. "Be very careful," she ended. My thoughts?
| She was jealous that I was going to America and not her kids. I
| had just turned 18.
|
| But then, I found myself depressed, disappointed, and betrayed in
| the US. I thought of her advice. "Be very careful." I knew i
| needed to be careful, I wanted to be careful. But what does being
| careful means?
|
| She was right about what my life would turn into. Two decades
| later, my entire experience into the US boils down to Be Careful.
| It's not bad advice, but you have to unpack it. It's a zip file
| that only time and experience can decompress.
| OnionBlender wrote:
| What does "be very careful" even mean? Be careful of what?
| That's so vague to be completely unhelpful.
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| I had the same thought, what does that mean?
| mariocesar wrote:
| Most people don't realize they're in free fall when you offer
| them a parachute, and most advice will tell you to take skydiving
| lessons in mid-fall.
|
| Giving advice is a bet; taking it is a risk. For both, awareness
| and context are key.
|
| It might be more effective to refrain from giving advice. Instead
| of solving problems, we should focus on helping people recognize
| where they are and whether this place is in free fall: Does the
| ground seem further away than usual to you?
| ano-ther wrote:
| You can't tell people anything
| http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-an...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23617188
| switch007 wrote:
| Tell a story. "I had this friend once...". I find it incredibly
| effective
| m3kw9 wrote:
| A 2 sentence advise trying to change a persons nature and natural
| reaction is a tough ask
| bloomingeek wrote:
| Perhaps wisdom isn't valued enough. Perhaps people think data is
| the same as knowledge, and knowledge is the same as wisdom. Both
| are wrong, wisdom is far superior. Common sense is gained by
| reasoning and experience, are these two tools falling out of
| value?
| nilirl wrote:
| I like the analogy of a physical trainer or coach using cues to
| help the trainee perform a movement correctly.
|
| They translate their knowledge of bio-mechanics and human anatomy
| to sensory information a non-expert can use to take action.
|
| I think that may be the formula: Having trust as an authority and
| being able to communicate actionably. Miss either one and the
| "consumer" won't or can't take your advice.
| asdf6969 wrote:
| Unsolicited advice is very rude and most people have no idea why
| they succeed at something. Please stop giving advice.
| sqeaky wrote:
| > Please stop giving advice.
|
| This is advice.
| asdf6969 wrote:
| Incorrect
| sqeaky wrote:
| This isn't advice.
| asdf6969 wrote:
| yep
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| It works be cool to parse advice by the amount of will power
| required to execute.
|
| How can will-power be measured though?
| daniel71l wrote:
| A different perspective. We all have our shadows, of things we
| believe to be but hurt us . When we need advice its usually about
| these topics. So the advice conflicts with our beliefs and we
| cannot act on them . Since these beliefs are hidden (shadows)
| then we ha e feelings against the advice and we rationalize why
| its wrong. In the proposed analysis, the answers are
| rationalizations of the feelings we have.
| randcraw wrote:
| Unsolicited opinion is just noise. If someone wants advice, in
| addition to the conclusion, they need to hear the reasoning and
| contextual facts that make that advice useful and reliable.
|
| Everyone knows that 95% of advice is opinion. So they filter it
| out. That's why almost all advice doesn't move the needle.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 100% of advice is opinion, but that doesnt mean it is bad. I
| heavily value the opinion of individuals I hold in high esteem.
| pella wrote:
| _" Could you change when change really mattered? When it mattered
| most? Yes, you say? Try again. Yes? You're probably deluding
| yourself. You wouldn't change. Don't believe it? You want odds?
| Here are the odds, the scientifically studied odds: nine to one.
| That's nine to one against you. How do you like those odds? This
| revelation unnerved many people in the audience last November at
| IBM's "Global Innovation Outlook" conference. The company's top
| executives had invited the most farsighted thinkers they knew
| from around the world to come together in New York and propose
| solutions to some really big problems. They started with the
| crisis in health care, an industry that consumes an astonishing
| $1.8 trillion a year in the United States alone, or 15% of gross
| domestic product. A dream team of experts took the stage, and you
| might have expected them to proclaim that breathtaking advances
| in science and technology -- mapping the human genome and all
| that -- held the long-awaited answers. That's not what they said.
| They said that the root cause of the health crisis hasn't changed
| for decades, and the medical establishment still couldn't figure
| out what to do about it. Dr. Raphael "Ray" Levey, founder of the
| Global Medical Forum, an annual summit meeting of leaders from
| every constituency in the health system, told the audience, "A
| relatively small percentage of the population consumes the vast
| majority of the health-care budget for diseases that are very
| well known and by and large behavioral." That is, they're sick
| because of how they choose to live their lives, not because of
| environmental or genetic factors beyond their control. Continued
| Levey: "Even as far back as when I was in medical school" -- he
| enrolled at Harvard in 1955 -- "many articles demonstrated that
| 80% of the health-care budget was consumed by five behavioral
| issues." Levey didn't bother to name them, but you don't need an
| MD to guess what he was talking about: too much smoking,
| drinking, eating, and stress, and not enough exercise."_
|
| ...
|
| _" Reframing alone isn't enough, of course. That's where Dr.
| Ornish's other astonishing insight comes in. Paradoxically, he
| found that radical, sweeping, comprehensive changes are often
| easier for people than small, incremental ones. For example, he
| says that people who make moderate changes in their diets get the
| worst of both worlds: They feel deprived and hungry because they
| aren't eating everything they want, but they aren't making big
| enough changes to quickly see an improvement in how they feel, or
| in measurements such as weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol.
| But the heart patients who went on Ornish's tough, radical
| program saw quick, dramatic results, reporting a 91% decrease in
| frequency of chest pain in the first month. "These rapid
| improvements are a powerful motivator," he says. "When people who
| have had so much chest pain that they can't work, or make love,
| or even walk across the street without intense suffering find
| that they are able to do all of those things without pain in only
| a few weeks, then they often say, 'These are choices worth
| making.' " While it's astonishing that most patients in Ornish's
| demanding program stick with it, studies show that two-thirds of
| patients who are prescribed statin drugs (which are highly
| effective at cutting cholesterol) stop taking them within one
| year. What could possibly be a smaller or easier lifestyle change
| than popping a pill every day? But Ornish says patients stop
| taking the drug because it doesn't actually make them feel any
| better. It doesn't deal with causes of high cholesterol, such as
| obesity, that make people feel unhealthy. The paradox holds that
| big changes are easier than small ones. Research shows that this
| idea applies to the business realm as well. Bain & Co., the
| management consulting firm, studied 21 recent corporate
| transformations and found that most were "substantially
| completed" in only two years or less while none took more than
| three years. The means were drastic: In almost every case, the
| CEOs fired most of the top management. Almost always, the
| companies enjoyed quick, tangible results, and their stock prices
| rose 250% a year on average as they revived. IBM's turnaround
| hinged on a radical shift in focus from selling computer hardware
| to providing "services," which meant helping customers build and
| run their information-technology operations. This required a
| momentous cultural switch -- IBMers would have to recommend that
| a client buy from competitors such as Hewlett-Packard and
| Microsoft when it was in the client's interest. But the radical
| shift worked: Services have grown into IBM's core business and
| the key to its success. Of course, radical change often isn't
| possible in business situations. Still, it's always important to
| identify, achieve, and celebrate some quick, positive results for
| the vital emotional lifts that they provide. Harvard's Kotter
| believes in the importance of "short-term wins" for companies,
| meaning "victories that nourish faith in the change effort,
| emotionally reward the hard workers, keep the critics at bay, and
| build momentum. Without sufficient wins that are visible, timely,
| unambiguous, and meaningful to others, change efforts invariably
| run into serious problems."_
|
| via:
|
| _" FastCompany; By Alan Deutschman: Change or Die ; All
| leadership comes down to this: changing people's behavior. Why is
| that so damn hard? Science offers some surprising new answers --
| and ways to do better."_
|
| https://archive.md/FvqlE#selection-825.527-884.0
| from-nibly wrote:
| Advice is useless. You don't have the context, or theories (see
| programming/everything as theory building) to make a good
| decision for someone else.
|
| The only thing that works is sharing truth. When you don't know
| what else to do except share advice, make sure you spend a lot of
| time explaining the truths behind it.
| Johanx64 wrote:
| It's more than useless.
|
| People that 'give' advice will most likely take no part in the
| implementation of the 'advice', so they get zero blowback for
| being wrong or advising the wrong thing, and wouldn't think
| twice before giving it. (no skin in the game)
|
| Worst of all, most advice is given unprompted and is somebody
| just expanding his ego with his own bullshit. Advice is not in
| short supply. And I don't want to hear it (barring few rare
| exceptions)
|
| I can't recall the last time I had gotten good advice, other
| than unprompted criticism and naysayer sentiments.
|
| And the only good advice I've ever gotten is from people that I
| have gone out of my way and reached out to because of their
| demonstrated and undeniable expertise on whatever the subject
| might be.
| bradlys wrote:
| I'd be wary of following almost any romantic advice out there.
| People who are best qualified to give advice tend to give the
| least cause they know how little use there is in advice. This
| creates a scenario where the least useful advice is the most
| plenty because those with experience know that advice is useless.
|
| So many people have had the luxury of being physically
| attractive, in the right place at the right time, an upbringing
| that got them into social circles that would match them properly,
| a work environment that has potential partners, or having the
| fortune of being in a college where they could meet their
| partner. So many of these types of individuals will act as if
| romance is effortless because it really was for them. They never
| needed to do anything because life worked out that way just due
| to sheer luck. These types of individuals will be completely
| useless for dating advice (but will make up the majority of
| advice giving) because they've never struggled for a moment and
| never had to think about what they're doing right/wrong.
| rmacqueen wrote:
| "Just be yourself and the right person will come along!"
| bradlys wrote:
| People with full bellies will give this same advice if you're
| starving. "Food will appear when you least expect it!"
| rmacqueen wrote:
| Something I've come to realize is when someone gives advice,
| especially career related, it's usually directed at a young
| version of themselves rather than to anyone else. The motivation,
| even in subconscious, is usually therapeutic from the standpoint
| of the advice-giver rather than helpful to the advice-receiver.
| It doesn't mean that it can't still be helpful, but it should be
| understood in that light.
| zug_zug wrote:
| My advice on giving advice:
|
| Step 0 - Ask "Would you like my advice?" Anything other than a
| sincere yes (not a maybe, not a patient okay, not a hmm) then
| don't give advice.
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| The rules I have for myself when giving advice are:
|
| 1. Unsolicited advice is always criticism.
|
| 2. LISTEN TO THEIR ACTUAL PROBLEM ALL THE WAY.
|
| 3. Never tell someone what they should do, tell them what you
| would do in that situation.
|
| 4. Remember that the purpose of giving advice is just to
| illuminate options, not to have someone follow what you recommend
| to the letter.
|
| 5. As the advice giver understand that you could be the one who
| is wrong.
|
| It's never about trying to convince someone to do what you want,
| it's about showing them an option and letting them decide.
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| > Never tell someone what they should do, tell them what you
| would do in that situation.
|
| This is great. It's empathetic and much more likely to be heard
| and received.
| meken wrote:
| I often find myself taking this approach, but it's still
| manipulative because it's just me masking the fact that I'm
| really just trying to tell them what to do.
| radus wrote:
| I guess then you've got to abstract one level further and
| formulate your advice as an allegory.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > just trying to tell them what to do
|
| If they disregard your advice and you don't criticize them
| for it, you are absolutely not telling them what to do. For
| what it's worth.
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| > manipulative
|
| It's not manipulative to use techniques that increase the
| chances of your advice being heard and followed, it's just
| good communication.
| Jensson wrote:
| Depends on your motives, people would absolutely call it
| manipulative if your motives were to make their lives
| worse to benefit yourself. Advice aren't always good for
| people.
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| > if your motives were to make their lives worse to
| benefit yourself
|
| I guess I made an assumption that wasn't the case. Most
| people that have malign intentions aren't curious about
| these topics enough to discuss them openly.
|
| "persuasion" gets a bad rap because most people assume
| you are persuading someone from a good place to bad. The
| opposite occurs often as well.
| lmm wrote:
| Yes it is. If you say something that is less true because
| it's more likely to be followed, that's very clearly
| manipulation.
| intended wrote:
| I think you have a lot to unpack here, for yourself.
|
| You seem to have set up two purposes in conflict with each
| other.
|
| On one hand you are telling people what to do, nicely.
|
| On the other, you recognize the intent of such a statement
| is to share an experience to see if it fits their
| situation.
|
| The only person who can know the difference, most of the
| time, is you.
|
| After all, If your statement is helpful, people will use
| it.
|
| So is it an issue of you being insincere ? Or is it an
| issue if you being confused if you are being helpful but in
| reality coercive ?
|
| If it's insincerity, then do what makes you happier with
| your statements.
|
| If it's coercive, then give people a choice - let them know
| your concerns, ensure that they have all the information to
| own the choice.
| unbalancedevh wrote:
| It sounds good, but often still might be wrong. "That
| situation" includes details that still might not be clear.
| It's hard to communicate an entire frame of mind, and you
| might find that you'd in fact do something very different if
| you were confronted with it.
| digging wrote:
| Telling someone what you'd do in that situation is also
| another way of sussing out context they haven't told you
| yet. As an extremely simplified example:
|
| "I'd probably remove that piece right there first. It
| doesn't appear to fit with the rest."
|
| "That piece is holding together this whole subsystem, I'm
| not going to remove it."
| crngefest wrote:
| If someone tells me what to do I instinctively do the exact
| opposite or at least have the overwhelming urge to
| graybeardhacker wrote:
| Don't go read about Oppositional Defiance Disorder.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| ODD has some really questionable aspects. Especially
| considering half of children diagnosed with it are also
| ADHD. I highly suspect the issue is more with the authority
| figures not knowing how to handle neurodivergence than the
| children themselves.
|
| Many people tend to do the opposite of what they are told
| to do. In an individualist culture, this is normal.
| lazide wrote:
| A step back - I'd consider the possibility too that it's
| a learned behavior where they have received enough pain
| in the past doing what they were told, so literally have
| been conditioned to do the opposite of what they were
| told.
|
| And/or, never got attention or positive feedback when
| doing what they were told - but got lots of attention
| when they did what they were told not to do. Not
| necessarily positive, but something is better than
| nothing.
|
| Which isn't necessarily at odds with what you're saying.
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| As someone who has some of the traits this is absolutely
| it.
|
| When you spend your childhood being told by people to do
| things that will lead to, well, almost certainly being
| poor and having a shit life, you learn to just ignore
| advice and do the opposite.
|
| It is really hard to unlearn this in adulthood. I tend to
| get by by judging the person giving the advice e.g. if
| they seem successful then they are more likely to be
| correct than if they are not.
| smeej wrote:
| I developed something like this, but it manifests more as
| "question everything until it makes sense _to me._ "
|
| I feel like I'm constitutionally incapable of taking
| anybody's word for anything, but it's _vastly_ worse for
| anyone who reacts with hostility to my questions about
| points that don 't make sense to me.
|
| It was very much trained into me by my father that
| following the advice of those people leads to suffering
| and pain. He acted like he knew everything. He reacted
| with _rage_ when questioned. And looking back on it, he
| was (and remains) wrong about every single point of
| substance I ever remember his having made.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| I happen to agree. You can very easily train a child with
| a compatible personality or disability into an ODD
| diagnosis.
| lazide wrote:
| Oh god. So many layers. A+
|
| Bonus points in the situation they figure out what you're
| doing, and just go a third way. Like setting your house on
| fire.
| smeej wrote:
| I really don't like that this worked on me even though I'm
| not the person you were replying to.
|
| But thanks too.
| buttercraft wrote:
| The worst is when I decide for myself to do something, and
| then someone suggests the same course of action right as I'm
| about to do it. Well, now I don't want to.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| The most common problem with advice is that people give it
| before what they understand the real problem.
|
| If someone tells you their car is broken, it's not helpful to
| tell them that they should get it fixed, because maybe the REAL
| problem is they don't have the money for it and are ashamed to
| tell you. (And maybe the solution to that is more complicated
| than you think, too.)
|
| For advice to be remotely useful, you have to first put in the
| time to understand the real problem. It requires a lot of
| patience and requires you suspend judgment. If you're not
| willing to do that, then don't give advice!
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| This reminds me of my inlaws telling me their car's engine
| needed finetuning but they did not have the money to spend at
| it. After a month or so the car's engine broke down
| 'suddenly' in a total loss fashion. Somehow they managed to
| buy another car.
|
| I never understood the ways of their prioritization schemes
| and probably never will. PS of course I gave them the obvious
| advice. It feels that even though they never buy new cars
| like I do, they still manage to spend more money on cars then
| I do.
| hamasho wrote:
| > 1. Unsolicited advice is always criticism.
|
| This is important to me. Especially when I become a senior, my
| opinion without much thought can be taken as a criticism and
| make others irritated or insecure.
| efitz wrote:
| > LISTEN TO THEIR ACTUAL PROBLEM ALL THE WAY.
|
| This is the key. People want to be heard, and also people don't
| necessarily divulge detail in the order you expect. The very
| last thing that they say may completely invalidate the solution
| you've been building in your mind as they've been speaking.
|
| Back in the mid 90's I was working support for Windows NT
| Server. In my area we had our heavy hitters- the issues that
| came up several times a week- and we all knew them inside out.
| One day a paying support customer called and within 30 seconds
| of him starting to talk, I knew exactly what the problem was. I
| let him talk but after 5 minutes I was getting bored of
| minesweeper and thought maybe he'd appreciate me fixing his
| issue. I interrupted him and say, "hey, let's try this". Sure
| enough, within 2 minutes his issue was fixed. We ended the call
| politely and I congratulated myself on getting him to relief so
| quickly.
|
| A couple weeks later we got our support survey results for the
| month. That customer had been surveyed and was nice enough to
| write something other than just give a star rating or whatever.
| I will never forget what he wrote:
|
| "I don't feel like the engineer listened to me before he solved
| my problem."
|
| That was a lot to unpack at the time- at first I was frustrated
| because he didn't give me a top score when I knocked it out of
| the park in my own estimation, but after a lot of reflection
| I've taken that lesson to heart. That person's short comment
| made me a better person, certainly better at support but more
| empathic in general, and I owe them a debt that I can't repay
| but will pay forward.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| > Unsolicited advice is always criticism.
|
| It's a balance. Sometimes people ARE looking for advice, but do
| not present it that way. So if you don't provide your input,
| you come across as an a**le. Figuring out whether that's the
| case can be tricky based on your relationship with the person.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| These are gold. Worth a printout next to the monitor.
| Especially number one.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| You can get decent at things very quickly by following advice
| like the rock climbing example. The trick is doing the right
| thing "even if". Even if you see a handhold but not a foothold,
| push from your legs instead of pulling with your arms.
|
| Progressing from 0 to experience to decent can be fast if you're
| willing to make second choices. Realize that as a novice, your
| first impulse is probably wrong. If it comes into conflict with
| the advice of people who know what they're talking about, find a
| second or third impulse. Maybe you need a little more time to
| find that foothold.
|
| This is a type of discipline, but a small discipline. It's not
| about waking up at 4am and doing hours of drills every day. It's
| about doing _any_ amount of practice properly, _even if_ there's
| something that feels easier in the moment.
|
| (This leads into another rant of why "find what works for you" is
| the antifreeze of advice - tasty and toxic. It takes people out
| of a learning mindset and puts them in a judging one.)
| Modified3019 wrote:
| >If people have a good "user experience" when they interact with
| you, then they will want to interact with you more in the future.
|
| I really liked this particular framing.
|
| Of course that's because it concisely states what I'm already
| struggling to accomplish in a conversation, and the types of
| people I end up seeking or avoiding. It's obviously not going to
| stop a willful asshole from doing what they do, they know their
| user experience is bad, and they enjoy it that way.
|
| Another useful thing I eventually discovered that sticks with me
| is "Not all conversion is information exchange".
|
| A lot of the times when people talk, rather than wanting "facts
| or fixes", what they are instead seeking to accomplish is to
| share, regulate or calibrate their emotions with other people.
| Smalltalk isn't about the content (which will be forgotten), it's
| about social bonding and a way of saying to someone "you matter
| enough to be with". What they will remember is how they felt
| around you. For those like myself with some degree of
| alexithymia, it can be surprising just how much of an important
| factor emotions can play in the daily experience of other people.
| javier_e06 wrote:
| 2 days ago someone posted on FB a message protesting people for
| not wearing bike helmets on a nature trail. A 20ft wide dirt path
| bordering a river (as flat as it gets) that goes on for miles.
|
| There was serious push back. Mind your own beeswax.
|
| Advice can be seen as the slippery slope to coercion and
| manipulation.
| davisr wrote:
| I was once riding my scooter on a clean street with no cars or
| traffic anywhere around. The next thing I knew, I was regaining
| consciousness in front of first-responders.
|
| If I wasn't wearing a helmet that day, they would be picking
| bits of skull out of my brain, and I wouldn't be able to type
| this comment.
|
| Advice!
| hooverd wrote:
| Context! As an advice giver, it's so simple, people /just/ need
| to do X and it will solve all their problems. As someone on the
| receiving end, it's always more complicated. Unless we're talking
| about like lifting or climbing advice.
| dbjacobs wrote:
| After verifying that the person isn't just venting and looking
| for empathy, I'll put in my plug for learning about the
| transtheoretical model of change [1]. Step one is determining
| whether the person even sees a problem. If they don't, you can
| ask questions about what would things look like if there was a
| problem. But there is no point in giving advice until the
| preparation or action stages. Before that your best avenue is
| asking the right questions (see motivational interviewing [2]).
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transtheoretical_model [2] -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivational_interviewing
| teddyh wrote:
| "Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who
| supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way
| of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting
| over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth."
|
| -- Mary Schmich
| fragmede wrote:
| Ladies and gentlemen of the class of '99 Wear sunscreen If I
| could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be
| it A long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by
| scientists Whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more
| reliable Than my own meandering experience, I will dispense
| this advice now Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth, oh,
| never mind You will not understand the power and beauty of your
| youth Until they've faded, but trust me, in 20 years, you'll
| look back At photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't
| grasp now How much possibility lay before you and how fabulous
| you really looked You are not as fat as you imagine Don't worry
| about the future Or worry, but know that worrying Is as
| effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing
| Bubble gum The real troubles in your life Are apt to be things
| that never crossed your worried mind The kind that blindsides
| you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday Do one thing every day that
| scares you Saying, don't be reckless with other people's hearts
| Don't put up with people who are reckless with yours Floss
| Don't waste your time on jealousy Sometimes you're ahead,
| sometimes you're behind The race is long and in the end, it's
| only with yourself Remember compliments you receive, forget the
| insults If you succeed in doing this, tell me how Keep your old
| love letters, throw away your old bank statements Stretch Don't
| feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your
| life The most interesting people I know Didn't know at 22 what
| they wanted to do with their lives Some of the most interesting
| 40-year-olds I know still don't Get plenty of calcium Be kind
| to your knees You'll miss them when they're gone Maybe you'll
| marry, maybe you won't Maybe you'll have children, maybe you
| won't Maybe you'll divorce at 40, maybe you'll dance the 'Funky
| Chicken' On your 75th wedding anniversary Whatever you do,
| don't congratulate yourself too much Or berate yourself either
| Your choices are half chance, so are everybody else's Enjoy
| your body, use it every way you can Don't be afraid of it or
| what other people think of it It's the greatest instrument
| you'll ever own Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but
| your own living room Read the directions even if you don't
| follow them Do not read beauty magazines, they will only make
| you feel ugly Get to know your parents, you never know when
| they'll be gone for good Be nice to your siblings, they're your
| best link to your past And the people most likely to stick with
| you in the future Understand that friends come and go But a
| precious few, who should hold on Work hard to bridge the gaps
| in geography and lifestyle For as the older you get The more
| you need the people you knew when you were young Live in New
| York City once but leave before it makes you hard Live in
| northern California once but leave before it makes you soft
| Travel Accept certain inalienable truths Prices will rise,
| politicians will philander, you too, will get old And when you
| do, you'll fantasize that when you were young Prices were
| reasonable, politicians were noble And children respected their
| elders Respect your elders Don't expect anyone else to support
| you Maybe you have a trust fund, maybe you'll have a wealthy
| spouse But you never know when either one might run out Don't
| mess too much with your hair Or by the time you're 40 it will
| look 85 Be careful whose advice you buy but be patient with
| those who supply it Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing
| it is a way of fishing the past From the disposal, wiping it
| off, painting over the ugly parts And recycling it for more
| than it's worth But trust me on the sunscreen
|
| -Baz Luhrmann
| sqeaky wrote:
| Yet everyone here is giving advice?
| sqeaky wrote:
| Advice does work, just not every time. If we ignore all the
| successes of some action then of course that action looks like it
| doomed to fail.
| wtroughton wrote:
| Anyone else fall into the trap of procrastinating watching
| YouTube or pg's essays for advice?
| AndyNemmity wrote:
| You can't tell people anything
| http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-an...
| tunesmith wrote:
| I've had a few experiences where someone asked for advice, and I
| shared something very earnestly, come to find out much later that
| the part of the advice that really stuck with them was some
| extraneous point of mine that was completely tangential to what I
| was being so earnest about.
|
| I've also had a few experiences where someone gave me repeated
| advice that I rejected several times previous, until it finally
| "clicked" once.
|
| I think the processing of advice is a communication; it takes
| two. The giver has to try, and the receiver has to be in a state
| that is receptive to hearing it. Neither side has full control.
| So overall, I think it's good to just keep trying, knowing that
| it'll only break through sometimes.
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| Advice is tied to the individual giving it. What worked for
| them might work for you, but it worked given their
| circumstances, not yours.
| yibg wrote:
| The article touches on this too, from personal experience it
| seems like the likelihood of someone taking advice depends on
| both sides:
|
| - How good is the advice? specific > generic, personalized >
| general, actionable > not actionable, objective > biased etc,
| from someone knowledgeable > random person with no specific
| knowledge / expertise in the subject.
|
| - How receptive is the person receiving the advise? Was the
| advise unsolicited? Did the person ask because they want to
| confirm what they already think or are they actually looking
| for advise they can consider? Do they trust the person (both
| in intent and knowledge)?
|
| Ironically some times the advise I ignore the most are from
| those that are closest to me. Family, close friends etc. I
| know they have my best interest at heart and they might be
| knowledgeable about the subject and know me so have an
| understanding of what I want / don't want. But they're
| biased, so the advise tend to be tainted.
| intended wrote:
| The example in the article about climbing is
|
| "When in doubt, move your feet up."
|
| For giving good advice, I'd say the answer is don't give advice.
|
| It's very rare to enjoy such a massive experience and information
| advantage that you can say "be the sword", at just the right
| moment, to grant someone enlightenment.
|
| Good "advice" is work - you solve a problem.
|
| If you want to _help_ , engage in problem solving. Which is miles
| better than giving good advice.
|
| Most people are able to solve their own problems.
|
| Heck - how many times have you sought advice only to be told
| something you already knew?
|
| Most of the time ?
|
| Generally, people need space/ time to think, resources, or to
| learn something about the world/ themselves.
|
| Even what I'm saying isn't new to you. At most it's formulated in
| a different order or style, but it's not new.
|
| -----
|
| If asked a question, a common response from me would be:
|
| "this is the answer based on what you said, but it seems it would
| be obvious/ I suspect you have considered it. Am I missing
| something ?"
|
| Typically the answer is "yes" and then I get better information.
|
| If the answer is no, then I check why something obvious was
| missed.
|
| ----
|
| NB : Problem solving means actually solving things, not throwing
| your hands up when someone doesn't 'follow your solution'.
|
| A workable solution - works.
|
| Good engineering considers the real world limits of the
| participants.
|
| Everyone wants to be healthier - it's finding the motivation,
| time, type of exercise, and the rest that matter.
|
| And thats work. You may have to search, come up with ideas, or
| bring some relevant experience and memories to bear.
| Einenlum wrote:
| > If asked a question, a common response from me would be:"this
| is the answer based on what you said, but it seems it would be
| obvious/ I suspect you have considered it. Am I missing
| something ?"
|
| Damn, I love this. Thank you!
| osigurdson wrote:
| >> if in doubt, move your feet up
|
| Language can only describe a tiny fraction of human experience. I
| think this is where language based advice for physical things
| starts to break down (e.g. please explain exactly how I should
| move my arm, hand and fingers to pick up a cup of coffee).
| d--b wrote:
| I can't relate to neither the article nor the comments here.
|
| I ask and follow people's advice all the time, and people ask and
| follow my advice all the time.
|
| I need a new car? I'll ask to the guy-I-know-who-knows-about-
| cars.
|
| My in-laws want a new computer? I'll happily tell them about the
| pros and cons of computer x and y.
|
| At work, everyone asks everyone what they think is the best
| course of action.
|
| And somehow it happened to me a handful of times that a random
| friend of mine tells me that their successful career started
| because of some advice I gave them. It's a very rewarding thing.
|
| Some people don't take exactly your words, some people don't
| follow anything, but god, don't make it a generality...
| cladopa wrote:
| I also had really great experience with advisers. For example,
| when I was young, I was tall and athletic but very bad with the
| women that I wanted to date, so I just looked for people that
| were good with women and started going out with them and asking
| advice.
|
| Probably the advice they gave was not that good because they
| were naturals at what they did and did not understood what they
| did well. But doing what they did and comparing it with what I
| did before was extremely useful and my life changed radically.
|
| I have repeated the process so many times in my life with
| different groups of people: If I wanted to sell well or make
| more money I went and hanged out with exceptional sellers and
| understood their thinking and then I started selling well as
| well.
|
| What happens with lots of people is they tend to despise or
| envy those that are better than them, specially in socialist
| countries where envy is celebrated and sometimes imposed as a
| philosophy of life(I have lived in socialist countries). If you
| envy the man that is better with women that you are, it will be
| impossible for you to learn anything from him. You will always
| find a way to justify that you are right and the System is
| wrong and unfair and the System should be corrected for them so
| they don't need to change anything.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Surprising that culture isn't mentioned once in the article.
| Advice does work, and people follow it, but only in professions,
| cultures, places where people have a certain respect for
| experience.
|
| Skilled musicians with good mentors almost certainly listen to
| advice, because most of them very early had to figure out how to
| get rid of all their self learned terrible habits and then really
| paid attention because that sucks.
|
| People in cultures with respect for seniority listen to advice,
| people who have served in the military tend to listen to advice.
|
| I don't know who the author is but given some of their other
| articles I suspect they're surrounded by a lot of people who
| don't listen to advice... because that's exactly what they've
| been told since they've grown up (ironically maybe the first and
| last advice they listened to, technically). If you're in a
| culture that devalues mentorship, authority of teachers and where
| mistakes aren't really considered mistakes until you've made them
| yourself it's not that surprising that nobody ever takes advice.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| One factor I think this misses is that advice has to come from
| the perspective of _a person who has the problem_. And if you 're
| in a position to give advice, you often do not have the problem
| (and you may have never had it to begin with).
|
| As a concrete example: I have very poor executive function, and
| it was much worse in the past than it is today. I got a lot of
| advice for how to deal with that, but a lot of that advice
| involved strategies that work great _when you have executive
| function_ and terribly when you don 't. "Oh, just set a reward
| and have it after you do the thing", for example, only works if
| you can actually set and stick to such a rule. If you can't, it's
| useless.
|
| What I had to learn was ways to route around the way my brain
| works. I am, as far as I can tell, basically incapable of feeling
| a reward that's more than a day or two away. (Yes, this _is_ a
| weird trait to have as someone trying to run a company.) But that
| doesn 't mean I can't pursue long-term rewards: it means I have
| to restructure them into shorter-term rewards that I _can_ feel.
| I don 't think about what will happen when my company succeeds in
| the long term. I think about "okay, I've done all the things on
| this to-do list for today, and now I can relax and go do
| something that isn't work for a while and not feel guilty about
| not working". That's a reward that works with the way my brain
| functions.
|
| That understanding, in turn, required a sequence of steps that
| couldn't be easily skipped over. You have to do step N before you
| can do step N+1, because step N+1 often does not even make sense
| until step N is done. To quote my favorite book [1]:
|
| > "It is good," he thought, "to get a taste of everything for
| oneself, which one needs to know. That lust for the world and
| riches do not belong to the good things, I have already learned
| as a child. I have known it for a long time, but I have
| experienced only now. And now I know it, don't just know it in my
| memory, but in my eyes, in my heart, in my stomach. Good for me,
| to know this!"
|
| > [...] Therefore, he had to go out into the world, lose himself
| to lust and power, to woman and money, had to become a merchant,
| a dice-gambler, a drinker, and a greedy person, until the priest
| and Samana in him was dead. Therefore, he had to continue bearing
| these ugly years, bearing the disgust, the teachings, the
| pointlessness of a dreary and wasted life up to the end, up to
| bitter despair, until Siddhartha the lustful, Siddhartha the
| greedy could also die.
|
| I couldn't have skipped to my current understanding of motivation
| from the point I was at five or ten years ago. I had to go
| through a sequence of steps to understand progressively more of
| it. I had to see what a ruin my life could be without long-term
| thinking to understand that it was important to work on in the
| first place. I had to be pushed into an environment with very
| short-term tasks to see that a motivated version of myself was
| possible at all. And I had to go back to being out of work for a
| bit to see that the improvements I'd made weren't permanent and
| that that fundamental dysfunction could still come back without
| the right structure.
|
| None of these steps would have made sense in isolation. Each made
| sense only in light of the previous one. And they had to start at
| the beginning.
|
| -----
|
| So when I'm giving advice, I try to frame it in terms of _how I
| learned the lesson_ , as it looked from the inside. Here's an
| example, from a post [2] I made here on HN a while back,
| discussing my understanding of [disordered] anxiety:
|
| > Before I got hired on to my first proper job at Triplebyte, my
| life was not going very well. Employers wouldn't give me the time
| of day, I had no idea what (if anything) I was good at, and I
| didn't have any direction; this era of my life involved bad
| enough mental health that it very very nearly killed me. It
| wasn't just anxiety, but anxiety was certainly a part of it. I'd
| spend almost every night with my head going in loops I'm sure
| you'll recognize: "I didn't do anything today so I'll never do
| anything so I'll always be miserable and it's all my fault" being
| the gist.
|
| > Fast-forward a bit. I was about six weeks into my new job, and
| everything in my life was turning around in a way that seemed
| almost miraculous. But I found myself in bed ruminating anyway.
| That voice in my head did not acknowledge any of the ways my life
| had improved. It didn't care that my income had gone up an order
| of magnitude, that I'd found a community of people I loved, that
| I seemed to actually be good at something. What it cared about is
| that I hadn't done anything else. It pulled up every example it
| could find where I'd done less than perfectly during that time.
| I'd screwed up something at work that I felt bad about. I wasn't
| getting out and socializing as much as I'd like to. I wasn't
| exercising. Look at all these ways I was screwing up that would
| ruin my life!
|
| > But the benefit of having such a dramatic change in
| circumstances is that it makes the ways in which that voice
| doesn't care about reality much more obvious. I remember having a
| clarifying moment of "wait, wait, wait, hold on, everything is
| WAY better than it used to be, why the hell does this voice sound
| exactly the same?" It became clear to me in that moment that that
| anxious/self-critical voice (anxiety and depression are one voice
| in my head) clearly wasn't coming from my circumstances, because
| my circumstances had changed dramatically and the voice hadn't.
|
| The thrust of this discussion, of course, is the idea that _your_
| anxiety probably isn 't coming from _your_ circumstances either.
| But framing it as a realization about my own process of
| understanding:
|
| - starts from the perspective of what the problem "looks like
| from the inside"
|
| - provides a framework for how to take the next step for someone
| who is at an earlier one
|
| - provides an external pattern to look at that can help them
| recognize their own patterns and find the next step in the first
| place
|
| - removes their ego from the equation by being about how _I_ was
| wrong about something then, rather than telling them how they are
| wrong now
|
| See [3] for a longer example of the same idea.
|
| -----
|
| [1] https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2500/pg2500-images.html
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40191179 [3]
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40978749
| cladopa wrote:
| Not everyone can give good advice, but there is people out there
| that can.
|
| In my opinion, the best advisers are those that understand
| people's personalities and adapt for them. Most people out there
| do not like thinking, but some people think A LOT, even too much.
| You can not give the same advice to both groups: "Think before
| you act" only will work with the first group. It will be just
| wrong for the second. "Act impulsivelly without thinking" will be
| much better, because they will think too much by default.
|
| The same applies to any aspect of personality: extroversion and
| introversion. Openness, domination level... Someone is a
| visionary or loves to start projects but hates following through.
|
| Most of the time the best advice is stopping doing what you hate
| and finding someone who loves it. If you are introverted and love
| spending time on your own like reading books do not try to go to
| meet people all the time selling stuff, let extroverted people do
| that. If you are extroverted, do not stay at home programming
| alone for hours. Let introverted people do that.
|
| If you have a company you need to be a visionary and have great
| ideas about what the customer needs but at the same time you need
| to execute and implement on those ideas. Visionary/executor
| usually are opposite personalities. You need both in order to
| succeed. Most people try hard to be what they are not instead of
| looking for complementary personalities. I have seen so many solo
| founders destroy their life just because of not understanding
| this simple thing.
|
| Those that ignore personality differences will give terrible
| advice. I have seen parents forcing on their children advice on
| something that was very difficult for the parents to understand
| but the children have different personalities and they don't have
| the same problem. They don't need the same advice because they
| are different to there parents.
| etothepii wrote:
| I give lots of advice but I always caveat with: "I don't know
| what I'm talking about; get as much advice as you can; in the
| end, make up your own damn mind."
| bnormative wrote:
| It works if and only if it is requested.
| networked wrote:
| Scott Alexander has asked, "Should you reverse any advice you
| hear?": https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/24/should-you-reverse-
| any....
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Anchoring bias is the core of most poor decision making. For
| example, someone that publishes a poorly generated webpage using
| mostly llm/chatGPT. Assuming algorithms won't flag the farmed
| slop content, and drop it to page 87 of future search results.
|
| One could appeal to the publishers better nature, confront the
| shenanigans, or recommend a fiscally advantageous posture. Yet,
| after all is said and done... the appeal of duping people will
| hijack the commonsense region in some peoples brains.
|
| Anecdotally, I have observed people tend to double-down on
| mistakes, especially when their ego is involved in that decision
| process.
|
| What was truly amazing is the level of engagement well structured
| nonsense can solicit. =3
| paulcole wrote:
| 1. Most advice is terrible
|
| 2. Most people don't know much about most things
|
| 3. It's hard to tell good advice from the bad advice -- and
| usually you can only see it in hindsight
|
| 4. Most people don't want advice
| kirth_gersen wrote:
| To me, you have to see the situation clearly, understand the
| other person em-pathetically AND manage to communicate the
| resolution of a complex situation that may unfold over a long
| time. Any of those things would be hard, but all of them together
| make advice a cursed problem. The author gives an example of his
| email cycle of marking emails as "Reply ASAP", ignoring them,
| feeling guilty and purging them. Is the real problem that he does
| this or that he does this and it makes him feel bad for some
| reason? Those are two very different problems that presumably
| require very different "solutions".
| profsummergig wrote:
| I was under the impression that Krishna was depicted blue because
| he was very dark skinned.
|
| Can anyone confirm either way?
| woopwoop24 wrote:
| you can always ask the other person, if they want advise or not
| efitz wrote:
| Hard lessons I've learned:
|
| 1. It doesn't matter what your title is, how much expert
| education, training, or experience you have, or even what hard
| lessons that you have learned: you are not an "expert" in an area
| unless you are invited in as an "expert". Put another way,
| unsolicited advice is unwelcome.
|
| 2. Smart people want to solve their own problems. Don't offer
| solutions. No one will feel empowered or much of a sense of
| accomplishment implementing your solution. Instead tell them the
| challenges that they will face for various options and let them
| draw their own conclusions.
|
| 3. Your spouse just wants to vent, UNLESS they say "fix it" in
| which case they want you to fix it, where "fix" means "make it
| act like I want it to". Your spouse does not want to know how it
| works so that they can fix it themselves next time, and their
| mental model is wrong and they don't care to correct it. Just
| listen, figure out what they want and do it yourself, and do it
| again next time even though it interrupted you and they could
| have fixed it themself.
| slim wrote:
| implying your spouse is not a smart person
| Swizec wrote:
| > implying your spouse is not a smart person
|
| My spouse is a smart person. But she cares about computers
| about as much as I care about how billion dollar corporate
| partnerships are made. She just wants her computer to work
| and I just want my credit card to get discounts.
| jascination wrote:
| Nice try, _dummy_!
|
| /s
| liotier wrote:
| Or a smart overwhelmed person who comes home tired and would
| love not to have to consider extra problems on top of family
| life and their demanding job. Plenty smart in a domain and
| just doesn't want to think in another is a common pattern.
| xeromal wrote:
| Where is that implied other than the wife not being
| interested in learning a specific domain.
| twelve40 wrote:
| Lesson I learned from this comment: you can dish out as much of
| heavy-handed advice as your heart desires, as long as you
| preface it with the phrase "things i've learned"
| moshegramovsky wrote:
| Absolutely 100%.
|
| I learned to keep my mouth shut and my life improved
| exponentially, if only from the energy savings alone.
| lmm wrote:
| Do you actually mean spouse here? In my experience that
| communication style is a lot more closely correlated with
| gender than with married-ness.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > 3. Your spouse just wants to vent, UNLESS they say "fix it"
|
| Or talk to your spouse, get to know them, and build a sense of
| what they absolutely need to know (e.g. you don't want or can't
| spend the rest of your life doing it for them and no one else
| will), what they don't need to care about, and what space of
| mind they're in.
|
| You're hopefully stuck with them for a very long time,
| investing time and effort to understand them, and skipping the
| generic heuristics is probably the only advice needed.
| wdh505 wrote:
| Have you heard of the 6 geniuses? It is a book that proposes
| that there are 6 areas of "managing" one's self and others,
| and some are areas of genius and some are areas of
| frustration and some are competencies.
|
| The book also proposes that spouses who are compatible tend
| to have complimentary areas of genius and frustration.
|
| More to your point: if someone has an area of frustration to
| discern what course of action will fix, and you have that as
| an area of genius, then be kind about it as you probably got
| married because there are other ways you complement each
| other.
| squigz wrote:
| Unpacking #3 is fun. Like, yeah, often times people (not just
| spouses) want to vent, not receive actual advice. But "their
| mental model is wrong and they don't care to correct it"?
| That's unfair. Maybe they're just tired? Maybe your own mental
| model isn't the only correct one?
|
| > even though it interrupted you and they could have fixed it
| themself.
|
| Oh no, not being interrupted by having to help your partner!
| intended wrote:
| I think #3 is self deprecating .
|
| It's clear this person has burnt their hand, and learned from
| it !
| tchock23 wrote:
| This post misses one important factor - whether people pay for
| the advice or not.
|
| Research shows people are much more likely to follow advice if
| they pay for it:
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222563639_Do_We_Lis...
| mihaic wrote:
| I've given a bunch of advice in my life, some was useful, some
| missed the mark, and over time after learning to listen to
| people, I think I've gotten reasonably good at it.
|
| And that's why I'd add to everything that's been said another
| pattern on why people don't listen to my advice: because I'm not
| rich.
|
| Instead of considering that some knowledge is domain-specific,
| I've seen a trend in people valuing halo-style anything said by
| someone that's much more financially successful then them,
| regardless if this matters with the problem at hand. I'm not sure
| if this is something that's increased recently, just my anecdotal
| observation.
| yibg wrote:
| Sometimes I want advise on a specific topic but don't have anyone
| to ask / discuss with.
|
| Could be because the people around me are part of the topic (e.g.
| relationship problems), or they don't know the domain well or
| maybe it's not something I'm comfortable sharing with friends.
|
| I keep thinking if this is a form of "social networking" that can
| be of benefit / some form of social good. Connecting people that
| have knowledge / wisdom in some particular aspect of life (I'm
| particularly biased towards the elderly, lots of life
| experience), but also more (hopefully) objective (they don't know
| you). Tinder for advise?
| parasti wrote:
| > I often wonder--how different are people?
|
| I was waiting for this angle. In my experience, at this point in
| my life, I've come to entertain the idea that humans are similar
| only on a surface level. We're genetically made of the same
| stuff, but our values, biases, even the basic axioms upon which
| each of us operates are vastly different. I've often felt that
| most people waste too many words to transfer a concept from their
| head into the heads of other people, preferring instead an
| abrupt, dry communication style to save time and energy and
| working off of the assumption that there's a vast, common
| emotional and intellectual knowledge base between humans. But I'm
| wrong and they're right. Use many words. Communicating ideas
| between humans is a craft and an art form. It's really difficult.
| andrewclunn wrote:
| I'd explain how to give advice better, but you wouldn't listen.
| lkrubner wrote:
| This applies to startups. I give good advice to the CEO. The CEO
| often ignores my advice, and so the startup is destroyed. The
| startup would have done better if we had followed my advice. I
| documented a case here:
|
| https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/startups-should-...
|
| Another case here:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Three-Steps-eboo...
|
| I struggle with the question, "How do I manage upwards? How do I
| gain influence over the CEO?"
|
| Often the problem is that there is a group of people who tell the
| CEO exactly what the CEO wants to hear. Some of these people are
| manipulative con artists, but others are folks who sincerely
| agree with the CEO.
|
| So then the question becomes, "When multiple people give the CEO
| advice, how does the CEO know that my advice is the correct
| advice?"
|
| The problems are well-illustrated in the article linked above.
| Does Alice have foibles? Does that make her unable to follow
| advice? Likewise with the CEO. Would the startup even be having
| so many problems if the CEO was more talented? If the CEO was
| smart enough to know that my advice was the correct advice then
| would the company be in trouble at all? Wouldn't the CEO have
| already foreseen and forestalled the problem from existing?
| screye wrote:
| > advice is incomplete without lived experience.
|
| This bit is usually the crux.
|
| It's not about your lived experience, but it has to be some lived
| experience that's felt viscerally. It can be your own, it can be
| in 2nd second person. It's about the feeling it drives. Not so
| much the frame/POV.
|
| Good advice is visceral, limited, targeted and helps get the
| person to the immediate next 'better' state.
|
| In military parlance, it's what helps you complete 1 single ooda
| loop. In ML parlance it's what helps complete 1 gradient update.
|
| Big picture advice only works if the person has already built
| trust with associated mini-advice over many steps. In ML
| parlance, you can't increase the learning rate until you have
| high confidence in the direction of the gradient.
| bentcorner wrote:
| I tell my kids this - you can tell people till you're blue in
| the face that there's an alligator in the river, and a
| surprising number of people will ignore you until they
| themselves see an alligator in the river.
|
| It's just how people are. It is very hard to learn from other
| people's mistakes.
| js2 wrote:
| I feel like this is a variation on, or perhaps an elaboration of,
| "You can't tell people anything":
|
| > What's going on is that without some kind of direct experience
| to use as a touchstone, people don't have the context that gives
| them a place in their minds to put the things you are telling
| them. The things you say often don't stick, and the few things
| that do stick are often distorted. Also, most people aren't very
| good at visualizing hypotheticals, at imagining what something
| they haven't experienced might be like, or even what something
| they have experienced might be like if it were somewhat
| different.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23617188
|
| http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-an...
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I have a joke with my brother: How do you win a
| race against Usain Bolt? Just run faster than him!
|
| Every time one gives the other a technically correct but
| perfectly inapplicable advice, we just answer "yeah, run faster".
| It's our own private joke of a shortcut keeping our BS in check.
|
| The thing is, when you are giving advice, you are usually missing
| a lot of context. Context you may not know exists, and that the
| other person won't or can't share with you. Maybe the other
| person doesn't even realize this context is needed or is aware of
| it.
|
| But if you had this context, you would understand how unpractical
| your advice is to this particular situation, because it's too
| generic. Too theoretical.
|
| After all, most smokers know they should quit, most fat people
| know they should lose weight. If it was just about hearing the
| right path, we would have little problems we can't solve.
|
| But knowing where you should go tells you less than expected
| about the path ahead because of the aforementioned missing
| context, such as where you start from and the obstacles in your
| way, whether you'll be alone on the road or with friends or wild
| animals, if you have to carry a big bag, if you need to forage
| for food and if it rains.
|
| That doesn't make advice useless.
|
| But you should not expect to see the effect right now. Rather,
| they may contribute to a self-realization that the person has to
| build for themself, adapted to themself. It takes time, it's
| hard, and there are a lot of other things that fight for being a
| priority.
|
| Assuming it was good advice to begin with of course, and there
| are not that many good advice to go around.
| darkerside wrote:
| Nobody asked, but here's my advice on advice. Instead of giving
| advice, ask questions. Questions are much harder to ignore than
| advice, and they force the listener to think through their
| problem from a different perspective. If you master the art of
| asking questions, people will be solving their own problems
| during your conversation, and you'll never have to give advice
| again.
| beryilma wrote:
| I find that people most eager to give unsolicited advice are
| people who are least equipped to give good advice. And people who
| need good advice the most are people who are least equipped to
| receive it. And it turns out that the same person can have both
| deficiencies; a version of Dunning-Kruger might be in effect
| here.
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