Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aeolun | Hacker News Reader

- Times I’ve learned my lesson by experience: 100

- Times I’ve learned a lesson by advice: 0

- Times a lesson taught by advice turned out to be false: 400

I don’t know. There’s so many things people take for granted that it is a dangerous thing to just take someone’s word for it.

View on HN

Put this way, it seems rather important to trust one's own judgement. That is a useful basis - one need to start somewhwere. If you give up both your judgement and other people's advice, you won't get anywhere at all before making that decision.

I sometimes wonder if bad advice is running more rampant today or if it was always this bad.

So did you get hit by a car before learning to look both ways when crossing the street? Or did someone tell you?

> So did you get hit by a car before learning to look both ways when crossing the street? Or did someone tell you?

Are you suggesting the first people that learned to cross a road got hit by cars before realizing they had to look both ways? There was no one to tell them how to look, so how did they learn it except by "being hit by a car"?

I’m suggesting it’s stupid to think you’ve learned nothing but false truths from advice.

Edit: but for what it’s worth even in this stupid example. To learn from experience that you must look both ways does imply you suffered the consequence of not knowing it beforehand. Be that being hit or coming close. Pedantic w/e

Not OP, but...the advent of cars over horse-drawn carriages involved a _lot_ of deaths before both pedestrians and drivers learned. There was also a lot of propaganda put out by car companies to change the popular conception of roadways from being a place where people walk and children play to being a place for cars. [1] So...it's actually pretty close to people needing to be told to look both ways.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26073797

Reply on news.ycombinator.com