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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know. Telling an alcoholic to “stop drinking” seems like pretty unambiguously directionally correct advice (albeit difficult to execute) in a way that “never eat alone” is not. In that way “never eat alone” is probably much worse advice.

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Telling an alcoholic to "stop drinking" is also completely useless advice. How many alcoholics do you think are like "Oh wow, you're right, if only I had known that all along..."

This is why I tried to develop A-B.fit. The hard part is working out what messaging leads to good outcomes, not what actions.

"You're overweight", says the Doctor, "you need to eat less and move more." "No s*t Sherlock with my IQ of 147 I'd never managed to put that one together myself," I replied.

There are probably better ways to discuss the topic with someone trying to help you.

> There are probably better ways to discuss the topic with someone trying to help you.

There are definitely better ways to discuss the topic with someone you are trying to help.

Telling an alcoholic who knows they are one and is trying to recover to “stop drinking” is probably useless. There are numerous alcoholics who are some combination of unaware or in denial and for whom that advice is not (necessarily) useless.

Yeah, being unaware of your alcoholism doesn't make it any less influential on your behavior. If anything, telling someone who is in denial about their alcoholism to "stop drinking" seems like the most useless option.

This is Newhartian Technique. See the master at work:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Gjc6V4QaxIY

"never eat alone" is probably useful advice in the sense of "oh, i always eat alone, but this book says that successful people are doing literally the opposite of what i always do, maybe that means that there is a huge blind spot that i am missing, and that maybe i should try doing something to at least not miss that blind spot, and then i can decide what actions i need to take"

The person you're responding to was not saying that "stop drinking" is directionally incorrect, but that it was not helpful (that it will not lead to an equivalent level of success).

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