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Comment by smoyer | Hacker News Reader

Nope ... there are a ton of 30-somethings writing "easy" advice like this and bemoaning the ignorance of their twenties. I'm a few decades older yet and can tell you that I'm still learning and integrating new ideas into my framework of how business (and the world in general) work. Creating a simple idea is easy but think about how many counter-examples there are to just this one rule (and you can find 100k more simple rules that together have complex interactions).

My simple rule ... it never hurts you to help another human. Sometimes it also benefits you but at a minimum your reputation in your sphere of influence is positive.

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> My simple rule ... it never hurts you to help another human. Sometimes it also benefits you but at a minimum your reputation in your sphere of influence is positive.

This is definitely not true, whether the general form you led with, or in the specific minimum you mention.

Contradictions to this rule are so widespread that we have an aphorism for it. ("No good deed goes unpunished.")

> My simple rule ... it never hurts you to help another human. Sometimes it also benefits you but at a minimum your reputation in your sphere of influence is positive

I love my life by this and it has already paid off with dividends.

The crabs in a bucket formula points out an important fallacy. Even incredibly generous help in every send line a zero sum hand can end up being bringing huge ventures to both parties.

It's one of the main lessons that people from high scarcity societies need to internalize when moving to a post scarcity society.

My problem I run into with these sorts of things, and to some extent normative ethics, is that they frequently contradict one another in reality. So you might be in a situation, and one piece of the advice would suggest one course of action, and another would suggest the opposite, and there wasn't any way to reconcile them.

I think they're well intended and can be useful to think about but beyond something like "these are useful things to be aware of or to keep in mind" it's hard to apply things in life.

Perhaps it's reading too much into what's intended by the authors of these sorts of pieces, and maybe they're just trying to communicate some help, but this particular piece is "advice about advice" so in that regard I think these issues are relevant.

Applying other people's rules (advice) to situations tends not to work out well. Using other people's advice to create your own framework and using that to live seems to work better.

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