The Advice Gap | Hacker News Reader

The Advice Gap

seths.blog

26 pointsgmays16 comments

As I've gotten older, I've become less convinced to the value of "advice", but far more convinced to the value of learning by watching what people do.

Unsolicited advice is usually ignored or unappreciated, and published advice has often been through so many layers of thought and editing that it doesn't reflect the true experiences or opinions of the person with the experience. Tell me what you actually did, what happened, and why, not what I "should" do (shout out to Julia Evans as she is a grandmaster at this).

Watching people work and reading their personal recollections is a great way to learn. I've learnt more watching folks doing things like writing code or solving puzzles on livestreams than reading articles by the same people.

Godin says "we don’t have an advice shortage", but we do have a shortage of unembellished recollections, recordings of how people work, work diaries, and other ways to truly see what people do and think rather than what they say we should do or think.

> As I've gotten older, I've become less convinced to the value of "advice", but far more convinced to the value of learning by watching what people do.

I've seen this too. In my case it was more being social to people in general. A person with a similar-ish personality. I saw what he was doing, copy/paste for me.

Yes. And in any case, until a person is ready to take and heed advice, the advice given is nearly always wasted on that person.

Usually being "ready" requires life experience and usually that life experience requires failure and pain. The more pain, the more likely they will see the value of advice though some people will paradoxically become less likely to take advice if they are not the type to learn from failure or pain.

So true. That said, I still think there's value in advice, mainly because it can sometimes help the receiver of the advice view things from a different perspective, look at their situation through a different lens that they might not have done before. That being said, it depends on a) the giver of the advice being able to actually figure out what a beneficial perspective would be, b) the receiver of the advice being open to actually hear it (I for one surely have a tendency to hold on to my own way of thinking, even though I know it's to my own detriment, so I have to make a conscious effort to overcome that), or c) sheer luck. Sometimes you come across a piece of advice, pretty much by random luck, and it just is exactly what you needed to hear. (This too has happened to me.)

I feel like (1.) is undersold by some orders of magnitude. There is a vast, vast quantity of bad advice circulating and being amplified in echo-chambers. If you need a particular piece of advice then by definition your ability to discern it from adjacent bad advice is not good.

Even if you do manage to identify good advice, a (1b.) is required stating something like "all advice is situational, and again, if you really need advice for this situation then by definition you aren't equipped to tell reliably whether any particular piece of advice really applies."

Put those together and you get a double Sturgeon's Law effect where 90% of all advice is bad, and 90% of good and seemingly relevant advice is inappropriate for your specific circumstances, and so your chances of a randomly selected piece of legit-sounding advice being actually good and applicable are around 1%.

I would add:

4. It's hard to understand and appreciate the advice without experiencing the situation first.

On the one hand, yes! Yes yes.

But lesson #3 is still imo what most causes your #4. Having thr humility & where-withall to understand & appreciate your own limits of cognition, to be able to appreciate & respect the things you dont fully know: that is what makes the better person, that is what it takes to start to grow & mature.

Not wanting advice is not functionally different from failing to let oneself atune to & receieve the messages about. Accept, even if not fully understand: just register, just let it in a bit, if not necessarily yet take up.

Arrogance (un-humility / not appreciating your own limits) is not the only reason one may reject advice. Unless the person giving the advise is already respected/revered for their knowledge by the person receiving the advice, then there is no reason for them to value the advise received over whatever their original plan of action was. This is [1] from the post. Bad advice exists, and if you cannot differentiate it, you must experience the reason for it. In which case, experiencing the scenario for the advise validates the need and usefulness of the advice.

That works both ways. It's hard to give someone helpful advice without experiencing their situation. (Or at least, understanding it alot more than you probably think you do.)

Someone may enjoy this article on advice in "Overthinking Everything" blog as well: https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-give-good-advice

Hard things are trade-offs so you almost always have 2 contradictory advices and the problem is choosing which combination of them applies to your situation best.

If two people follow the same advice and get different results; what conclusion can be drawn about the advice? What should the third person to hear the advice do?

Advice is not really valuable without understanding of cause and effect. Typically, advice givers misattribute their success to their own decisions.

And sometimes it’s analysis paralysis, and/or being confronted with too many different advices.

This is akin to: data vs. information vs. knowledge.

Knowledge is information that happens to be at the right place at the right time aid with a particular context of process or need. Otherwise it's, at best, just information.

Data vs. information is covered by Shannon.

I highly recommend the TED Talk 'Taming your advice monster'. Sometimes it's about really listening and letting people figuring out by themselves

But, Seth, what do you advise?

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