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Comment by jprete | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Funny when history was storified instead of dates and facts to focus on the learnings .. it was dismissed as storybooks !!

> 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.

> 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.

sounds like therapy

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