The Best Advice I have Received | Hacker News Reader

The Best Advice I have Received

onesock.net

40 pointsGVRV11 comments

After listing useful advice he's received over the years, the author appropriately offers some critial meta-advice: write down (and analyze) advice that you find interesting in order to put it into practice.

“Power unexercised is pointless”

Hopefully Pakistan doesn't feel that way about its nuclear arsenal.

I found that example perplexing. He puts the company into liquidation without discussing it with the other shareholders first. Why is this a good thing?

Pakistan doesn't actually have to fire the weapons; merely having the weapons at all lets them exercise more political power than they would otherwise have.

Maybe a more precise way of putting this is "Power is the basis of your leverage in any negotiation, so start any negotiation by thinking about what power you have. The corollary to this would be that any power you are unwilling to exercise is pointless."

This sounds like a rephrasing of BATNA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiate...).

To apply this to your metaphor, if Pakistan was unwilling to use its nuclear arsenal in any scenario, it would be pointless.

Re: putting his company into liquidation, we don't know the exact story, but I presume that he realized that (1) he had the power to put the company into liquidation and (2) he 100% wanted to put it into liquidation. So he didn't negotiate with his stubborn partners, he just exercised his BATNA.

Edit to comments below: but that is not what he does; he does not use his directorial power for leverage, he just goes ahead and does it without even telling anyone. If he is so confident about his position, why doesn't he tell people and then do it anyway? I don't know the legal implications of liquidating a business, but that whole paragraph read as "I did it because I could and so should you". I guess I am still confused as to the moral of the story.

“If you get to thirty and you still think persuasion is about making a logical argument, you have already lost”

I feel this kind of advice, that comes in many variations, has one major pitfall: you need to do more than make a logical argument, but often you still need the logical argument. People smell bullshit a mile away and get properly annoyed when someone tries to sell them some.

Ethos, Pathos, Logos.

Remember that.

Appeal to authority is only a logical fallacy -- it is, on the other hand, sound persuasive advice.

Appeal to emotion is only a logical fallacy -- it is, on the other hand, a valuable persuasive tool in many situations.

Appeal to logic is, therefore, only part of the equation.

It is, however, a part of the equation. I think that's what the parent was trying to say.

It is, however, the part of the equation least susceptible to abuse by those who want other people to act in an unwise fashion. A strong ethos or pathos could convince people to do something that a moment of thought would draw them strongly against.

The original author is right that logical arguments alone do not persuade people in general, especially if that is all the persuader offers. I am not yet thirty, and have figured this out, so I guess I'm ahead. :-)

However, I think it is tragic that logical arguments are not sufficient, nor even sometimes necessary for people to follow a particular philosophy or call to action. I don't understand the cause behind this behavior, but I can't imagine humankind being any worse off if people became more convinced that logic and reasoning do matter, and using them had concrete benefits. Ironically, making this appeal will likely involve the other two until acceptance of logic is sufficiently bootstrapped.

I'll leave this with a quote from Sam Harris, which really put better words to this than I ever could. "There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable."

However, both pathos and logos may be seen as short cut to logics. We live in a hierarchical society, therefore logically we expect the people who are above us to be smarter or know better than us therefore we trust them. That is based on logics. You know that the doctor has been studying for so many years and has been treating many other patients with the same issues as yours, therefore it is only logical to trust them. As for pathos, well that is ones instinct. It is the mind computing decisions without our concious logical critique of them, yet the mind is critiquing it logically, we just are not so aware of the computations and give the emotions names. It is logical to buy something you love rather than hate.

So many typos. A spelling check wouldn't hurt.

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