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Most advice is pretty bad

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Re: Most advice is pretty bad

#61

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

Most advice is advice:

  advice, n.
    An opinion about what could or should be done about a situation or problem.
    Information communicated; news.
    An opinion recommended, or offered, as worthy to be followed; counsel; suggestion.
If the advice is based on something that has worked for someone, it is good advice. It's up to you to figure out if the advice will work for you. If the advice didn't apply to your own situation, or wasn't appropriate, it is your responsibility to figure that out, not theirs.

You can of course try to blame everyone else for the paths you choose to take in life: you didn't get the right advice; they didn't give you the right tools; they didn't explain something well enough. But none of that changes the fact that you, ultimately, are the only one that controls whether you will take that advice and use those tools, or go find others. You own your own decisions.

Re: Most advice is pretty bad

#62

Post by mc32 »

nicoburns wrote: post #46
MattGaiser wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair, it is not truly unlimited, but for plenty of people (at least where I have worked) it has still ended up being 5-8 weeks a year. In contrast to the more traditional employers who say that you can start with two weeks and after 3 years of loyal service with no real raises, you can have three.

Ah, I guess that makes sense from an American perspective. For context, 5.6 weeks (28 days) is the legal minimum for absolutely every full time employee here in the UK, and I believe that’s one of the lower legal minimums in Europe. Higher allowances are not uncommon here. My employer considered introducing unlimited holiday, but we said no once they admitted that they were hoping it would result in us taking less ho…

Indeed. It’s a wolf in sheeps clothing.

It’s like letting the kids mind the house by themselves while you go on holidays.

If they take too much liberty, they never get that privilege again. If they do it within implied constraints they get to have the house more often.

If you have power (not necessarily managerial) you can exploit thus and be okay, if you’re mediocre and you take the same advantage, you could very well have signed your own pink slip.

Now if you have a minimum everyone takes, then even as a mediocre worker, you’re not an outlier.

Re: Most advice is pretty bad

#63

Post by WalterBright »

csallen wrote: post #16

Our obsession with non-obvious advice stems from our base addiction to novelty. For good reason, pathways in our brain become myelinated and more efficient the more often we use them, to the point where we can process well-worn thoughts almost subconsciously. Thus, toys we've played with too long become boring. Advice we've heard too many times before seems blah. We're hardwired to notice more when we encounter thing…

Good advice:

1. Try, try until you succeed.

2. Stop beating a dead horse.

Re: Most advice is pretty bad

#64

Post by mikkergp »

dwheeler wrote: post #51

I agree that advice that "isn’t practical" is bad advice, as the article states. I do NOT agree that advice that "isn’t insightful" or "is obvious" is bad advice. The author complains that "Work hard" is bad advice, and I don't agree. Some people I meet are not willing to work hard. You may think it's obvious, but that doesn't mean it really is obvious. Even if it's obvious, people often need reminding of obvious thi…

I wonder what the fundamentals are of coding, that you could practice, starting from "this is a football"

1: Naming Things 2: Testing (Unit or otherwise)

Re: Most advice is pretty bad

#65

Post by pdpi »

The best advice I ever got was that advice is pretty bad in general because the person giving the advice doesn't have skin in the game. It's usually much better when you instead tell the other person about relevant experience you've had in the past as a data point for them to base their decision on.

So: less "in your situation, I would do this", and more "when I was in this similar situation, I did this, and that happened".

Re: Most advice is pretty bad

#66

Post by jorgesborges »

csallen wrote: post #16

Our obsession with non-obvious advice stems from our base addiction to novelty. For good reason, pathways in our brain become myelinated and more efficient the more often we use them, to the point where we can process well-worn thoughts almost subconsciously. Thus, toys we've played with too long become boring. Advice we've heard too many times before seems blah. We're hardwired to notice more when we encounter thing…

The best advice — real wisdom, in fact — is often readily available as platitudes on door mats or fridge magnets but they don’t resonate with us. Because real wisdom and the best advice is useless without a certain time and experience to recognize it, and a great deal of practice in putting it to life.

I first recognized this learning to meditate. Life is impermanent and leads to suffering so stop cravings and avoiding! Okay, well I’ve heard that a million times so what. But then learning to observe my experience a lightbulb goes goes on.

Re: Most advice is pretty bad

#67

Post by ncmncm »

You can take advice or leave it. If you take it and it works, it's not bad. If you can't or don't take it, that doesn't make it bad if somebody else could. It's bad only if, when you take it, it will produce a worse outcome for you. Most advice is not bad in that way.

The most useful thing a piece of advice can be is something you would not have thought of yourself, that somebody else learned by hard experience, that you wish somebody had said to you before you got it.

It is in the nature of the very best advice that it is not obvious why it is good advice. If it doesn't seem like good advice, it might be because you have just not thought it through.

What we can say is that most posts on substack are bad.

Re: Most advice is pretty bad

#68

Post by simplestats »

MattGaiser wrote: post #38
nicoburns wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or consider unlimited vacation for developers. At one point that was a fairly novel perk. Now, everyone has that. I would argue that nobody (or hardly anyone) has this. Otherwise you’d find most developer only working 6 months a year.

Fair, it is not truly unlimited, but for plenty of people (at least where I have worked) it has still ended up being 5-8 weeks a year. In contrast to the more traditional employers who say that you can start with two weeks and after 3 years of loyal service with no real raises, you can have three.

People I know take about four weeks a year. 8 weeks seems nuts. Do their managers push back all the deadlines related to their projects since they take a lot of vacation? I'd imagine managers don't even consider it and plan deadlines according to a typical (e.g., 50 weeks a year) worker output.

Re: Most advice is pretty bad

#69

Post by HPsquared »

csallen wrote: post #16

Our obsession with non-obvious advice stems from our base addiction to novelty. For good reason, pathways in our brain become myelinated and more efficient the more often we use them, to the point where we can process well-worn thoughts almost subconsciously. Thus, toys we've played with too long become boring. Advice we've heard too many times before seems blah. We're hardwired to notice more when we encounter thing…

Hence the attention economy promoting informational junk food.

Re: Most advice is pretty bad

#70

Post by maximus-decimus »

mjr00 wrote: post #45
csallen wrote: post #16

Our obsession with non-obvious advice stems from our base addiction to novelty. For good reason, pathways in our brain become myelinated and more efficient the more often we use them, to the point where we can process well-worn thoughts almost subconsciously. Thus, toys we've played with too long become boring. Advice we've heard too many times before seems blah. We're hardwired to notice more when we encounter thing…

> However, most good advice is common advice. In practically any field, grokking the fundamental advice and actually sticking to it will get you 99% of the way there. As Charlie Munger once said, "Take a simple idea, and take it seriously." Definitely. There's also an issue on the flip side of it: many people asking for advice are not doing so sincerely. You'll see it in the new year on fitness forums. People asking…

I don't think this is the same thing. They're asking for a fun activity they can use to lose weight, not for a novel fun advice about losing weight.

It's not the advice itself that's boring, it's the activity the person will have to do every other day.

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