Why doesn't advice work?

Post by throwawayq3423 » Tue, Aug 06, 2024, 8:12 PM UTC

Delk wrote: post #291

throwawayq3423 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if your motives were to make their lives worse to benefit yourself I guess I made an assumption that wasn't the case. Most people that have malign intentions aren't curious about these topics enough to discuss them openly. "persuasion" gets a bad rap because most people assume you are persuading someone from a good place to bad. The opposite occurs often as well.

> "persuasion" gets a bad rap because most people assume you are persuading someone from a good place to bad. The opposite occurs often as well. Persuasion can be questionable even if it's not malicious. People can persuade others for selfish reasons, or to push their own desires, without it necessarily making the other person worse. But few of us like the feeling of being persuaded for someone else's benefit regardl…

Post by kappapilla » Sun, Aug 11, 2024, 5:18 PM UTC

Timon3 wrote: post #82

jprete wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 el…