I think this discussion about advice is very fruitful. I think the existing comments do a great job of characterizing why someone might reasonably be offended. So if we take that as the given situation: you want to help people, project respect, but don’t want it to come off the wrong way, what could you do?
My partial answer to this, is merely sharing your own authentic experience of why you are personally persuaded by the content of the advice, and allowing them to internalize that evidence and derive inferences for themselves. At social gatherings, the people in my life do this- just sharing stories, sometimes horror stories where the point is so obvious that it doesn’t need explicit statement. And it feels like a genuine form of social currency to faithfully report on your experiences. This reminds me of “Replace the Symbol with the Substance” [1] where the advice is the symbol and the experience is the substance.
So I wonder if that’s part of it—creating the same change in the person anyway a the while mitigating the risk of condescension. The dynamics of the relationship also complicate analyzing the situation. And in what type of social setting the advice is delivered. And probably a bunch more factors I haven’t thought of yet.
I think this discussion about advice is very fruitful. I think the existing comments do a great job of characterizing why someone might reasonably be offended. So if we take that as the given situation: you want to help people, project respect, but don’t want it to come off the wrong way, what could you do?
My partial answer to this, is merely sharing your own authentic experience of why you are personally persuaded by the content of the advice, and allowing them to internalize that evidence and derive inferences for themselves. At social gatherings, the people in my life do this- just sharing stories, sometimes horror stories where the point is so obvious that it doesn’t need explicit statement. And it feels like a genuine form of social currency to faithfully report on your experiences. This reminds me of “Replace the Symbol with the Substance” [1] where the advice is the symbol and the experience is the substance.
So I wonder if that’s part of it—creating the same change in the person anyway a the while mitigating the risk of condescension. The dynamics of the relationship also complicate analyzing the situation. And in what type of social setting the advice is delivered. And probably a bunch more factors I haven’t thought of yet.
[1]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GKfPL6LQFgB49FEnv/replace-the-symbol-with-the-substance