In my opinion, this misses the crucial dynamic that the costs of giving advice significantly go up if you care about what the other person thinks of you, which is correlated with respect, status and power. I personally think that giving advice is good, that if given tactfully many people take it well, and also often enjoy giving it, so will generally try to do this wherever possible unless there’s a clear reason not to, especially in the context of EG interpretability research. But I’m much more cautious if I’m talking to someone who seems important, consider themselves high status, has power over me, etc. I think this is a large part of why people can feel offended by receiving advice. There can be some implicit sense of “you are too stupid to have thought of this”, especially if the advice is bad or obvious.
Another important facet is that most people are not (competent) utilitarians about social interactions, so you cannot accurately infer their beliefs with reasoning like this.
Fair, there’s a real tension between signaling that you think someone has a good mindset (a form of intellectual respect) and signaling that you are scared of someone’s power over you or that you care a lot about their opinion of you.
In my opinion, this misses the crucial dynamic that the costs of giving advice significantly go up if you care about what the other person thinks of you, which is correlated with respect, status and power. I personally think that giving advice is good, that if given tactfully many people take it well, and also often enjoy giving it, so will generally try to do this wherever possible unless there’s a clear reason not to, especially in the context of EG interpretability research. But I’m much more cautious if I’m talking to someone who seems important, consider themselves high status, has power over me, etc. I think this is a large part of why people can feel offended by receiving advice. There can be some implicit sense of “you are too stupid to have thought of this”, especially if the advice is bad or obvious.
Another important facet is that most people are not (competent) utilitarians about social interactions, so you cannot accurately infer their beliefs with reasoning like this.
Fair, there’s a real tension between signaling that you think someone has a good mindset (a form of intellectual respect) and signaling that you are scared of someone’s power over you or that you care a lot about their opinion of you.