Giving unsolicited advice and criticism is a very good credible signal of respect
I have often heard it claimed that giving advice is a bad idea because most people don’t take it well and won’t actually learn from it.
Giving unsolicited advice/criticism risks:
The recipient liking you less
The recipient thinking you are stupid because “obviously they have heard this advice before”
The recipient thinking you are stupid because they disagree with the advice
The recipient being needlessly offended without any benefit
People benefit from others liking them and not thinking they are stupid, so these are real costs. Some people also don’t like offending others.
So clearly it’s only worth giving someone advice or criticism if you think at least some of the following are true:
Their wellbeing/impact/improvement is important enough that the small chance your advice has a positive impact is worth the cost
They are rational enough to not take offense in a way that would damage your relationship
They are particularly good at using advice/criticism, i.e. they are more likely to update than the average person
They value honest opinions and feedback even when they disagree, i.e. they prefer to know what others think about them because it’s interesting and potentially useful information even if not immediately actionable
The above points all reflect a superior attitude compared to the average person. And so, if you choose to give someone advice or criticism despite all the associated risks, you are credibly signaling that you think they have these positive traits.
Not giving unsolicited advice and criticism is selfish
The “giving advice is bad” meme is just a version of “being sycophantic is good”—you personally benefit when others like you and so often it’s useful to suck up to people.
Even the risk that your interlocutor is offended is not a real risk to their wellbeing—people dislike offending others because it feels uncomfortable to them. Being offended is not actually meaningfully harmful to the offended party.
No doubt that sycophancy and the fear of expressing potentially friendship damaging truths allows negative patterns of behavior to continue unimpeded but I think you’ve missed the two most necessary factors in determining if advice—solicited or unsolicited—is a net benefit to the recipient:
1. you sufficiently understand and have the expertise to comment on their situation & 2. you can offer new understanding they aren’t already privy to.
Perhaps the situations where I envision advice is being given is different to yours?
The problem I notice with most unsolicited advice is it’s either something the recipient is already aware of (i.e. the classic sitcom example is someone touches a hot dish and after the fact is told “careful that pan is hot”—is it good advice? Well in the sense that it is truthful, maybe. But the burn already having happened, it is not longer useful.) This is why it annoys people, this is why it is taken as an insult to their intelligence.
A lot of people have already heard the generic or obvious advice and there may be many reasons why they aren’t following it,[1] and most of the time hearing this generic advice being repeated will not be of a benefit even if they have all the qualities you enumerate: that you’re willing to accept the cost of giving advice, that they are rational enough to not take offense, they are good at taking advice and criticism, and they value honest feedback even when they disagree.
Take this example exchange:
A: “Why are you using the grill to make melted cheese, we have a toaster oven.”
B: “the toaster is shorted out, it’s broken”
You must sufficiently understand the recipient’s situation if you are to have any hope of improving it. If you don’t know what they know about the toaster oven, then unsolicited advice can’t help.
Another major problem I’ve found with unsolicited advice is that it lacks fine grain execution detail. My least favourite advice as a freelancing creative is “you need to get your name out there”—where is there? On that big nebulous internet? How does that help me exactly? Unless I needed further reinforcement of the fact that what material I am putting online isn’t reaching my current interlocutor—but it doesn’t give me any clues how to go about remedying that.
Advice, for it to be useful needs more than just sympathy and care for the person’s well being—it needs understanding of the situation which is the cause of their behavior.
My personal metric for the “quality” of advice is how actionable it is. This means that it can’t be post-facto (like the sitcom hot pan), it needs to understand causes and context—such as why they aren’t using the toaster oven, and most importantly it needs to suggest explicit actions that can be taken in order to change the situation (and which cations the recipient can or can’t take can only be determined by properly understanding their situation and the causes of their behavior).
Caveat: I’m sure there’s a genre of fringe cases where repetition becomes “the medium is the message”—that is they do need to hear it again. But there’s a certain point where doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result is quite stark raving mad.
Perhaps a situation to avoid giving advice in is if you think your advice is likely to be genuinely worthless because you have no expertise, knowledge, or intelligence that is relevant to the matter and you don’t trust your own judgment at all. Otherwise if you respect the other person, you’d consider them able to judge the usefulness of your advice for themselves.
You can’t know for sure that they’ve heard some advice before. Also you are providing the information that the piece of advice occurred to you, which in and of itself is often interesting/useful. So if you’re giving someone advice they are likely to have heard before this means there is a small chance that’s wrong and it’s still useful, and a larger chance that it has value zero. So in expectation the value is still positive. If you don’t give the advice, you are prioritizing not looking stupid or not offending them, which are both selfish motives.
Related to (2) is that telling someone you disapprove or think less of them for something, i.e. criticizing without providing any advice at all, is also a good signal of respect, because you are providing them with possibly useful information at the risk of them liking you less or making you feel uncomfortable.
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.
I noticed feeling a little unsatisfied and worried about this advice. I think it pattern matches with people who are savvy with status games or subtle bullying that allows for plausible deniability (“I’m just trying to help! You’re being too sensitive.”). I think people’s heuristic of perceiving criticisms as threatening seems somewhat justified most of the time.
To be clear, I tentatively define respect as the act of (a) evaluating a person as having an amount of value and welfare that is just as important as yours, (b) believing that this person’s value and welfare is worth caring about, and (c) treating them as such. You don’t have to admire or like a person to respect them. Here are some actions that connote disrespect (or indignity): torture, murder, confinement, physical abuse, verbal abuse, causing a person’s social standing to drop unnecessarily, etc. Having said that, I’m still not satisfied with this definition, but it’s the best I can come up so far.
Maybe you’ve thought about this already or I’ve missed some implicit assumptions, but let me try to explain by first using Buck’s experience as an example:
A lot of the helpful criticism I’ve gotten over the last few years was from people who were being kind of unreasonable and unfair.
One simple example of this is that one time someone (who I’d engaged with for many hours) told me he didn’t take my ideas seriously because I had blue hair. On the one hand, fuck that guy; on the other hand, it’s pretty helpful that he told me that, and I’m grateful to him for telling me.
I interpret this as Buck (a) being appreciative of a criticism that seems unreasonable and unfair, yet (b) his need for respect wasn’t fulfilled—I would probably say “fuck that guy” too if they thought my opinions don’t matter in any situation due to the color of my hair.
I could imagine Buck’s interlocutor passing your above conditions:
They might believe that Buck can be more impactful when other people see him with normal looking hair colour and takes him more seriously.
They might believe Buck is rational enough (but it turns out Buck was offended anyway).
They might believe Buck is good at using advice/criticism.
They might believe Buck values opinions and feedback even when they disagree (this is true).
I could also imagine Buck’s interlocutor doing a cost-benefit analysis and believing the associated costs you mentioned above are worth it. And yet, Buck was still at least a bit offended, and I think it would be reasonable to believe that this person’s criticism was actually not a good credible signal of respect.
One may argue that Buck isn’t being rational. If he did, he wouldn’t be offended. “Huh, this guy believed that the benefits of giving that criticism outweighs the cost of me liking them less, thinking that they are stupid, and me being offended outweigh. Seems like a credible signal of respect.”
I mean Buck was appreciative of that advice, but an advice being valuable is not necessarily a credible signal of respect. I could imagine an boss giving valuable advice that still checks all your conditions, but does it in a abusive manner.
My tentative version of what an unsolicited advice that’s also a good credible signal of respect would have more of the following conditions met:
The interlocutor actually communicating their criticism in a respectful way (as I’ve defined above). This seems like a necessary condition to pass.
The interlocutor made at least some effort to craft a good criticism/advice. One way this could work is for the interlocutor to ask questions and learn more about their advisee, which is probably a standard in many problem solving frameworks used by management consultants. But a mistake can sometimes be straightforwardly obvious that a low effort criticism works, so this condition is not sufficient on its own.
The interlocutor noticing that their advice could be wrong and very costly to heed. Again, not sufficient on its own.
The interlocutor showing care and authenticity, and showing that their advice isn’t some status-seeking one-upmanship, or a way to “create common knowledge of their status difference” (as a friend pointed out to me as another possibility).
I might be misunderstanding you though, so happy to update!
And thanks for writing this! I do think you are on to something—I do want to get better at feedback giving and receiving, and if done well and at a higher frequency (this might be what you’re pointing to), could make me more impactful.
How people respond tells you something about them, so you don’t necessarily need to start with a clear picture of how they might respond.
Also, I think advice is the wrong framing for things that are useful to give, it’s better to make sure people have the knowledge and skills to figure out the things they seem to need to figure out. Similarly to the “show, don’t tell” of educational discussions, you want to present the arguments and not the conclusions, let alone explicitly insist that the other person is wrong about the conclusions. Or better yet, promote the skills that let them assemble the arguments on their own, without needing to concretely present the arguments.
It might help to give the arguments and even conclusions or advice eventually, after everything else is done, but it’s not the essential part and might be pointless or needlessly confrontational if the conclusions they arrive at happen to differ.
Any rule about when to give advice has to be robust to people going on and on to lecture you about Jesus because they truly and sincerely want to keep you out of Hell. (Or lecture about veganism, or EA, or politics.)
More generally, social rules about good manners have to apply to everyone—both to people with correct beliefs and to people with incorrect ones. Just like not letting the police break into everyone’s houses catches fewer criminals (when the police are right), but protects innocent people (when the police are wrong), not giving advice helps fewer people (when the advice giver is right), but saves people from arrogant know it alls and meme plagues (when the advice giver is wrong).
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 enjoyed the combination of “these are real costs” and “positive impact is worth the cost.”
I found this insightful, ”...reflect a superior attitude...give...advice or criticism...signaling...they have...these positive traits”
I think the challenge lies in categorizing people as “superior” and “average”. I like the use of labels since it helps the conversation, but I wonder if it is too limiting. Perhaps, context and topic are important dimensions worthy of consideration as well. I can imagine real people responding differently given more variables, such as context and topic.
Giving unsolicited advice and criticism is a very good credible signal of respect
I have often heard it claimed that giving advice is a bad idea because most people don’t take it well and won’t actually learn from it.
Giving unsolicited advice/criticism risks:
The recipient liking you less
The recipient thinking you are stupid because “obviously they have heard this advice before”
The recipient thinking you are stupid because they disagree with the advice
The recipient being needlessly offended without any benefit
People benefit from others liking them and not thinking they are stupid, so these are real costs. Some people also don’t like offending others.
So clearly it’s only worth giving someone advice or criticism if you think at least some of the following are true:
Their wellbeing/impact/improvement is important enough that the small chance your advice has a positive impact is worth the cost
They are rational enough to not take offense in a way that would damage your relationship
They are particularly good at using advice/criticism, i.e. they are more likely to update than the average person
They value honest opinions and feedback even when they disagree, i.e. they prefer to know what others think about them because it’s interesting and potentially useful information even if not immediately actionable
The above points all reflect a superior attitude compared to the average person. And so, if you choose to give someone advice or criticism despite all the associated risks, you are credibly signaling that you think they have these positive traits.
Not giving unsolicited advice and criticism is selfish
The “giving advice is bad” meme is just a version of “being sycophantic is good”—you personally benefit when others like you and so often it’s useful to suck up to people.
Even the risk that your interlocutor is offended is not a real risk to their wellbeing—people dislike offending others because it feels uncomfortable to them. Being offended is not actually meaningfully harmful to the offended party.
No doubt that sycophancy and the fear of expressing potentially friendship damaging truths allows negative patterns of behavior to continue unimpeded but I think you’ve missed the two most necessary factors in determining if advice—solicited or unsolicited—is a net benefit to the recipient:
1. you sufficiently understand and have the expertise to comment on their situation
&
2. you can offer new understanding they aren’t already privy to.
Perhaps the situations where I envision advice is being given is different to yours?
The problem I notice with most unsolicited advice is it’s either something the recipient is already aware of (i.e. the classic sitcom example is someone touches a hot dish and after the fact is told “careful that pan is hot”—is it good advice? Well in the sense that it is truthful, maybe. But the burn already having happened, it is not longer useful.) This is why it annoys people, this is why it is taken as an insult to their intelligence.
A lot of people have already heard the generic or obvious advice and there may be many reasons why they aren’t following it,[1] and most of the time hearing this generic advice being repeated will not be of a benefit even if they have all the qualities you enumerate: that you’re willing to accept the cost of giving advice, that they are rational enough to not take offense, they are good at taking advice and criticism, and they value honest feedback even when they disagree.
Take this example exchange:
A: “Why are you using the grill to make melted cheese, we have a toaster oven.”
B: “the toaster is shorted out, it’s broken”
You must sufficiently understand the recipient’s situation if you are to have any hope of improving it. If you don’t know what they know about the toaster oven, then unsolicited advice can’t help.
Another major problem I’ve found with unsolicited advice is that it lacks fine grain execution detail. My least favourite advice as a freelancing creative is “you need to get your name out there”—where is there? On that big nebulous internet? How does that help me exactly? Unless I needed further reinforcement of the fact that what material I am putting online isn’t reaching my current interlocutor—but it doesn’t give me any clues how to go about remedying that.
Advice, for it to be useful needs more than just sympathy and care for the person’s well being—it needs understanding of the situation which is the cause of their behavior.
My personal metric for the “quality” of advice is how actionable it is. This means that it can’t be post-facto (like the sitcom hot pan), it needs to understand causes and context—such as why they aren’t using the toaster oven, and most importantly it needs to suggest explicit actions that can be taken in order to change the situation (and which cations the recipient can or can’t take can only be determined by properly understanding their situation and the causes of their behavior).
Caveat: I’m sure there’s a genre of fringe cases where repetition becomes “the medium is the message”—that is they do need to hear it again. But there’s a certain point where doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result is quite stark raving mad.
Perhaps a situation to avoid giving advice in is if you think your advice is likely to be genuinely worthless because you have no expertise, knowledge, or intelligence that is relevant to the matter and you don’t trust your own judgment at all. Otherwise if you respect the other person, you’d consider them able to judge the usefulness of your advice for themselves.
You can’t know for sure that they’ve heard some advice before. Also you are providing the information that the piece of advice occurred to you, which in and of itself is often interesting/useful. So if you’re giving someone advice they are likely to have heard before this means there is a small chance that’s wrong and it’s still useful, and a larger chance that it has value zero. So in expectation the value is still positive. If you don’t give the advice, you are prioritizing not looking stupid or not offending them, which are both selfish motives.
Related to (2) is that telling someone you disapprove or think less of them for something, i.e. criticizing without providing any advice at all, is also a good signal of respect, because you are providing them with possibly useful information at the risk of them liking you less or making you feel uncomfortable.
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.
I noticed feeling a little unsatisfied and worried about this advice. I think it pattern matches with people who are savvy with status games or subtle bullying that allows for plausible deniability (“I’m just trying to help! You’re being too sensitive.”). I think people’s heuristic of perceiving criticisms as threatening seems somewhat justified most of the time.
To be clear, I tentatively define respect as the act of (a) evaluating a person as having an amount of value and welfare that is just as important as yours, (b) believing that this person’s value and welfare is worth caring about, and (c) treating them as such. You don’t have to admire or like a person to respect them. Here are some actions that connote disrespect (or indignity): torture, murder, confinement, physical abuse, verbal abuse, causing a person’s social standing to drop unnecessarily, etc. Having said that, I’m still not satisfied with this definition, but it’s the best I can come up so far.
Maybe you’ve thought about this already or I’ve missed some implicit assumptions, but let me try to explain by first using Buck’s experience as an example:
I interpret this as Buck (a) being appreciative of a criticism that seems unreasonable and unfair, yet (b) his need for respect wasn’t fulfilled—I would probably say “fuck that guy” too if they thought my opinions don’t matter in any situation due to the color of my hair.
I could imagine Buck’s interlocutor passing your above conditions:
They might believe that Buck can be more impactful when other people see him with normal looking hair colour and takes him more seriously.
They might believe Buck is rational enough (but it turns out Buck was offended anyway).
They might believe Buck is good at using advice/criticism.
They might believe Buck values opinions and feedback even when they disagree (this is true).
I could also imagine Buck’s interlocutor doing a cost-benefit analysis and believing the associated costs you mentioned above are worth it. And yet, Buck was still at least a bit offended, and I think it would be reasonable to believe that this person’s criticism was actually not a good credible signal of respect.
One may argue that Buck isn’t being rational. If he did, he wouldn’t be offended. “Huh, this guy believed that the benefits of giving that criticism outweighs the cost of me liking them less, thinking that they are stupid, and me being offended outweigh. Seems like a credible signal of respect.”
I mean Buck was appreciative of that advice, but an advice being valuable is not necessarily a credible signal of respect. I could imagine an boss giving valuable advice that still checks all your conditions, but does it in a abusive manner.
My tentative version of what an unsolicited advice that’s also a good credible signal of respect would have more of the following conditions met:
The interlocutor actually communicating their criticism in a respectful way (as I’ve defined above). This seems like a necessary condition to pass.
The interlocutor made at least some effort to craft a good criticism/advice. One way this could work is for the interlocutor to ask questions and learn more about their advisee, which is probably a standard in many problem solving frameworks used by management consultants. But a mistake can sometimes be straightforwardly obvious that a low effort criticism works, so this condition is not sufficient on its own.
The interlocutor noticing that their advice could be wrong and very costly to heed. Again, not sufficient on its own.
The interlocutor showing care and authenticity, and showing that their advice isn’t some status-seeking one-upmanship, or a way to “create common knowledge of their status difference” (as a friend pointed out to me as another possibility).
And probably something else written here.
I might be misunderstanding you though, so happy to update!
And thanks for writing this! I do think you are on to something—I do want to get better at feedback giving and receiving, and if done well and at a higher frequency (this might be what you’re pointing to), could make me more impactful.
How people respond tells you something about them, so you don’t necessarily need to start with a clear picture of how they might respond.
Also, I think advice is the wrong framing for things that are useful to give, it’s better to make sure people have the knowledge and skills to figure out the things they seem to need to figure out. Similarly to the “show, don’t tell” of educational discussions, you want to present the arguments and not the conclusions, let alone explicitly insist that the other person is wrong about the conclusions. Or better yet, promote the skills that let them assemble the arguments on their own, without needing to concretely present the arguments.
It might help to give the arguments and even conclusions or advice eventually, after everything else is done, but it’s not the essential part and might be pointless or needlessly confrontational if the conclusions they arrive at happen to differ.
Any rule about when to give advice has to be robust to people going on and on to lecture you about Jesus because they truly and sincerely want to keep you out of Hell. (Or lecture about veganism, or EA, or politics.)
More generally, social rules about good manners have to apply to everyone—both to people with correct beliefs and to people with incorrect ones. Just like not letting the police break into everyone’s houses catches fewer criminals (when the police are right), but protects innocent people (when the police are wrong), not giving advice helps fewer people (when the advice giver is right), but saves people from arrogant know it alls and meme plagues (when the advice giver is wrong).
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
Insightful. Glad you wrote it.
I enjoyed the combination of “these are real costs” and “positive impact is worth the cost.”
I found this insightful, ”...reflect a superior attitude...give...advice or criticism...signaling...they have...these positive traits”
I think the challenge lies in categorizing people as “superior” and “average”. I like the use of labels since it helps the conversation, but I wonder if it is too limiting. Perhaps, context and topic are important dimensions worthy of consideration as well. I can imagine real people responding differently given more variables, such as context and topic.
Bottom line: I loved it!