When you receive advice, it must fall into one of these categories:
The advice is worthless or even outright bad.
The advice is valuable, but it’s common knowledge, or at least can be obtained from public information in a straightforward way.
The advice is valuable, and it’s not common knowledge, nor can it be obtained from public information in any straightforward way.
Now, if you believe you’re receiving advice that is in category (3), you must ask yourself what makes you so special that you are privy to this information. This leads to the following heuristics:
If the advice is in category (2), it is likely to be good if the source is reputable. For example, a book or website about programming written by a reputable author is likely to give you good advice on how to program. (But note that while it certainly adds value in terms of a convenient and attractive presentation, such a source doesn’t give any significant information that wouldn’t be available from other public sources.)
If the advice purports to be in category (3), and yet the source of information is public (e.g. a book or website, even a non-free one), it’s almost certainly bunk. The only exception is if the message is highly unpopular or counter-intuitive, and somehow you know that you have overcome biases that prevent most people from evaluating it correctly, which is very difficult and rare. For example, nearly any book that claims to bring special wisdom about investment, career, relationships, etc. is bunk.
If the advice comes from a person on a private occasion, then there are several steps that you need to do. First, does this person show clear indications of the relevant knowledge and competence? If not, it’s likely bunk for obvious reasons. Second, is the advice in category (2) or (3)? If it’s (2), it’s probably good, though it still pays off to check against other sources of information. If it purports to be (3), then you need to do the third, and most difficult evaluation: does this person have the motivation for an extraordinary degree of altruism towards you? If not, it’s likely bunk, or otherwise they wouldn’t grant you this privilege. If yes, for example if you’re getting advice from your parents, then it is probably highly valuable.
One common failure mode is when people believe they’re giving you advice of type (3), but in reality, their motivation for altruism towards you is weaker than their motivation for saying things that have high signaling value (and omitting things that have negative such value). This is one danger of socializing with people who are higher-status and more accomplished than you—you’ll be tempted to take their advice seriously, but in reality, even if they are giving it with good intentions, it’s likely to be heavily censored and distorted so as to maximize its signaling value.
(This is exacerbated by the fact that good no-nonsense advice on topics that involve any aspects of human social behavior, both personal and professional, tends to sound crass, disreputable, cynical, or worse.)
There’s a type of advice I’ve observed which I’m having trouble categorising into the above: advice which is valuable, but which has a prerequisite level of competence or understanding before you can use it.
I’ve been swing dancing for about four and a half years, and I’ve taken a lot of classes and workshops in it. There are several common pieces of advice that get thrown around by teachers: “keep your feet under you”, “dance into the floor”, “engage your core”… they’re generally referring to how something feels when you’re doing it, which has a reasonable margin for subjectivity, so some people will hear advice like that and think “oh, yeah, that makes sense”, while others will hear it and think “well where else would my feet be? Over me?”
Good instructors find a way to give you the bodily experience without giving you misinterpretable verbal advice. “Engage your core” can mean different things to different people. There’s a reasonable amount of crossover between the swing dance community and the circus skills community, and when an aerial acrobat hears “engage your core”, they tense up like they’re about to be thrown, which is not what’s meant in the dance context. But if someone says “imagine you’ve got a sword stuck point-first in your navel, and you have to keep that sword horizontal”, that’s quite a specific piece of advice which directly addresses what is meant.
Sometimes you’re just not ready for a piece of advice. Earlier this year at a weekend-long event, a well-respected and reputable instructor said something in a workshop. I can’t remember his exact wording, but in my notes for the class I wrote “the tension and compression you feel in your hands is a consequence of your bodies moving, not a cause”. I thought about this over the rest of the weekend and it completely blew my mind and made me revise huge chunks of how I thought the dance mechanically worked. If I’d heard it two years ago, my response to it would probably have been a lot less productive.
Sometimes you’ll be working on something, and you’ll notice a physical experience you’d previously not paid attention to, and a piece of advice you heard in a class months or even years ago will suddenly make sense. This doesn’t necessarily just happen once with any given piece of advice. The simple and seemingly-obvious imperative of “dance to the music” is one that you can get a lot of repeated use out of at different levels of experience. When you’re starting out, it means “just move in time to the music, OK?” A little later on, it means “fit the phrasing of your movements to the structure of the music”. A little later still, it means “take inspiration from the features of the music. If the clarinet does something twiddly, maybe you can do something twiddly to complement it in your movements.” At the moment, for me, it means something quite ridiculously art-wanky that I’d be mildly embarrassed about sharing, but in another six months I’ll probably peel away another layer of “dance to the music”, and it’ll give me a whole extra take on the words.
I seem to have taken this opportunity to talk at length about swing dancing, (a perennial hazard), but this general idea of advice which sits on prerequisite knowledge or experience is one I see elsewhere. Less-Wrong-flavoured advice like “your strength as a rationalist is to be more confused by fiction than by reality” feels a lot like “keep your feet under you”. “Go meta”, much like “dance to the music”, has different levels of subtletly and meaning. Less Wrong buzzword expressions sometimes feel like thing people are throwing around because they’re available to do so, but when someone uses one to get to an important central point of an issue, when they nail it, it’s genuinely illuminatory.
This category of advice is usually what I run in to when I’m evaluating things at all (people rarely trust me with secret wisdom, but they often trust me with merely advanced wisdom :))
As a metric, I’d suggest a variant on #3 works: is there some reason to suspect that YOU have a special level of competence that grants you unusual insight? And then ask equally why is it being shared? Is it because it’s useful at all levels, or because your instructor trusts that YOU are clearly an advanced student, who can understand these things?
Or is it simply because it’s a high-status platitude that will encourage people to start thinking for themselves, then credit the platitude for their success? Or perhaps it simply serves to keep you practicing, and practice tends to bring improvements! :)
Well, normally at dance workshops the advice is being shared because I’ve paid a not-inconsiderable sum of money for the privilege of being there, and have auditioned to make sure I’m in a group of dancers at a similar level to me :-)
Looks like a straightforward category-2 (logical extrapolation from publicly available information) with the added value of good presentation and doing the extrapolation work for us.
Hrm. There’s a category 2.5 of “advice which is common knowledge to long-standing members of a small subculture but not to the public and that isn’t written down.” These are cases where the information isn’t secret, but is primarily conveyed word-of-mouth, not in print, and where it’s too specialized to be “conventional wisdom”.
It might be that there’s some piece of advice that most expert, say, patent lawyers would give you, but that wouldn’t be in a standard book because the topic is too narrow or esoteric.
In my case, I’ve gotten valuable career advice from senior members of my profession. I don’t think it was a unique boon to me and their advice parallels conventional wisdom, but with details that are specific to my narrow field.
I’m not sure exactly what you mean by a lot of this (“common knowledge,” “public,” etc.) Some of these things, I suspect, will be a matter of degree.
Furthermore, legitimate information may be presented in a hyped-up manner for marketing purposes. For example, from what I can tell, Tim Ferriss’ books do contain a substantial amount of accurate information, though often presented in a hyped-up manner that makes the things he talk about sound easier to do than they really are. So I think “almost certainly” is too strong for your second bullet point.
This is true, but a simplification. Specifically, it doesn’t distinguish cases where good advice is mostly impersonal (e.g. how to invest money) from cases where the best advice will be highly personalized (e.g. diet).
In many complicated fields, like diet, good advice needs to be individual. Learning enough about the field to choose the right advice yourself may take years. And it’s prohibitively expensive to find what works best for you by trying everything. At best, you’ll stick with the first thing that works moderately well.
So I propose category (4): the advice is valuable, not because it relies on nonpublic information, but because matching the right advice to each person is complicated (though based on public info, such as medicine). People who study the field, master it, and then give personalized advice add real value. Most importantly, to trust the advice of such people, you don’t need to assume an extraordinary degree of altruism on their part. Ordinary situations like paying an expert for counseling may be sufficiently trustworthy.
Learning enough about the field to choose the right advice yourself may take years.
In that case, how could the expert possibly know enough about the field to choose the right advise for someone they only know through at-best several hour long appointments?
That’s a good point I hadn’t thought of. Many fields probably won’t be like what I described: one would need to know a lot both about the field and about the person who needs advice, to give personalized advice.
Still, I think in most fields good personalized advice requires many years of studying and working in the field, while a few weeks of studying the person who needs advice would be sufficient. There is a disparity, partially (wholly?) arising from the fact the expert is already experienced in the field when they start working with the client, and has also studied how to analyze clients’ requirements.
Of course, like you say, professionals that most people are able to hire can only give them a few hours of their time at most; often much less, like the 10-30 minutes of a typical doctor’s visit.
When you receive advice, it must fall into one of these categories:
The advice is worthless or even outright bad.
The advice is valuable, but it’s common knowledge, or at least can be obtained from public information in a straightforward way.
The advice is valuable, and it’s not common knowledge, nor can it be obtained from public information in any straightforward way.
Now, if you believe you’re receiving advice that is in category (3), you must ask yourself what makes you so special that you are privy to this information. This leads to the following heuristics:
If the advice is in category (2), it is likely to be good if the source is reputable. For example, a book or website about programming written by a reputable author is likely to give you good advice on how to program. (But note that while it certainly adds value in terms of a convenient and attractive presentation, such a source doesn’t give any significant information that wouldn’t be available from other public sources.)
If the advice purports to be in category (3), and yet the source of information is public (e.g. a book or website, even a non-free one), it’s almost certainly bunk. The only exception is if the message is highly unpopular or counter-intuitive, and somehow you know that you have overcome biases that prevent most people from evaluating it correctly, which is very difficult and rare. For example, nearly any book that claims to bring special wisdom about investment, career, relationships, etc. is bunk.
If the advice comes from a person on a private occasion, then there are several steps that you need to do. First, does this person show clear indications of the relevant knowledge and competence? If not, it’s likely bunk for obvious reasons. Second, is the advice in category (2) or (3)? If it’s (2), it’s probably good, though it still pays off to check against other sources of information. If it purports to be (3), then you need to do the third, and most difficult evaluation: does this person have the motivation for an extraordinary degree of altruism towards you? If not, it’s likely bunk, or otherwise they wouldn’t grant you this privilege. If yes, for example if you’re getting advice from your parents, then it is probably highly valuable.
One common failure mode is when people believe they’re giving you advice of type (3), but in reality, their motivation for altruism towards you is weaker than their motivation for saying things that have high signaling value (and omitting things that have negative such value). This is one danger of socializing with people who are higher-status and more accomplished than you—you’ll be tempted to take their advice seriously, but in reality, even if they are giving it with good intentions, it’s likely to be heavily censored and distorted so as to maximize its signaling value.
(This is exacerbated by the fact that good no-nonsense advice on topics that involve any aspects of human social behavior, both personal and professional, tends to sound crass, disreputable, cynical, or worse.)
There’s a type of advice I’ve observed which I’m having trouble categorising into the above: advice which is valuable, but which has a prerequisite level of competence or understanding before you can use it.
I’ve been swing dancing for about four and a half years, and I’ve taken a lot of classes and workshops in it. There are several common pieces of advice that get thrown around by teachers: “keep your feet under you”, “dance into the floor”, “engage your core”… they’re generally referring to how something feels when you’re doing it, which has a reasonable margin for subjectivity, so some people will hear advice like that and think “oh, yeah, that makes sense”, while others will hear it and think “well where else would my feet be? Over me?”
Good instructors find a way to give you the bodily experience without giving you misinterpretable verbal advice. “Engage your core” can mean different things to different people. There’s a reasonable amount of crossover between the swing dance community and the circus skills community, and when an aerial acrobat hears “engage your core”, they tense up like they’re about to be thrown, which is not what’s meant in the dance context. But if someone says “imagine you’ve got a sword stuck point-first in your navel, and you have to keep that sword horizontal”, that’s quite a specific piece of advice which directly addresses what is meant.
Sometimes you’re just not ready for a piece of advice. Earlier this year at a weekend-long event, a well-respected and reputable instructor said something in a workshop. I can’t remember his exact wording, but in my notes for the class I wrote “the tension and compression you feel in your hands is a consequence of your bodies moving, not a cause”. I thought about this over the rest of the weekend and it completely blew my mind and made me revise huge chunks of how I thought the dance mechanically worked. If I’d heard it two years ago, my response to it would probably have been a lot less productive.
Sometimes you’ll be working on something, and you’ll notice a physical experience you’d previously not paid attention to, and a piece of advice you heard in a class months or even years ago will suddenly make sense. This doesn’t necessarily just happen once with any given piece of advice. The simple and seemingly-obvious imperative of “dance to the music” is one that you can get a lot of repeated use out of at different levels of experience. When you’re starting out, it means “just move in time to the music, OK?” A little later on, it means “fit the phrasing of your movements to the structure of the music”. A little later still, it means “take inspiration from the features of the music. If the clarinet does something twiddly, maybe you can do something twiddly to complement it in your movements.” At the moment, for me, it means something quite ridiculously art-wanky that I’d be mildly embarrassed about sharing, but in another six months I’ll probably peel away another layer of “dance to the music”, and it’ll give me a whole extra take on the words.
I seem to have taken this opportunity to talk at length about swing dancing, (a perennial hazard), but this general idea of advice which sits on prerequisite knowledge or experience is one I see elsewhere. Less-Wrong-flavoured advice like “your strength as a rationalist is to be more confused by fiction than by reality” feels a lot like “keep your feet under you”. “Go meta”, much like “dance to the music”, has different levels of subtletly and meaning. Less Wrong buzzword expressions sometimes feel like thing people are throwing around because they’re available to do so, but when someone uses one to get to an important central point of an issue, when they nail it, it’s genuinely illuminatory.
This category of advice is usually what I run in to when I’m evaluating things at all (people rarely trust me with secret wisdom, but they often trust me with merely advanced wisdom :))
As a metric, I’d suggest a variant on #3 works: is there some reason to suspect that YOU have a special level of competence that grants you unusual insight? And then ask equally why is it being shared? Is it because it’s useful at all levels, or because your instructor trusts that YOU are clearly an advanced student, who can understand these things?
Or is it simply because it’s a high-status platitude that will encourage people to start thinking for themselves, then credit the platitude for their success? Or perhaps it simply serves to keep you practicing, and practice tends to bring improvements! :)
Well, normally at dance workshops the advice is being shared because I’ve paid a not-inconsiderable sum of money for the privilege of being there, and have auditioned to make sure I’m in a group of dancers at a similar level to me :-)
Exercise for the reader: Apply this advise to itself.
Looks like a straightforward category-2 (logical extrapolation from publicly available information) with the added value of good presentation and doing the extrapolation work for us.
Hrm. There’s a category 2.5 of “advice which is common knowledge to long-standing members of a small subculture but not to the public and that isn’t written down.” These are cases where the information isn’t secret, but is primarily conveyed word-of-mouth, not in print, and where it’s too specialized to be “conventional wisdom”.
It might be that there’s some piece of advice that most expert, say, patent lawyers would give you, but that wouldn’t be in a standard book because the topic is too narrow or esoteric.
In my case, I’ve gotten valuable career advice from senior members of my profession. I don’t think it was a unique boon to me and their advice parallels conventional wisdom, but with details that are specific to my narrow field.
I’m not sure exactly what you mean by a lot of this (“common knowledge,” “public,” etc.) Some of these things, I suspect, will be a matter of degree.
Furthermore, legitimate information may be presented in a hyped-up manner for marketing purposes. For example, from what I can tell, Tim Ferriss’ books do contain a substantial amount of accurate information, though often presented in a hyped-up manner that makes the things he talk about sound easier to do than they really are. So I think “almost certainly” is too strong for your second bullet point.
Does Tim Ferriss ever talk about finding Ferriss-style opportunities for yourself in addition to using what he’s discovered?
Yes. In the Four Hour there the general advice of testing seeking out ideas that might produce big wins and testing them the Quantified Self way.
This is true, but a simplification. Specifically, it doesn’t distinguish cases where good advice is mostly impersonal (e.g. how to invest money) from cases where the best advice will be highly personalized (e.g. diet).
In many complicated fields, like diet, good advice needs to be individual. Learning enough about the field to choose the right advice yourself may take years. And it’s prohibitively expensive to find what works best for you by trying everything. At best, you’ll stick with the first thing that works moderately well.
So I propose category (4): the advice is valuable, not because it relies on nonpublic information, but because matching the right advice to each person is complicated (though based on public info, such as medicine). People who study the field, master it, and then give personalized advice add real value. Most importantly, to trust the advice of such people, you don’t need to assume an extraordinary degree of altruism on their part. Ordinary situations like paying an expert for counseling may be sufficiently trustworthy.
In that case, how could the expert possibly know enough about the field to choose the right advise for someone they only know through at-best several hour long appointments?
That’s a good point I hadn’t thought of. Many fields probably won’t be like what I described: one would need to know a lot both about the field and about the person who needs advice, to give personalized advice.
Still, I think in most fields good personalized advice requires many years of studying and working in the field, while a few weeks of studying the person who needs advice would be sufficient. There is a disparity, partially (wholly?) arising from the fact the expert is already experienced in the field when they start working with the client, and has also studied how to analyze clients’ requirements.
Of course, like you say, professionals that most people are able to hire can only give them a few hours of their time at most; often much less, like the 10-30 minutes of a typical doctor’s visit.