Don’t solve people’s problems for them
In general, people don’t want you to solve their problems for them. Doing so strips them of their sense of self-efficacy, which is the crucial belief that they are capable of managing their own challenges.
Someone who ignores this precept, by lecturing or teaching others too much, can be called didactic.
My wisest friends are the opposite of didactic. They often withhold expressing their opinions when I’m discussing my problems, and instead help me figure things out on my own.
I will not give a person a boost or a start if he does not know the frustration of trying to [solve a difficult problem] or the frenzy one would get into when trying [to put an idea] into words. After I have shown a student one corner of a square, if he does not come back with the other three, I will not repeat what I have done. — Confucius, The Analects.
As any good teacher knows, you can’t just give students the answers to a test and expect them to learn anything. That’s efficient too easy.
If a skill is brought to a student, he will become complacent and imbibe very little. — Kapil Gupta
Minds, like bodies, will often fall into a pimpled ill-conditioned state from mere excess of comfort. — Charles Dickens
For a muscle to get stronger, it must be stressed under tension. The mind is no different. Having to work to arrive at a solution is what stresses the mind and causes it to learn and grow. The didactic person (and I used to be one) doesn’t want to patiently help someone thoroughly examine their problems. They would rather dish out some quick advice, which robs people of the opportunity to think for themselves.
We confuse the practice of [learning] with ease of access to information and forget that real [learning] requires the exercise of effort. — Ian Leslie, Curious.
Of course, for simple questions like “where is the bathroom?”, responding with a sphinxlike riddle such as “the location of the bathroom will be revealed to you when you most need it” is funny not helpful. Simple questions (e.g., how to ride a bike, how to swing a tennis racket, how to play a piano scale) should be met with simple answers.[1]
But once we enter into the realm of more complicated questions that can have multiple answers, then it is best to guide someone to think for themselves.
No human being actually wants to be told what to do. There’s something within a human being which rejects the idea of being told what to do. — Kapil Gupta
If someone says, “I don’t know what to major in college,” and you reply, “Just major in French,” and clap your hands together and walk away self-satisfied, I will throw a croissant at you I would recommend doing what the wise do and simply ask the college-curious person a series of questions.
Practice really hearing what people say. Do your best to get inside their minds. — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations.
This process I’m describing—where one person has a problem, and the other (wise) person asks them questions—it’s a game! The wise person knows that if they were to proffer advice, then they will have effectively stolen the other person’s turn, and are essentially playing the game by themselves at that point. Lame! How is the other person supposed to learn and grow if they don’t have a turn to think?[2]
So in a good and proper game, after somebody has brought a problem to the table, the wise person makes the first move by inviting their friend to think about the problem differently, or, to examine why they believe what they believe.
Note: the wise person truly does not know the answer to the other person’s problem. People know their own problems better than anyone else, sometimes they just get a little confused with everything going on in their heads and need help straightening things out. So asking leading questions is not helpful, and indeed, actually hinders the process of curiously and nonjudgmentally exploring the mind of the problem-haver.
“Kindly let me help you or you’ll drown,” said the monkey, putting the fish safely up a tree.
Sometimes doing good to others…is amazingly destructive because it’s full of conceit. How do you know what’s good for other people? — Alan Watts
Here’s an example of this game-dynamic I had with one of my friends recently.
Example of the game
My friend was struggling with whether or not to break up with his girlfriend. I had my own opinion on the matter, but rather than expressing it, I instead posed questions that forced him to think. And thus, the game commenced!
Me: “So, given all the information you’ve shared with me, do you want to break up with her?”
Friend: “Ugh, I don’t know. I love her, but there are some core differences between us that I’m not sure are reconcilable.”
Me: “Have you tried working on those differences together?”
Friend: “Yes, and she’s made some progress over the last year.”
Me: “A meaningful amount of progress, or a trivial amount?”
Friend, sighing: “A trivial amount…”
Me: “Assuming she continues to not change for you, can you accept her for who she is?”
Friend: “I’m not sure. I mean, I love her now and we make it work.”
Me: “Well, how ’bout 30 years from now? Can you live with and accept those core differences for the rest of your life?”
Friend, wide-eyed: “I…don’t want to.” He thought quietly for several minutes. I patiently waited for him to process things. Then he continued, “Thinking about the long-term, I don’t think we would be happy together. We would probably be better off finding more compatible people to date. I’m glad that I’ve had her in my life, but I don’t think we’re meant for each other.”
Benefits of this method
During this game, the answerer is the one trying to learn something, so they ought to be doing most of the work. And their reward is sometimes walking away with a new perspective on their problem.
Meanwhile, the questioner gets to explore their own curiosity with what they choose to ask. Even better, they get to watch their friend play with different ideas—a true delight!
Here’s a simple heuristic to remember this concept: You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it think!
- ^
Answers:
First, you have to lasso a wild bike, tame it, feed it lubricating oil, and then maybe it will let you ride it.
The swinging lifestyle isn’t for everyone, be sure you know what you’re getting into before you seduce a tennis racket.
Trick question! Pianos are not fish, they do not have scales.
- ^
This is like playing video games with your little brother but secretly not plugging in his controller, all the while complimenting him, “Wow you’re doing so great! Keep up the good effort!” He’s not going to improve when you do this.
I’d phrase the main point a bit differently: some skills are “learned not taught”, like math or playing a musical instrument. You have to put in the work, and only occasionally check in with a teacher. But other skills are “taught not learned”, like CPR. The teacher shows you how to do it, checks your technique, and that’s it. The wise will know which skills afford which approach.
That’s kind of what I was going for when I said that simple questions (of skill) should be met with prescriptive answers. Whereas more complicated questions (like: what should I major in college?) is not as straightforward.
^That’s a good way of putting it.
Becoming a good chess player requires two separate skills:
Position evaluation.
Strategic search.
Human grandmasters can destroy Stockfish at position evaluation. If you restrict Stockfish to depth one, it’s only around 1000 elo. Maybe 1500. On the other hand, grandmasters are destroyed by Leela at the same task. Yet Stockfish is a better engine than Leela.
This is because Stockfish is much better at search. Most of the elo improvements in the past decade were made by hardcoding in slightly smarter rules for when to prune nodes or when to investigate a little further. The position evaluation has mostly remained the same: a shallow <100k parameter neural network (compare to Leela’s 150MB network).
Getting good at competition math requires two separate skills:
Mathematical knowledge.
Innovation.
Mathematical knowledge does not just include knowing theorems and their proofs, it also includes knowing how to solve specific problems. The knowledge that the Diophantine equation might get simplified by taking modulo seven, because the cubic residues are
This is distinct from innovation, the ability to invent new solutions to problem types you have never seen before. You cannot train this skill by learning more math. In fact, that makes it harder to train this skill, because there will be fewer problems you have no clue how to solve. You can only train this skill by bashing your head against a wall, trying a bunch of random things until something sticks. Eventually, you’ll learn what kind of bashing is ‘reasonable’. Until you get hit with a harder problem.
My first experience realizing most people have not trained this skill was in high school. A friend took a math competition for fun, and was explaining their solutions to me. I was flabbergasted. “How could you possibly have come to that conclusion? That’s not a proof, it’s not even a valid heuristic! How did your brain let you write that on the page without stopping to look for the justification?!”
I obviously didn’t say all that. It would have been terribly rude. Also, now that I’m trying to get my younger sister to learn math, I realize they did a lot better than I gave them credit for. They actually tried for several hours. Yes, their trial and error was more flailing than experimentation, but it had hints of enlightenment. There was definitely reasoning going on, and probably reasoning about reasoning too.
I think there are a lot of individuals like this who could get very good at the skill, but never realize it is a skill you can practice. I never set out to practice this skill, I just happened to do math competitions without textbooks or coaches. And it was very frustrating, because I wanted to get better at (1), not (2).
The reason you should not solve other people’s problems for them is not because they don’t want your advice. It is because if you can solve their problem for them, they really need to improve at skill (2). You have less information than them on their specific problem. You are less invested in solving it. They should be better positioned than you to solve this problem. It is not good for their future if you let them offload searching the solution space on you. I sympathize with Confucius. People without the grit to solve their problems should develop that grit, not expect others to subsidize them forever.
^Exactly. The main reason I wrote this post was to avoid didactic behavior (ie: lecturing or teaching others too much) and what to replace it with (ie: curious & nonjudgmental questioning).
Yes, you can. Why is your essay peppered with quotes? Because each and every single one of those authors (excl. meditations) has made millions of people around the world think, because they bothered to write down and disseminate their beliefs.
“They should’ve thought for themselves.” The privileged lie of an educated prick. Someone who believes their beliefs were autochthonous, and not the result of the materials they’ve been exposed to.
How many chains of thought are inattainable beyond an acquisition period? How many of your ‘wise’ friends have attained their wisdom in the total absence of literature? Can your ‘critical thinking’ put people in the right information streams?
Um, yes, they should’ve thought for themselves. You can get quite far by just thinking for yourself. My sixth grade math competition training consisted of solving thousands of problems on MATHCOUNTS trainer. Not reading textbooks, just trying a bunch of things until I solved the problem. So, for example, I would solve problems like:
by taking a derivative, because I had never heard of AM-GM. I do not recommend this training method for people who want to win. I only placed second in my state. I do recommend it for getting better at critical thinking.
I fully agree there is a skill of critical thinking that can be developed with isolated practice, and I agree in many cases this ability is bounded by an individual’s intrinsic talent at doing so—whether by desire, intellect, hardiness, or such.
I strongly disagree this is relevant to a wide spectrum of knowledge problems.
I do not know what these knowledge problems are. Also, I strongly disagree with this:
This is the privileged lie of an encultured prick, who was lucky to be exposed to the right materials. How many chains of thought will you be lucky enough to come across? How many of your ‘smart’ friends have attained their abilities through others’ writing? Can your books push people into new information streams?
I’m not sure what the semantic change of the paraphrase is. Could you plainly state the disagreement, or otherwise recruit a model to reformat your intent into a pure context free claim?
Why didn’t you already recruit a model? Take a screenshot and feed it into Claude. I just tried, it worked. So what was the need for these two comments?
Because I do not have access to your internal state and cannot independently verify that my model obtained an accurate reading of your intent.
I claim: You believe I am attemping to troll you in some manner, by forcing some unnecessary work unto you.
I claim: There is a sincere and obvious moral reason why I should not read intent into an opposed party, even with AI assistance.
I claim: The act of me doing so, right now, is obviously impolite, and should be avoided in any polite conversation.
Please: don’t resort to meta-games. Stick to what is true, and only what is true.
The crux of our disagreement shows up in this little metagame. You think people need to be told what to think, while I think they should think for themselves. Your thinking might fail, but you will be better off for trying. At the very least, you will not frustrate your interlocutor asking for verbose explanations, because they can show you one corner of a square and you can find the other three.
My first reply was demonstrating how thinking for yourself does work. You do not need literature, just a steady stream of problems to forge your critical thinking skills against.
From your reply,
I realized you also think it can work, but only for those privileged enough with intrinsic talent. From your original comment, the argument seems to be: critical thinking can practiced and is useful, but only for those privileged enough to spend time on the endeavor; most people are better off just learning from books.
I strongly disagree with this idea that critical thinking is for the privileged. I think it is quite the opposite: only the privileged grow up in cultures that show them the best resources to learn from. Everyone else gets indoctrinated into the local cult, where football or magic worship takes precedence. Even those a little luckier learn studying is important, but being the students have no way to differentiate between “Linear Algebra Done Wrong”, “Linear Algebra Done Right”, Khan Academy, and MIT OCW, assuming they even find these resources.
Every state usually has one or two MATHCOUNTS clubs that win almost every year. In my day, it was Frost Math in Massachusetts, Quail Valley in Texas, and Desert Ridge in New Mexico. Why, even in very competitive states, is this so? Because some are privileged to be taught by better coaches, with better resources.
Yes, with the right resources, you can learn a lot faster from emulation than innovation. Only the very privileged get these resources. Everyone else is better off developing their critical thinking skills. How can you call it a privilege to think for yourself, when very few seeking to rise up the ranks get the opportunity to not think for themselves?
I simply disagree. There is no meaningful benefit to me to, for example:
figure out how to assemble an Ikea desk while ignoring the manual
deciding what bodily exercises are more or less effective, without consulting both folk knowledge and academia
learning any skill with a clear progression tree, whether be it the piano, martial arts, mathematics olympiads, in the absence of any tutor
That is predicated on an external progression tree. Consider how you would have developed your critical thinking skills if the questions had to all be developed by yourself too.
There is no guarantee from the world, for a wide variety of domains, that any obvious ladder of expertise acquisition exists. Especially with regards to the nebulous “life problems” the OP discusses, wherein there are often more societal traps to induct people into ladders of self flagellation.
Imagine a world where 90% of math textbooks simply came filled with metaphysical questions that were wholly and entirely unrelated to the art of problem solving. And you know someone who has probably figured out which books are really correct, because you see at a meta level that that someone appears to be Very Good At Problem Solving, but the only thing that chucklefuck does is to withhold knowledge and await your independent rediscovery of mental frameworks that are studied specifically for how rare they are to be developed in the total absence of external inputs.
Note: don’t take things literally. In a modern sense “books” are whatever social sphere and algo feeds and sekrit klubs and whatever else their info is subsisted on. I claim OP’s behavior boils down to a desire to hang that knowledge over people, to inflate the perceived difficulty of what they know.
OK, sure. That’s not a disagreement, that just means you should beat up the OP, because I believe they are perpetuating it.
I have absolutely zero problems with some blood of the earth redefinition of accessibility as innate sin and personal intellect as virtue. Insofar as the negative response to my first comment was predicated on readers’ pattern matching to various contemporary apparatchiks of equity, I regret not putting my political allegiances more front and center.