edit: the tone of this post is angry, so you know. The anger is directed primarily at the paragraph I quote, which I consider utterly outrageous. It definitely spills over onto you also but I have nothing against you other than what spills over from this paragraph. I found your post had interesting insights in it otherwise. Anyway this post is pretty much an outraged rant so be warned.
Actually, here are the cliff notes because there were some objective things I identified.
teaching is a public performance role. dealing with customers complaints is literally part of the job, and one can additionally take it on more in the mantle of one’s role as a teacher. Fielding a concerned intervention from a vetted personal friend is pretty much the opposite as a situation.
Making criticism unexplicit does not make it lighter, it just makes it more likely to be insiduous. The “criticism” in c) is formally information, informally advice, and only in subtext is it criticism. A friend cannot be expected to unravel this as it relates to a dear personal topic in real time. Phrasing criticism so that it doesn’t look like criticism is dangerous.
criticising someone’s chosen life path is a serious topic. The most salient thing about the topic is never going to be that you want them to be happy, unless you first explicitly state that you have an idea for them that might help them and you offer it in that spirit, but for them to judge it for themselves. -NOT just to drop it on them, if it’s bordering a fault line.
People can prefer unhappiness and stress over happiness for many reasons. It may be more important for them to have a struggle to rise to to ensure they grow, for example. Moreover, if someone has taken drastic action in their life choices, for example if they quit their job, became a hermit, and lived off plants, one would assume that there was a serious reason for it, whether or not it was a good one. The pattern you describe of someone choosing to dedicate themselves to one very difficult problem they may or may not be able for is serious in the same way. The way to go in such a case is not to condense one’s argument to 4 snappy lines, as one risks shearing through all kinds of layers of their understanding, in their attempt to meet you half way as a concerned friend. (-unless one understands them extremely well and can make the perfect such 4 lines), instead one has to check to see if one is proceeding from common ground.
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You apparently do not understand what is wrong with c):
“There’s strong evidence that there are only a few people in the world who have a chance of solving the math research problem that you’ve been working on for the past few years. It’s very unlikely that you have the innate ability to solve it regardless of how hard you work on it. You’re a good mathematician, you could make a lot of progress on easier problems, and that would probably make you happier.”
The first thing is taking the outside view on someone’s dedicated craft at all. One way people can become extreme outliers, the “few people”, in the first place (if whatever dubious analysis produced such an absurd statement is even remotely correct) is by obsessive focus, and by not counting the odds. To sneak in the idea, in the very first sentence that your friend should be taking a many times removed outside view on this, (rather than throwing himself at his limits until he breaks, transcends them, or both) -and rapidly build assertions off this cannot be attributed to lacking social skills. Structurally, it’s an excellently crafted psychological ambush from a friend.
And why would you even try to influence someone who’s actions make no sense to you? If that’s so then you clearly lack the common ground, or understanding of their motivations, to begin to speculate on what would fulfill their values, let alone craft this atrocity.
In this specific case, If someone is struggling at the limit of their ability to do something, anything at all, they don’t want to hear from you why it’s a bad idea, and still less how they’d be more hedonically comfortable if they’d just settle down and do the sensible thing.
And if a person has chosen to pursue a certain path, why would you presume that a half baked comment would be commeasurate with their deliberate personal decision on how and where to direct their lives?
It doesn’t matter if they’re completely, utterly, or even obviously wrong, attempting to change someone’s chosen path through life is a serious thing! At best, absolute best, this is like holding an intervention for an alcoholic, but not bothering to think through how to phrase it or show some seriousness, and minimal respect. If someone’s pathologically wasting their life. (in your judgement), you don’t just go up to them and tell them, hmmm you might be better off not doing that. That″s even completely ignoring the question of ability and pushing oneself.
-You don’t just condense the whole argument to 4 snappy lines in order to shear the hardest and fastest through their expectations, (as they reach out their mind to engage a trusted, vetted individual half way). Especially not when the question concerns values. To the extent that this person considers you a friend, they are liable to try to meet you half way to understand what you are saying, or further, but if they come even 20 or 30% of the way they might not be able to get back to where they where because it is so blatantly alien to the values implied by their choices, and presumably your personal knowledge of them.
-you argue the points, one at a time, first stating you premises and giving them a chance to say “no that doesn’t apply to my situation” before you start building, rather than piling on six assumptions on back-to-back-to-back.. and assuming that they all hold just fine.
And the absolute best outcome here seems to be to rob someone of the probably-one-time life-experience of navigating their own way through what they’ve gotten themselves into and coming to their own conclusions.
Nowhere in this “helpful advice” is there any suggestion that you understand that your friend may want to have a hard problem to push themselves with, rise to the level of, meditate on, motivate them, etc.
“You would be happier” is not advice for a young, serious, mathematician. Obviously choosing a very dificult problem is not intended to directly optimist happiness.
There’s the fact you chose to describe them as lacking innate ability, rather than (present) mathematical competence,
you described it as “the innate ability” as if it’s one thing. -it’s not even that their aptitude is not high enough, apparently they simply don’t have “it”, whatever “it” is.
with how very unlikely is put there, it conflates, in turn, the studies’ view, with your view, with the universal view, with their view.
The fact that it is gentle makes it a hell of a lot worse by the way, not better. It’s precisely the gentleness which makes it dangerous. You come with an attack, but as a friend, and gently. That is obviously far more dangerous because it has the potential to be insidious rather than stressful or traumatic. The fact that you describe it as criticism, while phrasing it as advice thinly masquerading as information, implies that you know what you’re doing at least on some level.
At the end of the day what you’re saying is precisely that “you’re too bad at math to be able to meet your goals”, except at least an order of magnitude worse.
And why would the salient thing about serious, drastic life advice/criticism/information be something about the adviser’s feelings?
I could probably go on, I keep realising more things, but my head hurts enough already. I will leave it at this one: teaching kids is a public performance role. Fielding hecklers is part of the job. Taking an apparent friend’s gently expressed concerns seriously is pretty much the opposite of that situation. (-which is what they seem so far as he can tell, but seemingly they’re not even intended as such, not as advice, but as an admonishment, as if, by equivocation with professional duty to use bad feedback on one’s professional work by one’s clients, individuals are then supposed to field attacks on their current values (whatever their quality or rationality), from their friends, disguised as concern!)
if nothing else, it’s also a matter of what things an imperfect liar must believe in in order to not give off accurate hints that they’re a bad person to have around, or more directly provoke retribution.
So perceiving the kind of things which would mark you as someone to be shunned or killed, as having their own special ontological category is very practical.
Even the idea that such things damn you is fairly accurate if you extract the baggage. You murder one lousy person and your option to live a normal life is greatly cut off and your options mostly narrow to escalation or starting your life anew elsewhere.
I think it’s also a matter of rationality, insofar as no one is born realising there are other people and those other people’s nature is such that they can suffer be happy live etc, much like we can. Being things like kind and honest allows you to perceive your nature and past both rationally and with pride. Conversely rvery time you’re evil you damage your past, and so (unless you are a perfect liar) your ability to engage the world directly. Otherwise there has to be some reaction, some crack that forms, whether it’s having to lie to yourself, lie to others, face your sins, partition your mind, forget or run from the past, etc.
I suppose all of that is escapable, and there can be equilibriums where it never comes up in the first place, but for an ordinary person there are self-interested reasons to have a moral sense, and in the absence of knowledge of what kind of world you’re living in, your instinctive prior should be that it’s possible that people who harm others for the sake of it might suffer retribution, and be afraid of doing/becoming that.
So morality is not purely aesthetic, it’s also at least our (instinctive) game-theoretical fear of making ourselves the natural enemy of anyone who wants a quiet life. What’s natural, or a priori worth consideration can later be screened out when we see we live in a world where justice is weak, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a (lets say) natural platonic pattern.