Every thought about giving and taking advice I’ve ever had
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Highlights
- To summarize: people generate systematically wrong explanations for their behavior and they will give you systematically bad advice if they reason from wrong explanations from their behavior. If you pay attention, you will notice this everywhere. We are really good at self-deception.
- The advice we are given is systematically biased not only because people are just bad it figuring out how shit works but also because advice can’t be isolated away from the relationships we have. If a friend suggests you to drop out of school and start a startup or write full-time, they will partly be to-blame for what happens to you when you make that decision (and unconventional life decisions do often end poorly). Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM applies to advice too and advice you receive will be systematically biased in favor of safe choices.
- One way out of this is to perhaps explicitly ask something along the lines of “what’s the most outrageous advice you can come up with? what advice are you scared of giving me because you think I’ll blame you if it fails?" and to remember to try to figure out why they believe the things they tell you, why the made the decisions they made, and why they tell you these specific things whenever someone shares advice with you.