Yet another Hacker News

Most advice is right for the person giving it

47 points rohanm93 1 hour ago 26 comments

Aurornis 55 minutes ago | parent

Another variation of this: Advice is what the person giving it needs to hear for themself.

This is oddly evident in beginner influencers trying to become gurus on social media. They try to write life advice from a position of superiority, but when you look closely they’re given themselves a little pep talk about how they want to be or what they need to hear. It doesn’t mean the advice is wrong, but you can see through the illusion that you’re hearing sage advice from someone who figured it all out long ago.

win311fwg 50 minutes ago | parent

> Mark Cuban says the opposite

In what way are they opposing thoughts? Steve Jobs said keep putting in the effort until you find the thing that you love. Mark Cuban also said keep putting in the effort until you find the thing that you love. The exact word choice may have differed, but they both expressed the exact same thing.

d-us-vb 14 minutes ago | parent

The mode is completely different. You have to twist Cuban’s words to make him say the same thing as Jobs. Because he didn’t say “find the thing you love” he said spend enough effort on what you’re doing until it becomes the thing you love. Jobs is about an actual search, which takes effort, for sure. Cuban is about transformation in place.

9rx 6 minutes ago | parent

Not at all. Jobs is not implying that you should, like, jump from minimum wage job to minimum wage job until you find one you like. He is suggesting that if you put in effort, like learning deeply about something, that will close the gaps that are necessarily closed to find true love. Which is the same thing Cuban is saying.

Perhaps you can interpret Jobs' statement that way in a vacuum, but fortunately we don't need to evaluate what Jobs' said in a vacuum. He also said a lot of other things that allow us to build up context around his intent. He spoke a lot about how he found his love.

hk__2 48 minutes ago | parent

> Which is why I find it pretty funny that Ozempic is arguably the biggest weight-loss breakthrough in decades - and all it does is make you…eat less. Billions in R&D, and the answer was the platitude the whole time. Ha.

The problem was not that we didn’t know what to do ("eat less"), but to enable that solution.

Thanemate 39 minutes ago | parent

I'm far from being an expert on this specific subject but, I have the impression that Ozempic does a lot of things in one's body in order to reduce the appetite and result in eating less. Which is to say that, the author sounds like he's implying that the solution to this was trivial all along, by deliberately omitting the underlying mechanism that makes it work.

skinfaxi 38 minutes ago | parent

The problem was always about enablement. We know the solution to smoking too, the problem is enablement.

lubujackson 20 minutes ago | parent

The interesting solution to smoking was social pressure. No smoking in restaurants, no smoking on planes, general intolerance to smokers, insane taxes on tobacco... suddenly, smokers for 30 years started quitting at a certain breaking point.

The real solution to weight loss (especially in the U.S.) is to change the social norms. When everyone is hitting the buffets and going to Cheesecake Factory and buying high calorie garbage at a discount, of course to population gets fat. France, for example, makes all of that much harder. Maybe Ozempic will help reduce the Walmart-wheelchair-fat population, but truly becoming fit as a country requires significantly more friction for everyone.

nemomarx 6 minutes ago | parent

The nice thing about ozempic is that it makes people less hungry and less able to eat large portions. Once 30% of the country is on it, expect buffets to go out of business and restaurants to need to shift to smaller portions in response. So it'll make it easier for everyone not on the drugs too.

Razengan 36 minutes ago | parent

And we laugh at AI for being simple minded

The mind is always the biggest battle

9rx 30 minutes ago | parent

To be fair, we also knew how to enable it long before Ozempic arrived. We had hundreds of thousands of years of successfully "eating less" to look back upon for answers.

But drugs allow one to remove themselves from society, which is far more appealing.

nemomarx 21 minutes ago | parent

Basically every diet program for the last 4 years, every change to food or social habits at least in the US, failed to curb it. So in a pretty real sense we did not know how to eat less successfully, emphasis on successfully.

9rx 17 minutes ago | parent

Yes we do. We toss out the technology and go back to substance farming or hunter/gathering. You'll have no trouble "eating less". But that requires social coordination and humans much prefer to escape society through the use of drugs. Always have, always will.

nemomarx 9 minutes ago | parent

I think the revolt you'd get from trying to move everyone back to subsistence farming (and also getting conquered by some other group who didn't do this) also means we don't know how to do that successfully. You're ignoring that last word again.

9rx 1 minute ago | parent

We know how to do it, we just don't want to, which is why seeking escape wins. Always has, always will.

mrbenjihao 29 minutes ago | parent

Plenty of options exist that enable the solutions around weight loss. The issue is that 99% of those are difficult to either start and/or maintain consistency with. Ozempic just happened to address both of those issues in one swoop because people as a whole are incredibly intolerant to any friction in their lives.

jcalx 17 minutes ago | parent

Classic case of "simple != easy". Things can be simple, yet hard, and that's an underrated measure of difficulty in my experience.

hansvm 2 minutes ago | parent

That's true, but the fact that it wasn't easy created a huge industry of fake information regarding alternative explanations of weight loss from CICO. It's nice to have some more obvious evidence to convince people that no, your body can't magically move and exercise for free when you eat less, among other strange claims I've heard from people struggling to lose weight. People stuck in that rut of not being able to eat less were prone to being deceived by countless weight loss products when the real solution (also hard mind you, but at least more viable) would have been to focus on which activities and diets actually allowed them personally to maintain a calorie deficit.

And as a bonus, now they also have one. A lot of people didn't even believe that was the solution though, and the belief change is important.

randusername 41 minutes ago | parent

We should distinguish between 1:many advice and 1:1 advice.

An interviewer is really asking "how do you recommend people replicate your success?" which grounds the response in the hard lessons that person learned on their own journey.

Personalized advice can be equally useless, but if that person really understands you and your situation you might be surprised how specific and valuable good objective feedback can be.

Razengan 34 minutes ago | parent

In Buddhism/Taoism, it's said that teachings are like someone pointing at the moon: If you just look at the fingers, you'll not see the moon.

Or "playing the lute for a cow" (though we know some animals can appreciate music in some way)

The point being that advice depends on the listener's capacity to understand the intent of the advisor.

figassis 26 minutes ago | parent

"good objective feedback" - right, I think advice in general is bad because it tries to bite size a complex system, that is society/humanity. Feedback is giving someone information they can act on, along with the rest of context they have of their situation. No need for you to know them deeply, just the interaction.

There are things that can work, and things that likely won't work, and most people know these. Then there is a space of things that usually work and things that may not work, and you can't fit these into a person without knowing a lot of variables about them and the environment around them, like what and who they know, their personality, their competence (not just their resume), and many, many other variables. So advice defaults to guessing most of these variables to find some direction.

And I think it boosts advisors' ego, makes advisees feel temporarily better, even motivated, but YMMV by a lot.

This is why the good advisors also change the variables in your favor, like introduce you to their network, coach, etc. And often this costs you something. Like money, equity, whatever.

clickety_clack 28 minutes ago | parent

If I have to choose between hearing advice (which I can ignore), or not getting any advice at all, I’d much rather get the advice. I’ve ignored a lot of advice in my time, but every once in a while a diamond sneaks through, and often I get an idea or two for a different way of looking at things.

AnthonyR 23 minutes ago | parent

While mostly true, there is definitely such thing as advice fatigue and generally easy for our brains to conflate advice and criticism which can be detrimental in large doses from my experience. Not to say that it's bad to receive advice/criticism but it has to be ideally in the right dose and with the right intention.

yipinwong 15 minutes ago | parent

(My analogy for this article only): Ideas gleaned from the article.

AIs do not have all the contexts about you thus provide you guidance not fit for you. Advisors are the same, they don't know everything about you thus not all advices fit for you.

You know about yourself the best (given you "reflect") and make trade-offs between what you know, and what you consider benficial to you.

As I always bring up about making tradeoffs in HN in my comments, the article is solid.

elohimus 5 minutes ago | parent

I really like this piece - but it points to a wider truth. All advice is contextual.

- It's contextual to the advice giver: Is it specific to them? Do they have an ulterior motive or are beholden to someone with an ulterior motive, e.g. getting you to support their agenda or getting you to buy or vote.

- It's contextual to you: Does that fit the way you operate? Does it play to your strengths?

- And it's contextual to your ...well... context: Are you in a country where this advice applies? Do you have the financial means to execute on it, etc...

Bottom line - there are very few pieces of truly universal good advice.

radial_symmetry 2 minutes ago | parent

Scott Alexander has a great post on this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/24/should-you-reverse-any...