advice is highly sus
why all advice should be marked with a 'proceed with caution' sign
*Note - this is a largely unfinished and unpolished piece. I’m not completely satisfied with the way that I’ve described everything, I don’t necessarily agree with everything I’ve written, and I had to cut out a bunch of nuance for the sake of clarity and not dragging you all down weird intellectual rabbit holes. For example, I think there’s some deeper psychology at play relating to mimetic desire and idolatry in terms of our relationship with experts, role models, and ‘winners’ in society that I didn’t really talk about. I still think these ideas are worth sharing! I would love to hear what you all agree / disagree with :)
*Also, it’s worth noting that every one of the criticisms of advice that I’ve laid out below applies to me and the stuff I’ve written; there’s quite a deal of hypocrisy laden throughout this piece. Please treat everything I’ve written with a great deal of skepticism lol
The culture around advice is so weird.
It seems like everyone is desperate to give advice to others; there’s some kind of innate desire to be invited up to a lectern and preach. It’s almost a marker of status and prestige. You’ve ‘made it’ not necessarily when you make a million dollars or get a huge promotion, but when people come to you for advice, when you get invited to talk shows and podcasts to ‘share your story’, when you share a really sappy LinkedIn post about how humbled and grateful you are, or when you give a TED talk or some other address to a large group of people. It’s less about the journey, but more how about how well you can sell the value of your journey to others. So strange.
Stranger yet is just how many people there are that are ready to guzzle all of it up. It blows my mind how many people spend every waking moment consuming self-help content (podcasts, Tik Toks, audiobooks, etc.) and how many people form a cultish devotion to the authors and creators they follow.
This article is a case for why advice (and the behavior described above) can be dangerous. I think that the guidance of ‘experts’ or ‘role models’ should be treated with a high degree of skepticism for the following reasons:
Sampling Bias - most ‘experts’ or givers of advice are working with a really small set of experiences from which they extrapolate from. Their relative success or expertise doesn’t mean that their experiences and actions speak to some larger rule or pattern for how to be successful.
Attribution Error - humans are awful at diagnosing the true reasons why things unfolded the way they did. History is littered with examples of humans doing stupid shit based on misunderstanding cause and effect.
Path Dependence - context is everything; just because one set of principles or actions worked in one instance doesn’t mean they’ll work in other contexts or settings.
Value System Mismatch - people passing on advice are implicitly passing on a set of values that they think you should adopt. This means that the advice isn’t necessarily what’s best for you and most aligned with your values, it’s just validation of the set values that the person giving the advice has adopted.
Hopefully, you’ll finish filled with the belief that you don’t need to seek out external pieces of advice and help for guidance or inspiration; you are more than capable of finding it from within.
Sampling Bias
I think sampling bias is extremely important to be aware of; it completely messes up our perception of the world around us. When I refer to sampling bias, I refer to our tendency to draw conclusions of a population as a whole based on interactions from limited samples. Here are a couple examples:
Social media roughly follows the rule that 1% of users generate 90% of the content. So while it’s easy to look at social media and think “wow, people are batshit crazy”, maybe a more fair assessment is “wow, a select few individuals are batshit crazy”. There’s an even higher level of sampling bias present here — the people that are on social media are a biased subset of the world population overall.
Drawing conclusions on ‘all men’ or ‘all women’ based on interactions from dating apps is maybe a little shortsighted since studies have shown that people on dating apps generally have a different psychographic profile than people that aren’t on dating apps. It’s a biased sample.
The list could go on and on, but you get the idea. Sampling bias is present everywhere.
I think this applies to advice in two specific ways:
You’re only choosing from the samples of successes - Successful people, or experts, aren’t the only ones that have followed the pieces of advice they lay out. There are probably tons of failures sprinkled in too, except we never hear from them because no one thinks they’re worth listening to. If only 0.00001% of people who followed the advice ‘make your bed every morning’ ended up making a million dollars, would you think it’s worth doing?
Successful people have a biased set of experiences - Most successful people have a lifestyle that generally doesn’t mirror the lifestyles of most people, filled with lavish travel, fancy meetings, conferences, podcasts, etc. The conclusions about life that follow from this set of experiences probably doesn’t apply to most people.
Attribution Error
Even really smart people are wrong all the time when it comes to diagnosing why things happened the way they did. Here are two common ways in which it happens:
Narrative Fallacy - we love to see the world and events through the lens of grand stories and narratives that elegantly and simply weave together cause and effect. For example, when a sports team wins a championship, it’s easy for us to say ‘they were a grittier and tighter knit team than the others’. That’s a simple narrative to get behind. However, the reality is often substantially more complex.
Self-Serving Bias - we overestimate our role in our successes and underestimate our role in our failures. For example, when I hit a good golf shot, it’s because I’m exceptionally talented, but when I hit a bad golf shot, it’s because I caught a bad break. It’s not possible for me to make a poor swing.
These two often come together when looking at advice. Most advice stems from the desire to offer a simple explanation for someone’s success. Not only is this simple advice usually too convenient a narrative to actually be useful or helpful, it conflates the level of agency that the person had in their own success.
This also becomes really dangerous when we subconsciously mimic behaviors, thoughts, and actions adopted by our idols. We make the mistake of believing that those things were necessary to their success, which is how you end up with Elizabeth Holmes stealing Steve Jobs’ wardrobe and a ton of Silicon Valley CEOs building toxic work cultures and being dicks to their employees because that’s how Steve did it (if you’re talented, you’re just talented, but if you’re talented and an asshole, you’re a genius!)
Path Dependence
Context is everything. A lot of the time, principles do not generalize beyond the context in which they were first encountered. For example, after World War 1, there were a few generals that were on record of saying that cavalry will be the future of all world warfare based on their reflections of the battles from World War 1. However, that only applied in a context in which there was no technological development in the future. In retrospect, it was really awful analysis, but in that specific time period and context, those generals were hailed as geniuses.
The way that this applies to advice is that advice is path dependent; it only applies and works in the context of a single person’s unique life and journey. For example, some of the worst advice that I hear nowadays is that people need to drop everything and become an individual entrepreneur and creator. Just because it worked for them at a specific time in their life does not mean that everyone should do it! You cannot guarantee similar results unless you copy the same path, the same journey, as someone else.
And this is obviously impossible! But it’s still so sad to see people doing their best to replicate the paths that other people walked on (doing the same majors, taking the same classes, doing the same extracurriculars, applying to the same companies, reading the same books, etc.) hoping to strike the same gold that they saw someone else strike. No matter how much you try you cannot replicate someone else’s path, and any attempt to is just going to make you feel like more of a fraud and more of a failure than you did in the first place.
This is something I really struggle with. If Ryan Holiday or Jay Shetty suggest some articles or books to read, I immediately find myself adding that content to my reading list without even consciously thinking about whether it’s something I want to read. I know it’s because at some level I deeply desire to have the level of respect, love, and joy that they seem to have in their life, and I have this feeling that reading the same things (or wanting to read the same things) that they do will bring me closer to what they have that I don’t. That frame of thinking isn’t helping me; all it is doing is inserting a greater sense of inadequacy and insufficiency into my own life.
Value System Mismatch
Every single piece of advice implicitly passes on a set of values that the person giving the advice has based their life off of. The way I see it, giving advice to others is a way to validate the decisions that they’ve made in their own life and the value systems they’ve endorsed. For example, someone who drops out of college isn’t going to give you the advice that you should finish your college degree and stay connected to your institution; they’ll give you the advice that you should chase your dreams and that college is just an unnecessary obstacle in the way of greater ambitions. Are they saying this because it’s best for you? Not necessarily. They’re saying it because it’s what they did and it worked for them, and it carries the implicit suggestion that you should value the same things they did while making the decision (pursuit of wealth + status, independence, etc.). Another example is that the common advice of ‘keep putting yourself out there’ carries the implicit assumption that external validation and status are things that should be pursued.
The real danger from this isn’t that you’ll be receiving advice that doesn’t necessarily apply to you, but that if you’re not careful, you’ll end up subconsciously adopting the values of someone else. And in a society that seems to value wealth, fame, and sex appeal above all else, the people that are idolized and celebrated usually aren’t the same people that you should be looking to when forming your value system. I’m sure the obsession with Elon Musk has turned some really kind, compassionate people into narcissistic jerks.
I guess I’ve got two main takeaways from all this:
1. Use other people as case studies, not idols or role models
Instead of trying to extrapolate from the lives of the people we want to be like (i.e. Ryan Holiday’s story and advice means that I should do this), it might be better to view their lives as case studies for understanding how things could happen (i.e. Ryan Holiday’s story and advice is an example or instance of this principle).
I think this helps me resist the impulse to generalize everything or turn everything into a lesson to be learned. It’s so easy to look at the stories of some people or some of the events happening in the world and come up with lazy generalizations for how things work. Most things don’t have a grand takeaway or an easy piece of advice to learn.
Letting each specific event / story of someone’s life stand for itself is way more helpful anyway. When confronting a challenging life situation, I can pull back to different stories I’ve learned or case studies I’ve accumulated and be like ‘huh, my current situation reminds me of when this person experienced this thing’. Reflecting on how that situation played out helps me find guidance and inspiration to tackle whatever problem I’m dealing with.
And this means that we don’t have to limit ourselves to learning the stories of real people in history! I’ve learned way more from the case studies I’ve accumulated from my readings of fantasy books and myths than any real-world story of someone’s life.
2. We’re better off finding inspiration and guidance from within
I think our impulse or need from advice comes from the desire to be like someone else or have what someone else has. Why do we have these desires? Maybe it’s because we lack the self-awareness to understand what we really feel like we’re missing in our lives. I think what happens is this: we feel a general sense of dissatisfaction with our lives, we see someone else that seems to have the life that we want filled with glamour and adventure (usually these people have one or more of wealth, fame, and sex appeal), and then we come to associate those things as conduits for living the life that we want to be. So then we obsess over advice for trying to figure out how to obtain those things.
Maybe a more fruitful approach would be reflecting deeply about the things we feel are missing in our lives and learning how to overcome that feeling of lack by ourselves. Instead of viewing wealth, fame, and sex appeal as conduits to the life we want to live, maybe we should reflect deeply on what those things are conduits for. Why do you want to be rich? Why do you want to travel to every country? What’s so good about getting wasted on exclusive beaches in Italy? Why are those things hallmarks of a ‘good life’?
And then maybe we can shift from asking the question ‘how can I find more wealth and fame?’ to asking the question ‘how can I cultivate more love, joy, and happiness in my life?’ Those things typically not only have vastly different answers, but vastly different processes. One question asks you to look for guidance outside of you, the other asks you to look from within. One requires you to jump through an insane amount of hurdles to maybe find the life you want to live at the end of the tunnel, the other teaches you to create it right here and now.
Big picture, I’m starting to get more and more disillusioned with the idea of being in a place where I can give advice to others. It just feels wrong.
I just don’t want to be the person that knows. I don’t want to be the person that answers questions that other people have. I don’t want to be the person that tells other people what they should do.
Instead, I want to be the person that explores and learns and discovers. I want to be the person that inspires and encourages people to learn how to answer interesting questions on their own.
I don’t want to model having something (wisdom, wealth, etc.) I want to model discovery and curiosity and exploration.
Maybe one day someone will say ‘I want to be like Dhruv Methi’. I’d rather them say ‘Dhruv Methi is an example of finding meaning through curiosity; I’d like to try that myself’.