Well, I don’t know if I’d call it a fully general argument against taking any kind of advice. I’d say it’s more like a fully general argument against directly trying to optimize for the thing being measured, i.e. an argument that you should avoid Goodhart’s curse.
As to to the post not adding anything, I guess that’s true in a certain sense, but I find many people, myself included, are kinda bad at taking general advice and successfully applying it in all specific situations, so it’s often helpful to take something general and consider specific instances of it. You might say it’s something like the general idea is the “math” and this post is the “engineering” of using the “math” to do some specific thing.
Some other quick examples that come to mind that might be worth exploring as posts to take this general idea and consider it in specific contexts given many people benefit from seeing the same thing worked out many ways:
don’t harm yourself by trying to directly optimize for productivity
Well, I don’t know if I’d call it a fully general argument against taking any kind of advice. I’d say it’s more like a fully general argument against directly trying to optimize for the thing being measured, i.e. an argument that you should avoid Goodhart’s curse.
As to to the post not adding anything, I guess that’s true in a certain sense, but I find many people, myself included, are kinda bad at taking general advice and successfully applying it in all specific situations, so it’s often helpful to take something general and consider specific instances of it. You might say it’s something like the general idea is the “math” and this post is the “engineering” of using the “math” to do some specific thing.
Some other quick examples that come to mind that might be worth exploring as posts to take this general idea and consider it in specific contexts given many people benefit from seeing the same thing worked out many ways:
don’t harm yourself by trying to directly optimize for productivity
… for popularity
… for happiness
… for success
… for minimizing guilt
… for health
And so on.