If “they already tried it and it didn’t work” they’re real into that [Ray interpretation: as an excuse not to try more].
I think I’ve had this narrative in a bunch of situations. My guess is I have it too much, and it’s like fear-of-rejection where it’s worth running the numbers and going out on a limb more than people would do by default. But also it really does seem like lots of people overestimate how easy problems are to solve, or how many ‘standard’ solutions people have tried, or so on. [And I think there’s a similar overconfidence thing going on for the advice-giver, which generates some of the resistance.]
It’s also not that obvious what the correct update is. Like, if you try a medication for problem X and it fails, it feels like that should decrease your probability that any sort of medication will solve the problem. But this is sort of like the sock drawer problem,[1] where it’s probably easy to overestimate how much to update.
Suppose you have a chest of drawers with six drawers in it, and you think there’s a 60% chance the socks are in the chest, and then they’re not in the first five drawers you look in. What’s the chance they’re in the last drawer?
Yeah. This is a real problem and the world is full of people leaving $100 bills on the table, but I can think of situations I expect the other person would describe as “Elizabeth isn’t even trying to solve her problem” and I would describe as “Alice jumped to idiot-level solutions without even a token attempt to understand the context, she is clearly not going to be helpful and there isn’t a point in trying to bring her up to speed”. I suspect this is common, which is why “the kind of person who would suggest yoga for depression” is a codified insult.
And self-development instructors can be the absolute worst at this. They get used to helping people with low-hanging fruit and when their tricks don’t work they blame the participant for not trying[1], instead of their algorithm being inadequate to a particular person’s problems.
I’m not asserting that’s what happened with Critch- there definitely are lots of people who just aren’t trying and that’s worth pointing out. Although in many cases I suspect there are underlying reasons that at least felt rational at one point.
Agree. The advice I’ve heard for avoiding this is, instead of saying “try X”, ask “what have you already tried” and then ideally ask some follow-up questions to further probe why exactly the things they’ve tried haven’t worked yet. You might then be able to offer advice that’s a better fit, and even if it turns out that they actually haven’t tried the thing, it’ll likely still be better received because you made an effort to actually understand their problem first. (I’ve sometimes used the heuristic, “don’t propose any solutions until you could explain to a third party why this person hasn’t been able to solve their problem yet”.)
It’s funny. I’ve had friends make confident statements that I was missing something quite stupid, with a smirk in their voice, and it felt good because they were right. A friend pointing out something I was missing felt good and safe, and necessary, because no one can catch everything and everyone has blind spots, especially when they’re upset.
So while “have you tried...?” or “what do you think about...?” are marginal improvements over “you should...”, they’re not getting at what I really want, which is highly skilled people who have my back.
Okay, maybe? But I’ve also often been “real into that” in the sense that it resolves a dissonance in my ego-structure-or-something, or in the ego-structure-analog of CFAR or some other group-level structure I’ve been trying to defend, and I’ve been more into “so you don’t get to claim I should do things differently” than into whether my so-called “goal” would work. Cf “people don’t seem to want things.”
I think I’ve had this narrative in a bunch of situations. My guess is I have it too much, and it’s like fear-of-rejection where it’s worth running the numbers and going out on a limb more than people would do by default. But also it really does seem like lots of people overestimate how easy problems are to solve, or how many ‘standard’ solutions people have tried, or so on. [And I think there’s a similar overconfidence thing going on for the advice-giver, which generates some of the resistance.]
It’s also not that obvious what the correct update is. Like, if you try a medication for problem X and it fails, it feels like that should decrease your probability that any sort of medication will solve the problem. But this is sort of like the sock drawer problem,[1] where it’s probably easy to overestimate how much to update.
Suppose you have a chest of drawers with six drawers in it, and you think there’s a 60% chance the socks are in the chest, and then they’re not in the first five drawers you look in. What’s the chance they’re in the last drawer?
Yeah. This is a real problem and the world is full of people leaving $100 bills on the table, but I can think of situations I expect the other person would describe as “Elizabeth isn’t even trying to solve her problem” and I would describe as “Alice jumped to idiot-level solutions without even a token attempt to understand the context, she is clearly not going to be helpful and there isn’t a point in trying to bring her up to speed”. I suspect this is common, which is why “the kind of person who would suggest yoga for depression” is a codified insult.
And self-development instructors can be the absolute worst at this. They get used to helping people with low-hanging fruit and when their tricks don’t work they blame the participant for not trying[1], instead of their algorithm being inadequate to a particular person’s problems.
I’m not asserting that’s what happened with Critch- there definitely are lots of people who just aren’t trying and that’s worth pointing out. Although in many cases I suspect there are underlying reasons that at least felt rational at one point.
Agree. The advice I’ve heard for avoiding this is, instead of saying “try X”, ask “what have you already tried” and then ideally ask some follow-up questions to further probe why exactly the things they’ve tried haven’t worked yet. You might then be able to offer advice that’s a better fit, and even if it turns out that they actually haven’t tried the thing, it’ll likely still be better received because you made an effort to actually understand their problem first. (I’ve sometimes used the heuristic, “don’t propose any solutions until you could explain to a third party why this person hasn’t been able to solve their problem yet”.)
It’s funny. I’ve had friends make confident statements that I was missing something quite stupid, with a smirk in their voice, and it felt good because they were right. A friend pointing out something I was missing felt good and safe, and necessary, because no one can catch everything and everyone has blind spots, especially when they’re upset.
So while “have you tried...?” or “what do you think about...?” are marginal improvements over “you should...”, they’re not getting at what I really want, which is highly skilled people who have my back.
Okay, maybe? But I’ve also often been “real into that” in the sense that it resolves a dissonance in my ego-structure-or-something, or in the ego-structure-analog of CFAR or some other group-level structure I’ve been trying to defend, and I’ve been more into “so you don’t get to claim I should do things differently” than into whether my so-called “goal” would work. Cf “people don’t seem to want things.”
Beware of Other-Optimizing?
Is this the narrative of “this person is using this as an excuse not to try more” or “this is a reason not to try more”?
“I already tried this and it didn’t work.”