Most people, when giving advice, don’t optimize for maximal usefulness. They optimize for something like maximal apparent-insight or maximal signaling-wisdom or maximal mind-blowing, which are a priori all very different goals. So you shouldn’t expect that incredibly useful advice sounds like incredibly insightful, wise, or mind-blowing advice in general. There’s probably a lot of incredibly useful advice that no one gives because it sounds too obvious and you don’t get to look cool by giving it. One such piece of advice I received recently was “plan things.”
There’s probably also a lot of useful advice that our minds filter out because it scans as obvious or trivial. Even when I’m trying to give maximally effective advice, I usually spend a lot of effort optimizing it for style; the better something sounds, the more people dwell on its implications and the likelier it is to stick. Fortunately, most messages leave plenty of latitude for presentation.
Alternately, you could try dressing simple advice up in enough cultural tinsel that it looks profound, as suggested here.
Well, a lot basic rationality literally seems to be about doing what is almost obvious but is hard to do because of bugs in your cognitive architecture. This reminds me of the following quote by Elon Musk in an interview where he was asked what he would say to new start-up founders:
Try to get together a group of people to do something useful. This may seem like an obvious thing, but often people will organize into a company that doesn’t produce anything useful.
-Joel Spolsky
-- Steve Jobs
(The Organization Formerly Known as SIAI had this problem until relatively recently. Eliezer worked, but he never published anything.)
And they ship the characters the fans want.
If your service is down, it has no features.
And no bugs.
Well, there is one pretty major bug: That your service is not doing anything at all!
It has all the bugs. All of them.
(Well, not really. For instance, it doesn’t have any security holes.)
If it bears any resemblance to a product at all, your own admin-level access constitutes a potential security hole.
It’s a feature.
I would have quoted more, because on reading that out of context I was like “YOU DON’T SAY?”
Most people, when giving advice, don’t optimize for maximal usefulness. They optimize for something like maximal apparent-insight or maximal signaling-wisdom or maximal mind-blowing, which are a priori all very different goals. So you shouldn’t expect that incredibly useful advice sounds like incredibly insightful, wise, or mind-blowing advice in general. There’s probably a lot of incredibly useful advice that no one gives because it sounds too obvious and you don’t get to look cool by giving it. One such piece of advice I received recently was “plan things.”
There’s probably also a lot of useful advice that our minds filter out because it scans as obvious or trivial. Even when I’m trying to give maximally effective advice, I usually spend a lot of effort optimizing it for style; the better something sounds, the more people dwell on its implications and the likelier it is to stick. Fortunately, most messages leave plenty of latitude for presentation.
Alternately, you could try dressing simple advice up in enough cultural tinsel that it looks profound, as suggested here.
Well, a lot basic rationality literally seems to be about doing what is almost obvious but is hard to do because of bugs in your cognitive architecture. This reminds me of the following quote by Elon Musk in an interview where he was asked what he would say to new start-up founders:
And by the same author:
and
(because what counts after getting it out the door is how many people actually use it.)
That’s Jeff Atwood. The quote is from Joel Spolsky. While the two both work together on Stack Exchange, they’re different individuals.