Being able to accept and consider advice from other people who think you’re doing something stupid, without lashing out at them; and the more you show them this is true, and the more they can trust you not to be offended if you’re frank with them, the better the advice you can get. (Yes, this has a failure mode where insulting other people becomes a status display. [...])
It also has a more subtle and counterintuitive failure mode. People can derive status and get much satisfaction by handing out perfectly honest and well-intentioned advice, if this advice is taken seriously and followed. The trouble is, their advice, however honest, can be a product of pure bias, even if it’s about something where they have an impressive track record of success.
Moreover, really good and useful advice about important issues often has to be based on a no-nonsense cynical analysis that sounds absolutely awful when spelled out explicitly. Thus, even the most well-intentioned people will usually be happier to concoct nice-sounding rationalizations and hand out advice based on them, thus boosting their status not just as esteemed advice-givers, but also as expounders of respectable opinion. At the end, you may well be better off with a rash “who is he to tell me what to do” attitude than with a seemingly rational, but in fact dangerously naive reasoning that you should listen to people when they are clearly knowledgeable and well-intentioned. (And yes, I did learn this the hard way.)
Things are of course different if you’re lucky to know people who have the relevant knowledge and care about you so much that they’ll really discard all the pious rationalizations and make a true no-nonsense assessment of what’s best for you. You can expect this from your parents and perhaps other close relatives, but otherwise, you’re lucky if you have such good and savvy friends.
You can take any area of life where you could be faced with tough and uncertain choices, where figuring out the optimal behavior can’t be reduced to a tractable technical problem, and where the truth about how things really work is often very different from what people say about it in public (or even in private). For example, all kinds of tough choices and problems in career, education, love, investment, business, social relations with people, etc., etc.
In all these areas, it may happen that you’re being offered advice by someone who is smart and competent, has a good relevant track record, and appears to be well-intentioned and genuinely care about you. My point is that even if you’re sure about all this, you may still be better off dismissing the advice as nonsense. Accordingly, when you dismiss people’s advice in such circumstances with what appears as an irrationally arrogant attitude, you may actually be operating with a better heuristic than if you concluded that the advice must be good based on these factors and acted on it. Even if the advice-giver has some stake in your well-being, it actually takes a very large stake to motivate them reliably to cut all bias and nonsense from what they’ll tell you.
Of course, the question is how to know if you’re being too arrogant, and how to recognize real good advice among the chaff. To which there is no easy and simple answer, which is one of the reasons why life is hard.
The problem of getting good data on how other people see you is a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. I’d love to see a top-level post on this, because I think it’s pretty essential for many areas of self-improvement, and I’d write it myself but I don’t think I have a clear enough idea of the problems involved. I didn’t think about this particular failure mode, for example.
Alternatively, are there any other resources that can help me get this information?
On the off chance this will be spotted in the sidebar: I’m a couple years late responding, but has anyone written anything useful on this subject? Is anyone in a position to do so?
Getting a correct model of others’ models of oneself, and knowing it’s correct, seems ridiculously difficult to me.
I agree that this is a difficult problem. It seems to be that way because the incentive structure is misaligned for truth. The costs of giving someone unbiased feedback are mostly paid by the giver of the feedback, but the benefits are mostly received by the receiver of the feedback. Thus, this is very difficult to get from people who are not close friends and allies- but those people are probably ones who have an above-average view of you.
Thus, one of the low-hanging fruit here is rewarding negative feedback, which is in many ways more useful than positive feedback (and yet most people don’t reward it).
It may be useful to ask people you trust questions like “How do you think other people view me?” The deflection to other people makes it easier to voice their personal concerns under plausible deniability, as well at getting at the question of “how do I present myself to others?” and “what features of my personality and behavior are most salient?”
It also has a more subtle and counterintuitive failure mode. People can derive status and get much satisfaction by handing out perfectly honest and well-intentioned advice, if this advice is taken seriously and followed. The trouble is, their advice, however honest, can be a product of pure bias, even if it’s about something where they have an impressive track record of success.
Moreover, really good and useful advice about important issues often has to be based on a no-nonsense cynical analysis that sounds absolutely awful when spelled out explicitly. Thus, even the most well-intentioned people will usually be happier to concoct nice-sounding rationalizations and hand out advice based on them, thus boosting their status not just as esteemed advice-givers, but also as expounders of respectable opinion. At the end, you may well be better off with a rash “who is he to tell me what to do” attitude than with a seemingly rational, but in fact dangerously naive reasoning that you should listen to people when they are clearly knowledgeable and well-intentioned. (And yes, I did learn this the hard way.)
Things are of course different if you’re lucky to know people who have the relevant knowledge and care about you so much that they’ll really discard all the pious rationalizations and make a true no-nonsense assessment of what’s best for you. You can expect this from your parents and perhaps other close relatives, but otherwise, you’re lucky if you have such good and savvy friends.
An example would help this comment.
You can take any area of life where you could be faced with tough and uncertain choices, where figuring out the optimal behavior can’t be reduced to a tractable technical problem, and where the truth about how things really work is often very different from what people say about it in public (or even in private). For example, all kinds of tough choices and problems in career, education, love, investment, business, social relations with people, etc., etc.
In all these areas, it may happen that you’re being offered advice by someone who is smart and competent, has a good relevant track record, and appears to be well-intentioned and genuinely care about you. My point is that even if you’re sure about all this, you may still be better off dismissing the advice as nonsense. Accordingly, when you dismiss people’s advice in such circumstances with what appears as an irrationally arrogant attitude, you may actually be operating with a better heuristic than if you concluded that the advice must be good based on these factors and acted on it. Even if the advice-giver has some stake in your well-being, it actually takes a very large stake to motivate them reliably to cut all bias and nonsense from what they’ll tell you.
Of course, the question is how to know if you’re being too arrogant, and how to recognize real good advice among the chaff. To which there is no easy and simple answer, which is one of the reasons why life is hard.
I agree. I think that the grandparent is useful, but I’m a bit fuzzy on exactly what mental levers it’s telling me to pull and why to pull them.
The problem of getting good data on how other people see you is a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. I’d love to see a top-level post on this, because I think it’s pretty essential for many areas of self-improvement, and I’d write it myself but I don’t think I have a clear enough idea of the problems involved. I didn’t think about this particular failure mode, for example.
Alternatively, are there any other resources that can help me get this information?
On the off chance this will be spotted in the sidebar: I’m a couple years late responding, but has anyone written anything useful on this subject? Is anyone in a position to do so?
Getting a correct model of others’ models of oneself, and knowing it’s correct, seems ridiculously difficult to me.
I agree that this is a difficult problem. It seems to be that way because the incentive structure is misaligned for truth. The costs of giving someone unbiased feedback are mostly paid by the giver of the feedback, but the benefits are mostly received by the receiver of the feedback. Thus, this is very difficult to get from people who are not close friends and allies- but those people are probably ones who have an above-average view of you.
Thus, one of the low-hanging fruit here is rewarding negative feedback, which is in many ways more useful than positive feedback (and yet most people don’t reward it).
It may be useful to ask people you trust questions like “How do you think other people view me?” The deflection to other people makes it easier to voice their personal concerns under plausible deniability, as well at getting at the question of “how do I present myself to others?” and “what features of my personality and behavior are most salient?”