Obvious advice is obvious because it works, yes. The background assumption is that it is all implementable without further advice-wanting requirements. Advice for building a kickass gaming PC in 2017 with secure income and access to the internet will be simpler than the same advice adapted for 1950, because PCs were not available in 1950, the internet did not exist, and computers were huge, slow, and low on storage capacity as compared to 2000, never mind 2017.
Of course, if this could be fully generalized to all contexts, it would likely have been done by now. It’s not practical to account for every outlier when responding to a general audience, and even to an individual without extraordinary circumstances (such as being paid as a therapist/life-coach/etc). This is where generalized instrumental rationality should take over, and yet, signs seem to point toward GIR being much harder than … eh, just about everything short of implementing Utopiae, I guess.
The point in the first paragraph is well made, but in a way that might be interpret as misvaluing the content which is in fact, very good. It shifts the means from “Find the right advice” to “Figure out how to implement the advice you already know is right” which is a very notable change.
I agree that going meta-contrarian isn’t always enough to implement advice. There’ll be more to come about debugging internal aversions and more systematic ways to build up habits.
One thing that is in the works is a sort of “ladder of interventions” of increasingly powerful ways to compel yourself to get something done. I think the attitude this ladder embodies is not good “form”, in that it probably leads to suboptimal attitudes, but it’s what I often end up doing in practice. (Going up the ladder, one thing at a time, until I feel like doing the thing.)
Obvious advice is obvious because it works, yes. The background assumption is that it is all implementable without further advice-wanting requirements. Advice for building a kickass gaming PC in 2017 with secure income and access to the internet will be simpler than the same advice adapted for 1950, because PCs were not available in 1950, the internet did not exist, and computers were huge, slow, and low on storage capacity as compared to 2000, never mind 2017.
Of course, if this could be fully generalized to all contexts, it would likely have been done by now. It’s not practical to account for every outlier when responding to a general audience, and even to an individual without extraordinary circumstances (such as being paid as a therapist/life-coach/etc). This is where generalized instrumental rationality should take over, and yet, signs seem to point toward GIR being much harder than … eh, just about everything short of implementing Utopiae, I guess.
The point in the first paragraph is well made, but in a way that might be interpret as misvaluing the content which is in fact, very good. It shifts the means from “Find the right advice” to “Figure out how to implement the advice you already know is right” which is a very notable change.
Excellent post, OP.
I agree that going meta-contrarian isn’t always enough to implement advice. There’ll be more to come about debugging internal aversions and more systematic ways to build up habits.
One thing that is in the works is a sort of “ladder of interventions” of increasingly powerful ways to compel yourself to get something done. I think the attitude this ladder embodies is not good “form”, in that it probably leads to suboptimal attitudes, but it’s what I often end up doing in practice. (Going up the ladder, one thing at a time, until I feel like doing the thing.)