One day a mother came to Gandhi with her little boy for help. She asked Gandhi, “Please, Bapu, will you tell my little boy to stop eating sugar. He simply eats too much sugar and will not stop.” Gandhi told the mother to leave and come back with the boy in three days.
The mother returned with her son and said to Gandhi, “We have come back as you asked.” Gandhi turned to the boy and said, “Young boy, stop eating sweets. They are not good for you.”
The mother then asked Gandhi, “Bapu, why didn’t you tell my son that when we first came to see you? Why did you ask us to leave and come back in three days? I don’t understand.”
Gandhi said to the woman, “I asked you to return with the boy in three days, because three days ago, I, too, was eating sweets. I could not ask him to stop eating sweets so long as I had not stopped eating sweets.”
I think it is possible that this story doesn’t go far enough because its possible to do X and not get a positive outcome from it other than “the moral authority to command X”, or do X once and get a positive outcome as a fluke.
The ideal sort of advice, from an epistemic perspective, seems like it would involve explaining the general principle that you think might be useful, and then talk about evidence about your attempts to falsify the advice—times you got hurt by ignoring it and times you benefitted from following it. Maybe even pointing to academic research backing it up.
I think this practice, generally followed, would be likely to create a good memetic environment for generating and selecting for honestly sound planning heuristics.
For my own part, I’ve never been in a context where I could apply this meta-advice with a full theoretical justification of the method because most of the people I try to give good advice to aren’t really positively disposed towards being “meta”. But I have found that the general process works reasonably well both to help people and to garner status.
I think it is especially useful to “sharing your failures” because it builds trust and shows that you’re not simply trying to one up the other person in a stale status game where advice shades into command and a position of command-giving gives a person de facto political authority. Admission of failure provides ammo for later lowering your status by bringing the failure up again later in a different context, so offering it reveals that you’re willing to cede ground in places where the ammo might be used later. If you gain authority nonetheless, it is of a more limited sort.
I like LW a lot, but unfortunately I think that with our karma system and public accessibility we’re not structurally set up to properly protect people’s admissions of failure from hostile scrutiny by the wider world nor to meaningfully reward them with recognition for actually helping people, but in other contexts, where it’s honesty safe to apply, I think this is a pretty good formula for genuinely supportive advice.
Quoting from here:
I think it is possible that this story doesn’t go far enough because its possible to do X and not get a positive outcome from it other than “the moral authority to command X”, or do X once and get a positive outcome as a fluke.
The ideal sort of advice, from an epistemic perspective, seems like it would involve explaining the general principle that you think might be useful, and then talk about evidence about your attempts to falsify the advice—times you got hurt by ignoring it and times you benefitted from following it. Maybe even pointing to academic research backing it up.
I think this practice, generally followed, would be likely to create a good memetic environment for generating and selecting for honestly sound planning heuristics.
For my own part, I’ve never been in a context where I could apply this meta-advice with a full theoretical justification of the method because most of the people I try to give good advice to aren’t really positively disposed towards being “meta”. But I have found that the general process works reasonably well both to help people and to garner status.
I think it is especially useful to “sharing your failures” because it builds trust and shows that you’re not simply trying to one up the other person in a stale status game where advice shades into command and a position of command-giving gives a person de facto political authority. Admission of failure provides ammo for later lowering your status by bringing the failure up again later in a different context, so offering it reveals that you’re willing to cede ground in places where the ammo might be used later. If you gain authority nonetheless, it is of a more limited sort.
I like LW a lot, but unfortunately I think that with our karma system and public accessibility we’re not structurally set up to properly protect people’s admissions of failure from hostile scrutiny by the wider world nor to meaningfully reward them with recognition for actually helping people, but in other contexts, where it’s honesty safe to apply, I think this is a pretty good formula for genuinely supportive advice.