Being relatively young I get really excited when someone gives advice that they wish they realized earlier (as if I’m privy to some unique and incredibly useful information), but I’ve now realized the huge plethora of information that I wish I could share with the “me of 2 years ago”. After years of reading reddit, hacker news, etc, I must have come across hundreds of similar advice threads, and yet even now I feel like there are just so many things I figured out way too late. Our brains have a horrible self satisfaction mechanism.
Not that this devalues your advice at all (I have similar problems, so I’m incredibly grateful for the link). Just an observation.
Which is why it makes sense to seek good advice on sites that have better signal-to-noise ratio.
For me this is one important aspect of LW. I can get good advice almost anywhere. But in most of those places I can also get bad advice with high probability. -- On LW I trust people to self-censor before saying something stupid (as opposed to enjoying a happy death spiral), and even if they fail, I trust other people to correct them. It does not work perfectly, but it’s better than not even trying.
Being relatively young I get really excited when someone gives advice that they wish they realized earlier (as if I’m privy to some unique and incredibly useful information), but I’ve now realized the huge plethora of information that I wish I could share with the “me of 2 years ago”. After years of reading reddit, hacker news, etc, I must have come across hundreds of similar advice threads, and yet even now I feel like there are just so many things I figured out way too late. Our brains have a horrible self satisfaction mechanism.
Not that this devalues your advice at all (I have similar problems, so I’m incredibly grateful for the link). Just an observation.
There’s also a lot of bad advice out there. So even if you find some good advice, it won’t help you because you can’t pick it out of the bad advice.
Which is why it makes sense to seek good advice on sites that have better signal-to-noise ratio.
For me this is one important aspect of LW. I can get good advice almost anywhere. But in most of those places I can also get bad advice with high probability. -- On LW I trust people to self-censor before saying something stupid (as opposed to enjoying a happy death spiral), and even if they fail, I trust other people to correct them. It does not work perfectly, but it’s better than not even trying.