LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Let me give you some advice: give advice.

Not all the time, but some of the time.

Yes, it does imply that the person you're talking to is not "an adult capable of making their own decisions and taking responsibility for their own life".

And often we're not.

We have a ton on our minds. We have the capability to figure out our own problems, but we have more problems (areas where our lives are not optimized) than we have time to figure out and optimize. And that's even LW/tech/intellectuals whose first thought is to google it. Most of humanity for most of history has tended to just guess and try stuff unless they've happened across someone who's said "I actually know something about this." My most frequent advice is "have you googled it" but even there I find people who've found some dumb SEO optimized page with terrible advice - and they haven't known or bothered to look farther.

Why is someone telling you their problems if they don't want help figuring them out? Usually they want some mix of sympathy and help - and they don't know which because they don't know how much you can help them. Figuring out which is appropriate is a very useful skill.

This is not to disagree with your suggestions; asking questions before giving advice is a great idea; it really helps establish whether this is an occasion where your advice might be useful.

I will quibble with your second one; sharing from personal experience rather than from your knowledge of other people's experiences seems limiting. If your personal experience in the topic is looking at academic papers or Reddit accounts of success and failure stories, that's highly worth sharing so that this person doesn't have to re-do all of that work and spend all the time you did to get up to speed.

When people offer me advice, I feel cared for, and it often helps me think through the issue from a new perspective. I do wonder if they think I'm not an adult who's taking responsibility for my own life - and often I conclude that they're right, I haven't yet taken responsibility for that particular aspect of my life.

And yes, it is helpful to couch your advice in the form of a question, to avoid implying too hard that this person is lazy or an idiot^[1]

1. ^{^}

   We are all lazy and an idiot some times and in some areas. We have sharp cognitive and energetic limitations. We're doing great for monkeys, but recognizing that we're all deeply limited and imperfect is not only realistic, it's freeing.

I don't think you've highlighted the casual factor here.  It's not at all clear that the reason bees and ants have a more effective response to predators than do flocks of birds is that the bees are individually less intelligent than the birds.

There's a very clear evolutionary/game theoretic explanation for the difference between birds and bees here: specifically the inclusive fitness of individual bees is tied to the outcome of the collective whereas the inclusive fitness of the birds is not.

In a game theoretic framework we might say that the payoff matrices for the birds and bees are different, so of course we'd expect them to adopt different strategies.

Neither of these is dependent upon the respective intelligences of individual members of the collectives.

This makes me predict that we should see the effectiveness of group strategies to be more strongly correlated with the alignment of the individuals incentive structure than with the (inverse of) intelligence of their individual members, as your post suggests.

So, for instance, within flocking birds, do birds with smaller brains/body mass ratios adopt better strategies?  Within insects, what pattern do we see?  I would suggest that the real pattern we'll end up finding is the one related to inclusive fitness.  So I'd predict that pack animals who associate with close relatives like wolves and lions will adopt better collective strategies than animals that form collectives with non-relatives.

Once you control for this I might even expect intelligence of individual members to positively correlate with group strategies, as it can allow them to solve coordination problems that less intelligent individuals couldn't solve.  This would explain the divergence of humans from the trend you notice.  But I'm speculating here.

Just to push back a little - I feel like these people do a valuable service for capitalism. If people in the reviews or in the press are criticizing a business for these things, that's an important channel of information for me as a consumer and it's hard to know how else I could apply that to my buying decisions without incurring the time and hassle cost of showing up and then leaving without buying anything.

I don't think I will ever find the time to write my novel. Writing novels is dumb anyways. But I feel like the novel and world are bursting out of me. What do

One funny thing I have noticed about myself is that I am bad enough at communicating certain ideas in speech that sometimes it is easier to handwave at what a couple things that I don't mean and let the listener figure out the largest semantic cluster in the remaining "meaning space".

I agree that there is such a thing as two things occurring in sequence where the first doesn’t cause the second. But I don’t think this is one of those cases. Instead, I think there are strong reasons to believe that if S(A) is active and has positive valence, then that causally contributes to A tending to happen afterwards.

For example, if A = stepping into the ice-cold shower, then the object-level idea of A is probably generally negative-valence—it will feel unpleasant. But then S(A) is the self-reflective idea of myself stepping into the shower, and relatedly how stepping into the shower fits into my self-image and the narrative of my life etc., and so S(A) is positive valence.

I won’t necessarily wind up stepping into the shower (maybe I’ll chicken out), but if I do, then the main reason why I do is the fact that the S(A) thought was active in my mind immediately beforehand, and had positive valence. Right?

Low importance aside:

Seems slightly unproductive and unnecessarily connotation inducing to say "Anthropic says:". Maybe "The Sabotage eval paper (from Anthropic) says:". Like this was just written by various people on the Anthropic alignment science team and by no means should discussion sections of papers be interpreted to speak for the company overall. Obviously not very important.

I'm so sorry but I haven't been able to think of any specific books, although the first case it seems like your problem could be a matter of the Availability Heuristic [? · GW]- your teacher answered a different question to the one you asked because quite simply it was easier for them to recall the knowledge about the evolution of the system than the relative stability of GTP to ATP.

I'm not sure if there is anything in Kahneman's Thinking Fast, Slow which might offer your practical techniques for priming listeners the right way. If anything you might be better served by the books of Robert Cialdini or even literature on sales - my thinking here is sales people often think about the structure (or in Aristotelian terms the Kairos) that they present different options which in effect 'primes' the customer to different Semantic and Mental frameworks.

Sorry that I can't point to any specific books. I could guess on some specific techniques that I think might aid your communication but I've been wracking my brain and can't think of any books that I know hit the mark.

Hmm. I think you’re understating the tendency of most people to follow prevailing norms, and yet your main conclusion is partly right. I think there are interesting dynamics happening at two levels simultaneously—the level of individual decisions, and the level of cultural evolution—and your comment is kinda conflating those levels.

So here’s how I would put things:

1. Most people care very very strongly about doing things that would look good in the eyes of the people they respect. They don’t think of it that way, though—it doesn’t feel like that’s what they’re doing, and indeed they would be offended by that suggestion. Instead, those things just feel like the right and appropriate things to do. This is related to and upstream of norm-following. This is an innate drive, part of human nature built into our brain by evolution.
2. Also, most people also have various other innate drives that lead to them feeling motivated to eat when hungry, to avoid pain, to bond with friends, for parents to love their children and adolescents to disrespect their parents (but respect their slightly-older friends), and much else.
3. (But there’s person-to-person variation, and in particular some small fraction of people are sociopaths who just don’t feel intrinsically motivated by (1) at all.)
4. The norms of (1) can be totally arbitrary. If the people I respect think that genocide is bad, then probably so do I. If they think genocide is awesome, then probably so do I. If they think it’s super-cool to hop backwards on one foot, then probably so do I.
5. …But (2) provides a constant force gently pushing norms towards behavioral patterns that match up with innate tendencies in (2). So we tend to wind up with cultural norms that line up with avoiding pain, eating-when-hungry, bonding with friends, and so on.
6. …But not perfectly, because there are other forces acting on norms too, such as game-theoretic signaling equilibria or whatever. These enable the existence of widespread norms with aspects that run counter to aspects of (2)—think of religious fasting, initiation rites, etc.
7. When (4),(5),(6) play out in some group or society, some norms will “win” over others, and the norms that “win” are probably (to some extent) a priori predictable from structural aspects of the situation—homogeneity, mobility, technology, whatever.

I like the three suggested approaches instead of giving advice directly.  All three seem like good ideas.

However, all three of your approaches seem like things that could still be done in combination with giving advice.  "Before giving advice, try to fully understand the situation by asking questions" seems like a reasonable way to implement your first suggestion, for instance.  Personal experiences can be used to give context for why you are giving the advice you are giving, and clearing up misconceptions can be an important first step before giving more concrete advice.  This doesn't mean that these approaches need to be combined with giving advice, but they aren't in opposition to it and can perhaps be the thing that shifts us from bad advice to good advice.

In general I see you trying to tip us into a more collaborative frame with friends or collegues who come to us with problems.  Instead of immediately trying to solve their problem independently, try to work with them to better understand the issue and see if you have something worthwhile to add.  This makes sense to me.

I find your second paragraph oversimplified.   It's not at all clear that being in different circumstances means your advice doesn't apply to others.  There are many situations where it's exactly because you come from a different perspective that you can expect to have useful advice.

My final criticism is with respect to the idea that advice is no longer applicable in the modern world of the internet.  I don't think this is true.  A lot of the time people simply don't know what options are available and so wouldn't even consider looking for entire classes of solutions without being given advice that guides them to it.  There have been many cases in my own life when I've benefited from advice when I didn't even realise I had a problem: I was doing something in a way that worked but was highly suboptimal, and when a friend saw what I was doing suggested a simpler and more elegant solution that immediately made things easier for me.  I wouldn't even have thought to ask (or to search the internet) for a solution to this problem, because I already had a solution, and so didn't think of it in terms of having a problem to be solved.  In these cases unsolicited advice was highly useful for me.

I think there's a good reading of what you are saying as "advice is overrated", and you are trying to shift us to a more collaberative framework.  Since advice is overrated and reactive advice is overused, maybe a heuristic like "don't give advice" is useful to shift us away from a typical immediate reaction to friends with problems where we typically try to solve the problem immediately rather than simply asking questions to delve deeper.