Translating bad advice

Hm, okay, let me try to make it more concrete.

My main example is one where people (more than once, in fact) told me that "I might have my own truth, but other people have their truth as well". This was incredibly easy to dismiss as people being unable to tell map from territory, but after the third time I started to wonder why people were telling me this. So I asked them what made them bring it up in the first place, and they replied that they felt uncomfortable when I was stating facts with the confidence they warranted. I was reminded of something Richard Dawkins said: "clarity is often seen as offensive." I asked some other people if they felt the same way, and a helpful people-person told me that the reason for this is that those people felt threatened by my intelligence (they were HR) and my stating things with confidence reminded them of this. So I got the advice to phrase my statements of belief in a more friendly way. I hated this because it felt dishonest, having to use weasel words to hide the fact that I felt confident, but I could no longer deny that my current method wasn't working.

The meta-level I learned was the one presented in the OP: When people give you advice/objections, they almost never say what they mean or what the actual problem is. They substitute something that sounds nice and not-offensive sounding, making it easy to dismiss their advice as nonsense. So what you are supposed to do is find out what they originally meant and draw a lesson from that instead.

Another example: My father often tells me not to be cynical, but this doesn't make much sense to me because he is very cynical himself. It turns out that what he actually means is that I should be more upbeat, or as Scott Adams would put it: "Be a huge phony." The reason my father does not state this outright is because he is following his own rule even while giving the advice: he is rephrasing "be a huge phony" as "don't be cynical", because "be a huge phony" sounds cynical.

Oh, I've thought of another example:

Less Wrongers and other rationalists frequently get told that "rationality is nice but emotion is important too". Less Wrongers typically react to this by:

1) Mocking it as a fallacy because "rationality is defined as winning so it is not opposed to emotion", before eagerly taking it up as a strawman and posting the erroneous argument all over the place to show everyone how poor the enemies of reason are at reasoning.

Instead of:

2) Actually considering for five minutes whether or not there might be a correlation or even an inverse causal relationship between rationality and emotional control/ability to read emotions, which causes this observation in the first place.

Needless to say, I blame Yudkowsky.

This surprised me as well when I first heard it, but it's apparently a really common problem for shy people. I tend to shy back and do my own thing, and apparently some people took that as meaning I felt like I was too good to talk to them.

Now that I've trained myself to be more arrogant, it's become much less of an issue.

They often look the same.

You make a bit of effort to make conversation with someone you don't know: they give the minimum responses, move away when they can do so, and don't reciprocate initiation.

This could be shyness or arrogance. Very tough to tell the difference. Plus the two can actually be connected: if you see yourself as very different from others, the natural instinct is a mixture of insecurity ('I don't fit!') with arrogance ('I see things these guys don't'). I think the main way not to end up with a mix of both is just if one is very strong: if you're too insecure to be arrogant or too arrogant to be insecure.

Ugh, I am new here, but probably sprinkling it with links? Main posts tend to be heavy with linkage, preferably to studies or other articles, on-or offsite that reference studies. I have the impression that the community prefers heavily linked articles, either because the links point to things that can be interpreted as evidence, such as studies, but perhaps even more because they show the whole thing is not just something happening in the authors head, but is connected with reality, even if the links simply reference other people's opinions at least they demonstrate it is something happening in a lot of heads, and as such at least part of the reality of human psychology... they also demonstrate the diligence of trying to research the topic.