Hello beautiful readers 👋
It’s time for your injection 🧠
Let’s get straight into this week’s article…
Why good advice is ruining your life…
Hi 👋
I’m a moron. And I need advice:
“How much money will make me happy?”
“Can I marry my sister?”
“And should I study physics, or self-induce a coma via cerebral hypoxia so I don’t have to make any more decisions for myself, nor take accountability for my decreasingly significant existence in a universe expanding faster than the speed of light?”
The answer to all of these questions is yes.
Or no.
Or any infinity of answers that reside between and beyond the two.
Asking these sorts of questions is like solving the following:
x could = 5, and y = 5
x could = 10, and y = 0
x could = -2 + i, and y = 12 - i
x could = negative google, and y = positive google + 10
The problem isn’t that there aren’t any answers.
The problem is there are too many f*cking answers.
Already, with just 2 variables there is a literal infinity of solutions.
Now imagine parametrising your life:
That’s one hell of an infinity you’ve got there!
#GeorgeCantor
But instead of trial-and-erroring your way to an answer out of your infinite set of possible solutions…you push for the answer. The right one!
And so we arrive at…
The Dark Side of Advice
Dark Advice is advice given in the dark: when you don’t know enough about the advisee’s context to give accurate advice - i.e. the advice that will best help the advisee.
An example:
Moron:
“How much water should I drink in a day?”
Advisor who has no idea, has never studied hydration, and knows little about the moron’s broader health circumstances nor health goals:
“About 8 glasses a day is what I heard.”
Moron:
“Thanks, Advisor! Without you I’d already be dead from fluid loss and hypovolemic shock.
Oh, actually how big should the glasses be?”
Advisor:
“Oh, you know, the normal size of a glass.”
Moron:
“Great, thanks, Advisor! And how should I space out my water consumption across the day?”
Advisor:
“Errmmm, 1 glass in the morning, 1 in the evening before bed, and then 6 in the day.”
Moron:
“OK sure, but what exact interval of time should I leave between each glass?”
Advisor:
“I don’t know, maybe 1 hour?”
Moron:
“But Advisor, if I wake up at 8am and drink 7 glasses on the dot at the turn of each hour, I will have finished 7/8ths of my water consumption by 3pm! Does this mean I have to go to bed at 4pm? Or risk dying of dehydration?”
The above dialogue is semi-facetious but hopefully makes the point.
Asking questions that your Advisor (whomever that may be, parent, friend or internet) isn’t qualified (or computationally able!) to answer will lead to advice that is unfounded & potentially counterproductive.
Few Advisors have the self-confidence to just say I don’t know. And leave it there.
And few Morons have the awareness to realise they’re asking stupid questions. They want to believe someone has all the answers. And they need an answer more than they need the truth.
They want to believe the meaning of life is literally 42. Because at least that’s an answer. At least now you can stop thinking. And if things go wrong, you can blame the advice!
All Advice is Dark
Of course, all advice is dark to some extent.
Even simple, seemingless universal questions like:
7 + 11 = 18
Have different answers if we use e.g. modular arithmetic:
7 + 11 = 3 (mod 5)
Without full context, we will always give dark advice, but some shades are darker than others.
Advising someone to go into finance when they’re only 16 and very impressionable is quite shady.
Advising someone to break up with their girlfriend after one argument, and no broader insight into their relationship dynamic, is a little darker.
Advising someone to gun down Iraqi children for risk of carrying potential explosives is Vantablack, totally void of light, if not based on strong evidence.
Extrapolation Error
So all advice is dark, shady and risky.
The advice might work, the advice might not.
But we often take advice from those who’ve already done the thing we want to do as sacred.
After all, if your cousin achieved a 1st in Classics at Newcastle, if you do the exact same revision thing, surely you will, too!
This is, of course, extrapolation error.
With a sample size of n = 1 = your cousin, it’s risky to extrapolate to anyone else; after all, they may have a different way of processing information, different study preferences, they might be studying at a different university, or different modules, or find fascination in slightly different aspects of the course.
If you ask a bodybuilding Bro Scientist at your local gym how to get “hench”, you might hear: work out twice a day, eat chicken, rice and broccoli; and consume 5000 calories a day.
That’s the advice I got when I was 19. And not knowing any better, I went for it! 3 months later I was fat again and back on the kebabs.
What works for someone else may or may not work for you.
Attribution Error
But this is only half the problem.
You see, how does the other person even know what worked for them in the first place?
They have no counterfactual.
The Bro Scientist doesn’t know if it was the 5000 calories, or the gym twice a day. Perhaps if he’d gone just once, the added recovery would’ve grown his muscles even bigger. Perhaps if he’d eaten a little more temperately, he wouldn’t have needed to diet down for 6 months afterwards to see the muscle past his love handles.
I remember running a call with:
Prospecrtive students applying to universities
Current successful students who’d gotten offers
and actual university admissions staff!
The “successful” students went on about the importance of mentioning A Levels in their personal statements and name-dropping famous academics.
The University Admissions staff shook their heads, explaining not to do any of these things and that these students got in despite the bad practices they’re now imparting on to you..!
Nobody really knows what’s worked for them.
And more importantly, nobody ever knows if it’s really worked.
For example, when I was 16 I was advised to study economics by the internet because it had a £45,000 starting salary.
“That’s ace squared!” I thought.
So I went to study economics.
Then I found out you only get that ace squared salary if you spend 100 hours a week making PowerPoint presentations and being miserable.
I immediately regretted economics and wished I’d studied neuroscience.
But now I’m writing an economics book called Treadmill Capitalism (and it’s really good, as far as I’m aware). And I’ve learned neurosicence and piano and all the other stuff I wish I’d learnt at university on the side.
So was economics a bad decision? I don’t f*cking know!
And I will never know. Because I will never be able to compare with the alternative reality!
So what is good advice?
“I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.”
- Oscar Wilde
We’ve seen now that all advice is dark.
But some advice is darker than others.
Advice that’s worked for many people (n = more than 1!) is perhaps less risky to trust.
Advice based on some kind of controlled experiment, ideally double-blind placebo’d, is perhaps also more trustable.
I like to mix things up.
If I was looking for a startup mentor, for example, I’d look for someone who’s started multiple successful ventures in a variety of industries (i.e. has actually done the thing) but also boasts years of experience mentoring other startups (i.e. has a large sample size of data).
Plus a second advisor who’s been successful in your exact niche and has read all the books on whatever your field happens to be.
This way you get the hands-on n = 1 advice that only someone who’s been there and done it knows; and also the loftier but perhaps more reliable n = 1000 advice from books, academic literature and crowdsourced data.
But sadly, few interesting advice questions fall into the surgical remit of laboratories, and few have access to such perfectly placed mentors!
(Who aren’t secretly trying to sell you something!)
And so here’s my advice to you…
Stop asking for advice.
Ask instead for how your Advisor would think about your problem?
Before: “Should I start a newsletter for my irregular cactus company?”
After: “How would you think about getting more sales for an irregular cactus company? What things would you look at? How do you make these kinds of decisions? ”
This allows the Advisor to expose their way of thinking. You now understand the assumptions they’re making as they think, you can see the logical fallacies, the shoddy fact base, but also the bits that resonate and make sense to you.
You can take these, think about them, make them your own, and personalise their mental framework to your own situation.
Before: “Should I dump my girlfriend?”
After: “How do you evaluate staying in your relationship vs staying single?”
Again, there’s more nuance, more context will come to the fore, and you can personalise whatever they say to your situation to tailor your own custom-fitting advice!
And then start testing it…
Equipped with your new mental frameworks and possible answers to your problem, it’s time to test your advice.
That’s right, instead of blindly following, you’re going to test.
Put your goggles on, load up R, and enter your hypotheses.
For example:
You think starting a newsletter about irregular cacti could help increase your sales.
So create an experiment.
Basically you’re going to write a newsletter and see what happens to sales.
Give yourself enough time to see the payoff - e.g. 6 months, because you know it takes a while for newsletters to gain a following.
Make sure you’ve got tracking links and analytics so you can see who’s buying from the newsletter vs your other sources.
And evaluate your results in 6 months time :)
Or instead:
You wanna try out acroyoga as a new sport.
Here the “result” of the experiment is less obvious, so no need to quantify it.
Keep it fluffy: whether or not you’re enjoying it, or whatever you’re doing it for, however vague.
Again, enough time to see payoff - perhaps 6 weeks here, sufficient time to get into it, get past noob hell, and after that you can reevaluate if this is your sport (or not!)
If the results are positive, keep going. If negative, stop & iterate i.e. run another experiemt.
But don’t go hopping around between Advisors looking for the “most right” answer.
Test. Evaluate. And then you can iterate.
There are many, many ways to feel fulfilled, make money, get laid, find a partner, lose weight, blablabla.
And more macroscopically, there are many, many, many ways to live.
Do you really want a six pack? Or is that just some random advice you’ve internalised from the internet.
Do you really want to be rich? Or is that just advice your poverty-struck parents inculcated upon you.
Many of our “goals” are actually bits of advice we’ve picked up subconsciously along the way.
The goal of getting rich is likely just advice from parents/friends/society that you should get rich.
Whether this is your true desire or not is something you need to test :)
Is a life where you pursue wealth a life you wanna live?
Again run an experiment: test, evaluate and then iterate!
As always, a pleasure sharing my unsolicited advice with you ;)
Ask Me Anything 👋
What are your struggles/goals? What’s holding you back? Any questions - let me know and I’ll answer personally.
Andrew ✌️