Yet another Hacker News

Most advice is right for the person giving it

59 points rohanm93 1 hour ago 40 comments

Aurornis 1 hour ago | parent

Another variation of this: Advice is what the person giving it needs to hear for themself.

This is oddly evident in beginner influencers trying to become gurus on social media. They try to write life advice from a position of superiority, but when you look closely they’re given themselves a little pep talk about how they want to be or what they need to hear. It doesn’t mean the advice is wrong, but you can see through the illusion that you’re hearing sage advice from someone who figured it all out long ago.

win311fwg 1 hour ago | parent

> Mark Cuban says the opposite

In what way are they opposing thoughts? Steve Jobs said keep putting in the effort until you find the thing that you love. Mark Cuban also said keep putting in the effort until you find the thing that you love. The exact word choice may have differed, but they both expressed the exact same thing.

d-us-vb 33 minutes ago | parent

The mode is completely different. You have to twist Cuban’s words to make him say the same thing as Jobs. Because he didn’t say “find the thing you love” he said spend enough effort on what you’re doing until it becomes the thing you love. Jobs is about an actual search, which takes effort, for sure. Cuban is about transformation in place.

9rx 25 minutes ago | parent

Not at all. Jobs is not implying that you should, like, jump from minimum wage job to minimum wage job until you find one you like. He is suggesting that if you put in effort, like learning deeply about something, that will close the gaps that are necessarily closed to find true love. Which is the same thing Cuban is saying.

Perhaps you can interpret Jobs' statement that way in a vacuum, but fortunately we don't need to evaluate what Jobs' said in a vacuum. He also said a lot of other things that allow us to build up context around his intent. He spoke a lot about how he found his love.

hk__2 1 hour ago | parent

> Which is why I find it pretty funny that Ozempic is arguably the biggest weight-loss breakthrough in decades - and all it does is make you…eat less. Billions in R&D, and the answer was the platitude the whole time. Ha.

The problem was not that we didn’t know what to do ("eat less"), but to enable that solution.

Thanemate 57 minutes ago | parent

I'm far from being an expert on this specific subject but, I have the impression that Ozempic does a lot of things in one's body in order to reduce the appetite and result in eating less. Which is to say that, the author sounds like he's implying that the solution to this was trivial all along, by deliberately omitting the underlying mechanism that makes it work.

skinfaxi 57 minutes ago | parent

The problem was always about enablement. We know the solution to smoking too, the problem is enablement.

lubujackson 39 minutes ago | parent

The interesting solution to smoking was social pressure. No smoking in restaurants, no smoking on planes, general intolerance to smokers, insane taxes on tobacco... suddenly, smokers for 30 years started quitting at a certain breaking point.

The real solution to weight loss (especially in the U.S.) is to change the social norms. When everyone is hitting the buffets and going to Cheesecake Factory and buying high calorie garbage at a discount, of course to population gets fat. France, for example, makes all of that much harder. Maybe Ozempic will help reduce the Walmart-wheelchair-fat population, but truly becoming fit as a country requires significantly more friction for everyone.

nemomarx 24 minutes ago | parent

The nice thing about ozempic is that it makes people less hungry and less able to eat large portions. Once 30% of the country is on it, expect buffets to go out of business and restaurants to need to shift to smaller portions in response. So it'll make it easier for everyone not on the drugs too.

Razengan 55 minutes ago | parent

And we laugh at AI for being simple minded

The mind is always the biggest battle

9rx 49 minutes ago | parent

To be fair, we also knew how to enable it long before Ozempic arrived. We had hundreds of thousands of years of successfully "eating less" to look back upon for answers.

But drugs allow one to remove themselves from society, which is far more appealing.

nemomarx 39 minutes ago | parent

Basically every diet program for the last 4 years, every change to food or social habits at least in the US, failed to curb it. So in a pretty real sense we did not know how to eat less successfully, emphasis on successfully.

9rx 36 minutes ago | parent

Yes we do. We toss out the technology and go back to substance farming or hunter/gathering. You'll have no trouble "eating less". But that requires social coordination and humans much prefer to escape society through the use of drugs. Always have, always will.

nemomarx 27 minutes ago | parent

I think the revolt you'd get from trying to move everyone back to subsistence farming (and also getting conquered by some other group who didn't do this) also means we don't know how to do that successfully. You're ignoring that last word again.

9rx 20 minutes ago | parent

Protip: Read right up to the end of the comment before pressing reply. You missed a whole lot of context by rushing to respond midway through.

nemomarx 7 minutes ago | parent

What I'm saying is that "knowing how to do something" requires knowing how to actually implement that solution, how to get people to agree to do it. You might as well say "we know how to get to tau ceti".

hansvm 19 minutes ago | parent

Are you saying that Ozempic allows you to escape society or that all the fat people are actually just druggies? Like, either way it's wild, but I'm struggling to come up with a more charitable take.

ragall 8 minutes ago | parent

Both are true.

mrbenjihao 48 minutes ago | parent

Plenty of options exist that enable the solutions around weight loss. The issue is that 99% of those are difficult to either start and/or maintain consistency with. Ozempic just happened to address both of those issues in one swoop because people as a whole are incredibly intolerant to any friction in their lives.

jcalx 36 minutes ago | parent

Classic case of "simple != easy". Things can be simple, yet hard, and that's an underrated measure of difficulty in my experience.

hansvm 21 minutes ago | parent

That's true, but the fact that it wasn't easy created a huge industry of fake information regarding alternative explanations of weight loss from CICO. It's nice to have some more obvious evidence to convince people that no, your body can't magically move and exercise for free when you eat less, among other strange claims I've heard from people struggling to lose weight. People stuck in that rut of not being able to eat less were prone to being deceived by countless weight loss products when the real solution (also hard mind you, but at least more viable) would have been to focus on which activities and diets actually allowed them personally to maintain a calorie deficit.

And as a bonus, now they also have one. A lot of people didn't even believe that was the solution though, and the belief change is important.

projektfu 18 minutes ago | parent

I would push back and say that a lot of people didn't actually know that. They came up with elaborate reasons why eating less doesn't work, but keto works, or paleo works, or eliminating sugar works, or vegan works, or it's just physically impossible to lose weight.

thomastjeffery 9 minutes ago | parent

They did that because the other thing didn't work. It doesn't matter that the reason it didn't work is that they can't do it: the implication is identical.

Don't underestimate how impossible it can be to force your own body into a new behavior pattern.

NikolaNovak 2 minutes ago | parent

I am constantly arguing with all of my friends and family who believe primary way to loose weight is to exercise more.

Exercising is great, absolutely, but eating less is the actual primary method. While acknowledging complications of metabolism and psychology and weird states body goes through when it's hungry, primary part is to reduce calory intake vs expenditure.

So as snide and silly as it may be, in my neck of the woods, I would agree, lots of people don't believe eating less is the primary method of losing weight.

randusername 1 hour ago | parent

We should distinguish between 1:many advice and 1:1 advice.

An interviewer is really asking "how do you recommend people replicate your success?" which grounds the response in the hard lessons that person learned on their own journey.

Personalized advice can be equally useless, but if that person really understands you and your situation you might be surprised how specific and valuable good objective feedback can be.

Razengan 53 minutes ago | parent

In Buddhism/Taoism, it's said that teachings are like someone pointing at the moon: If you just look at the fingers, you'll not see the moon.

Or "playing the lute for a cow" (though we know some animals can appreciate music in some way)

The point being that advice depends on the listener's capacity to understand the intent of the advisor.

selimthegrim 9 minutes ago | parent

I guess that's where the saying "playing the flute in front of the water buffalo" comes from

figassis 45 minutes ago | parent

"good objective feedback" - right, I think advice in general is bad because it tries to bite size a complex system, that is society/humanity. Feedback is giving someone information they can act on, along with the rest of context they have of their situation. No need for you to know them deeply, just the interaction.

There are things that can work, and things that likely won't work, and most people know these. Then there is a space of things that usually work and things that may not work, and you can't fit these into a person without knowing a lot of variables about them and the environment around them, like what and who they know, their personality, their competence (not just their resume), and many, many other variables. So advice defaults to guessing most of these variables to find some direction.

And I think it boosts advisors' ego, makes advisees feel temporarily better, even motivated, but YMMV by a lot.

This is why the good advisors also change the variables in your favor, like introduce you to their network, coach, etc. And often this costs you something. Like money, equity, whatever.

clickety_clack 47 minutes ago | parent

If I have to choose between hearing advice (which I can ignore), or not getting any advice at all, I’d much rather get the advice. I’ve ignored a lot of advice in my time, but every once in a while a diamond sneaks through, and often I get an idea or two for a different way of looking at things.

AnthonyR 42 minutes ago | parent

While mostly true, there is definitely such thing as advice fatigue and generally easy for our brains to conflate advice and criticism which can be detrimental in large doses from my experience. Not to say that it's bad to receive advice/criticism but it has to be ideally in the right dose and with the right intention.

yipinwong 34 minutes ago | parent

(My analogy for this article only): Ideas gleaned from the article.

AIs do not have all the contexts about you thus provide you guidance not fit for you. Advisors are the same, they don't know everything about you thus not all advices fit for you.

You know about yourself the best (given you "reflect") and make trade-offs between what you know, and what you consider benficial to you.

As I always bring up about making tradeoffs in HN in my comments, the article is solid.

elohimus 23 minutes ago | parent

I really like this piece - but it points to a wider truth. All advice is contextual.

- It's contextual to the advice giver: Is it specific to them? Do they have an ulterior motive or are beholden to someone with an ulterior motive, e.g. getting you to support their agenda or getting you to buy or vote.

- It's contextual to you: Does that fit the way you operate? Does it play to your strengths?

- And it's contextual to your ...well... context: Are you in a country where this advice applies? Do you have the financial means to execute on it, etc...

Bottom line - there are very few pieces of truly universal good advice.

radial_symmetry 21 minutes ago | parent

Scott Alexander has a great post on this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/24/should-you-reverse-any...

glitchc 16 minutes ago | parent

Sadly no one wants the truth, so folks like Jobs and Cuban have to layer it with bromides. Truth is they're both giving the exact same advice, it's just that the honest version is deeply unpopular, because it implies that there is no secret sauce.

The advice is: Work very hard on something, and you too might get lucky.

Jobs' version is just slightly modified: Work very hard on something (you care about), and you too might get lucky.

sksksk 15 minutes ago | parent

There are so many podcasts where "successful" people (within a narrow definition of success) give advice.

The issue there, is that for every "successful" person, there are thousads who did the exact same things and didn't make it. Arguably a better thing would be to interview the ones who failed, and learn lessons from them.

Secondly, the person themselves can be selective in what they share, they may talk about the risks they took to get where they are, but not about the backstop of a wealthy family to fall back on if it all goes wrong (for example).

solatic 15 minutes ago | parent

You don't ask for advice to have someone else make your decisions for you, rather in the hope that you learn about options you didn't otherwise realize were open to you. You ask for advice to "get out of your head".

It may not be right for you, but you'll have made a better decision for having considered it.

dec0dedab0de 11 minutes ago | parent

Is it just me, or is this just an ad with a headline that is trying to make common sense sound profound?

1970-01-01 9 minutes ago | parent

The X-factor of LLM AI advice is how it consists of both artificial and intelligent responses; It cannot cloud judgement by having feelings and will still think very carefully about your problem.

thomastjeffery 6 minutes ago | parent

In other words: communication requires empathy.

readthenotes1 5 minutes ago | parent

No support for the assertion in the title.