Good post. On one point, I think Landmines are useful in many fields, to warn against important beginners’ mistakes/misconceptions. Though (unless for big safety reasons) this should indeed be secondary to positive advice.
Eg with a startup, don’t spend lots of time creating a product before writing a business plan. The plan should come first, or at least early on, because it’s how you decide whether to create the product! (Something I’ve written about on here)
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1Eg with a startup, don’t spend lots of time creating a product before writing a business plan. The plan should come first, or at least early on, because it’s how you decide whether to create the product! (Something I’ve written about on here)
What, this goes against the advice of basically anyone I have ever talked to. The central advice has always been "build something you want, or someone you know want", explicitly without concern for how exactly you are going to commercialize. Indeed, most successful companies figure out where their margins come from quite late into their lifecycle.
Indeed building something you want, or that someone you know wants, is necessary, but not sufficient! I'd say it depends how much time you're going to spend creating it and whether you have broader commercial ambitions at the outset.
If you're creating something you're going to use yourself anyway, that could well justify creating it (if it won't take too long). Similarly if you're creating it for someone else (as a favour, or who will pay you appropriately). Or if you can create a minimum viable product quickly to try out on people.
Also, particularly in the realm of short software projects, there's a blurry line between creating something for fun/interest and doing so with serious commercial intentions, i.e. you could justify doing it speculatively without feeling you'd wasted your time if it goes nowhere.
But if you're going to take months (or years) full-time creating something with a view to commercializing it, i.e. make a serious effort, it is remiss not to do basic research and evaluation first, to find out whether there really is a market for your thing (e.g. who customers would be, potential market size, what customers currently do instead, whether you can actually improve on that enough, how hard that might be, what customers would be prepared to spend), whether your thing should do what you think it should (i.e. its features, or indeed whether you’d be better off creating something else entirely), etc. It's far cheaper to do basic research & planning than to spend months/years creating something speculatively and only then discover much/all of that was misguided.
explicitly without concern for how exactly you are going to commercialize. Indeed, most successful companies figure out where their margins come from quite late into their lifecycle.
The exact way you commercialize or get margins can of course change - but if you can't figure out any way way of making it work on paper, the chances of it succeeding in real life are slim.
(My LW article on this FWIW: Write a business plan already — LessWrong)
Reposting my Inkhaven post on ontology of advice here.
Are you interested in learning a new field, whether it’s programming, writing, or how to win Paper Mario games? Have you searched for lots of advice and couldn’t choose which advice to follow? Worse, have you tried to follow other people’s Wise Sounding Advice and ended up worse than where you started?
Alternatively, have you tried to give useful advice distilling your hard-earning learnings and only to realize it fell on deaf ears? Or perhaps you’ve given advice that filled a much-needed hole that you now regret giving?
If so, this post is for you!
While this post is far from exhaustive, I hope reading it can help you a) identify the type of advice you want to give and receive and b) recognize and try to avoid common failure modes!
7 Categories of Good Advice
Source: https://englishlive.ef.com/en/blog/english-in-the-real-world/5-simple-ways-give-advice-english/
Here are 7 semi-distinct categories of good advice. Some good advice mixes and matches between the categories, whereas others are more “purist” and just tries to do one style well.
I. The Master Key
This is where someone who deeply understands a field tries to impart the central tenets/frames of a field so newbies can decide whether the model is a good fit for what they want to do. And the rest of the article/book/lecture will be a combination of explaining the model and why they believe it’s true, and examples to get the learner to deeply understand the model. Eg “Focus on the user” as the central dictum in tech startups, or understanding and groking the Popperian framework for science.2
My previous post, How to Win New Board Games, is an unusually pure example, where I spend 2000 words hammering different variations and instantiations of a single idea (“Understand the win condition, and play to win”).
In writing advice, Clear and Simple as the Truth (by Thomas and Turner, review + extension here) works in this way as well, doing their best to model how to write well in the Classic Style.
II. The Toolkit
“When art critics get together, they talk about form and structure and meaning. When artists get together, they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.” - Pablo Picasso, supposedly3
The motivating theology is something like “reality has a surprising amount of detail“, and you want to impart these details onto novices. In tech startups, this could be a list of 20 tips. In videogames, this could be a youtube video that goes through a bunch of different tips.
My first post this month, How to Write Fast, Weird, and Well, is mostly in this vein, with a collection of loosely structured tips that I personally have found to be the most helpful in improving myself as an online writer.
III.The War Stories
Teaching through stories and examples rather than principles or tips. Business schools love this approach (case studies), as do many mentors who say “let me tell you about the time I...” The idea is that patterns emerge from concrete situations better than from abstract rules. While not stereotypically considered an “advice book,” the nonfiction book I’m currently the most engrossed in, Skunk Works, is written almost entirely as a collection of war stories.
For games, this could be videos of professional streams. In writing, this would be books like Stephen King’s “On Writing”, which weaves memoir with advice.
IV. The Mirror(s)
Can you think of good questions to guide your students, rather than declarative statements?
The minimal viable product for this type of advice is just being a “pure” mirror. Have you tried just asking your advisee what they’re thinking of doing and what they think the biggest flaws with their plans are? Otherwise known as “Socratic ducking,” this is where your questions essentially just mirror your advisee’s thoughts and you don’t try to interject any of your own opinions or tastes in the manner. Surprisingly useful!
In more advanced “mirror strategies,” the advisor’s questions might serve more as prisms, lenses, or funhouse mirrors. Can you do better than a pure mirror? Can you think of some common failure modes in your field and ask your advisees pointed questions so they can address those? Can you reflect your subtle judgments in taste and prioritization and reframe your tips into central questions of interest?
Coaching and therapy often works this way. Instead of “focus on the user,” it’s “who do you think will use this and what do they need?”
There’s a spectrum of mirror purity vs detail. In the most detailed end, maybe you should just give your normal advice but say it with an upwards inflection so it sounds like a question?
V. The Permission Slip
This is advice like “be yourself” or “chase your dreams.” This might initially seem to be semantically useless, but there’s real value in giving license for people to do (socially positive) things they kind of want to do anyway. In Effective Altruism, this could be something like “when in doubt, just apply (to socially positive jobs)” or “you don’t need permission to do the right thing.”
In writing advice, this could be seemingly trivial advice like telling aspiring writers to just start writing, or telling writers worried about style that your style ought to be an expression of your personality.
VI. The Diagnosis
Advice that helps you figure out what specific bottleneck is, or the specific thing (among a suite of options) that would help you the most. Some product reviews might look like this.
The post you’re reading right now is also somewhat in this vein! Hopefully after reading the post, you’d have a better sense of what types of advice you’d find most useful to give or receive.
VII. The Landmines
Advice for what not to do, scary things newbies should avoid, etc. In most fields, learning the Landmines is supplementary advice. But in certain high-stakes domains where beginners have enough agency to seriously hurt themselves or others like firearms practice, outdoor climbing, or lab chemistry, it’s the prerequisite advice.
Integration
Of course, many advice posts/essays/books might integrate two or more of the above categories. For example, my Field Guide to Writing Styles post mixes a meta-framework (master Master Key) for choosing which framework/frameworks to write in (Diagnostic), with specific frameworks/writing styles you might want to write in. While in some sense this is more sophisticated and interesting to write (and hopefully to read!) than advice in a single “pure” category, it also likely suffers from being more scattered and confusing. So there are real tradeoffs.
Is the above ontology complete? What am I missing? Tell me in the comments!4
Core Ways Advice Can Be Bad
There are an endless plethora of ways advice can be bad, and fail to deliver value to the intended audience (eg the advice is ignored), or deliver anti-value to the intended audience (the advice is taken, and taking the advice is worse than not taking it).
In this article, I will just focus on the biggest ones.
The biggest three reasons are that the advisor can fail at metacognition, the advice can fail to center the advisee, or the advice can otherwise fail to be persuasive
Failures of Metacognition
The advisor can fail at metacognition, and do not know the limits of their knowledge
Many of these failure modes can be alleviated through clearer thinking and better rationality.
Failures of audience centering
The advice can fail to center the advisee.
Nietzsche’s great at self-promotion, but not the best at meta-cognition or audience awareness.
The advice can be in the wrong category for the audience of interest
Many of these failure modes can be alleviated through greater empathy and revealed desire to help others.
The advice can fail to be persuasive
This category is somewhat less bad than the previous two categories, as the damage is limited.
Many of these failure modes can be alleviated by improvements in writing quality in general. They can also be reduced via learning about other (ethical/semi-ethical) forms of self-promotion, which I have not yet cracked but hope to do so one day (and will gladly share on the blog).
What do you think? Are there specific categories of advice you're particularly drawn to? Are there (good) categories of advice that I missed? Tell us in the comments!
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I realize this is a bit of a trap/local optima to be stuck in, so starting tomorrow, I’m calling for a personal moratorium on publishing advice posts until at least the end of this week!
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Sometimes the central tenet can be explained “well enough” in one sentence, like “focus on the user.” Often, it cannot be.
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Apocryphal
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(For simplicity I’m ignoring high-context/specific/very situational advice, like specific suggested edits on a blog post, or an experienced programmer providing code review). I’m also excluding exercise “books” like Leetcode or writing prompts.
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I was a decent but not great (by Silicon Valley standards) programmer, so it’s possible there is a central dogma I was not aware of. But I also read dozens of books at programming and worked at Google for almost 2 years, so at the very least the memescape did not try very hard to impress upon me a central dogma