Something that annoys me is when people turn “reverse all advice you hear” into a generic warning that advice might not apply to everyone, when in the original essay Scott was talking about a specific mechanism behind a specific class of advice failures. If you read the post, he notes that people are often drawn to groups that share the same views/opinions/tendencies as them (e.g., if selfish people are disproportionately drawn to Objectivism). And when such groups give advice (e.g., you should be more selfish), the advice might even be good for the average person (e.g., perhaps the average person should actually be more selfish). But it may be particularly bad advice for the average recipient of the advice, because the recipient has been selected to be the kind of person who already leans in that direction and should consider going in the other direction (to reverse the advice, as it were).
Scott’s job-advice example makes the selection effect clear:
And when a young person is looking for job advice, I worry that all the artsy creative people whose heads are already way too high in the skies will be reading books by artsy creative people who urge them to follow their dreams, and so be even less mindful of the importance of a secure future. And all the hard-headed down-to-earth people will naturally gravitate toward reading Have A Very Secure Future By Going Into Business by Warren Buffett, and maybe never get reminded of the importance of following dreams.
In practice, though, I often see “reverse advice” used as a vague caveat: “my advice might not work for you, lol”, rather than as a claim about selection effects. Which is a shame, because the idea that people are particularly drawn to advice they not only don’t need, but that might in fact make things worse for them, is much more interesting than “sometimes advice doesn’t work for you”. And maybe if people had internalized the actual mechanism, instead of just saying “reverse this advice maybe”, they’d give better qualifications in their advice posts? For example, I appreciate the section in Sympathetic Opposition’s post about women (not) asking more men out where they discuss what kinds of people “ask more men out” is likely to work for, and what kinds of people it isn’t likely to work for. Scott’s checklist captures the narrower claim nicely:
- Are there plausibly near-equal groups of people who need this advice versus the opposite advice?
- Have you self-selected into the group of people receiving this advice by, for example, being a fan of the blog / magazine / TV channel / political party / self-help-movement offering it?
- Then maybe the opposite advice, for you in particular, is at least as worthy of consideration.