{"id":6441,"date":"2016-06-29T11:10:47","date_gmt":"2016-06-29T18:10:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/?p=6441"},"modified":"2019-03-08T10:08:50","modified_gmt":"2019-03-08T18:08:50","slug":"the-problem-with-advice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/2016\/06\/29\/the-problem-with-advice\/","title":{"rendered":"The Problem with Advice"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you want to eat healthy, you need to have a balance between eating too much and too little. If you want to be responsible with money, you need to balance between saving enough to enjoy your future and spending enough to meet your needs today. Not too much, not too little.<\/p>\n

Most problems in life come down to calibrating between extremes like these. Calibration has two challenges. First you need to figure out in which direction you\u2019re unbalanced\u2014are you spending too much or too little? Too aggressive or too passive? Overdoing it or underdoing it? Second, you need to figure out how to rebalance yourself.<\/p>\n

Calibration is harder than maximizing. If you don\u2019t need to balance, and moving in one direction is always better, then you can marshall all your efforts into solving the second challenge. When a problem involves calibration, however, you always need to keep an eye on whether you\u2019ve slipped too far to the other side.<\/p>\n

Calibrating Advice<\/h2>\n

The problem with advice is that most of the time it can only point in one direction. I can advise you to spend more and enjoy life or save it for a rainy day. But it\u2019s hard for me to advise both and still be comprehensible.<\/p>\n

If the intended recipient for advice is obviously miscalibrated in one direction, this may not be a problem. It\u2019s probably safe to say someone with high consumer debt should spend less and save more, or someone who is obese should eat less.<\/p>\n

However, what if there\u2019s more than one recipient? If I write a blog post, it will get read by thousands of people. For any conceivable topic, that means my advice will be bad for some people, even if it\u2019s still useful on average.<\/p>\n

What if you don\u2019t know the recipient very well? In that case, you may assume they\u2019re miscalibrated in one direction, but the opposite could very well be true. Good advice crucially depends on what the advice giver believes to be the more likely miscalibration.<\/p>\n

Too Much or Too Little?<\/h2>\n

How can you tell which direction you\u2019re miscalibrated? This itself isn\u2019t an easy issue.
\nA dominant heuristic people use is to see where other people are calibrated, and compare themselves to those people. Unfortunately, this suffers from a number of problems.<\/p>\n

First, averaging over the people around you doesn\u2019t necessarily give you the ideal position. If we did this with weight or savings rate in North America right now, it might be far from what most reasonable people would consider ideal. This creates a bias to think you\u2019re better calibrated than you actually are if you\u2019re close to the average.<\/p>\n

Sometimes we\u2019re able to recognize a discrepancy between the average and the ideal. But this can also create other problems if you\u2019re calibrated in the opposite direction of the people around you. This may push you to an opposite, unhealthy extreme. If you\u2019re told people of your group are normally too passive, you may push yourself to becoming overly aggressive. If you\u2019re told people in your group are too heavy, you may push yourself to undereating.<\/p>\n

Sometimes the calibration issue has to deal with the fact that it\u2019s not clear where the ideal sits between two extremes. With weight and savings, there\u2019s a minor risk of distortion, but consider philosophical issues like:<\/p>\n