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Bistromathtician's avatar

I think this is generally correct, but I've always considered "good" advice to be inherently context dependent, given that there are basically no "universals" among human behavior. So, because of that, advice is generally meant by the giver to nudge the recipient based on the perceived context towards one of those dyads). So the existence of contradictory maxims is a feature, since the "right" one can be deployed by the skilled advice giver to point the recipient in the correct direction.

This generally fails because both advice givers and recipients are terrible at correctly interpreting context (because most humans are bad at most things, compared to the "ideal"). So advice givers are generally giving the same "wisdom" to everyone, since they assume the recipient's internal context matches their own, and the external context they *want* would be for more people to move towards the extreme they think is "better." Similarly, if you're "looking for" advice, you will either search the internet, and find exactly what you want to hear, or ask multiple people, and remember the advice that most matches your priors (although you might also remember the most surprising advice as well).

Unless the advice giver actually has both the wisdom/experience to know the subject of the advice, and a well enough developed theory of mind to know what the recipient needs to hear, the advice will probably be neutral to bad. Of course, giving and receiving advice is probably more important for social cohesion and maintaining relations than any informational content which is exchanged, so the fact that most advice is "bad" doesn't actually matter for its existence.

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