QC

@jon_bois nails the style of it perfectly here:https://twitter.com/jon_bois/status/1111290382481018880 …

it's not that the advice is "wrong," more like 1) only a person who was already doing this would really understand what it means. most advice is a verbal tag summarizing an experience and the words are mostly useless without the experience the tag is pointing to

2) why are you even telling me this, do you think you're better than me or what. not that hard to tell when people are giving advice to posture / occupy a particular "wise" role, because it gets optimized for sounding "wise" instead of for actually helping people

(meanwhile i am optimizing for sounding as interesting as possible to attract the attention of interesting people, i hope it's pretty clear this is what i'm doing, i am in no way trying to hide this)

generally speaking i wish that instead of giving me advice people would tell me the experience that the advice is coming from. like instead of "i learned that you really have to listen to people, y'know" tell me about how you finally started listening to your gf

i am hungry for stories. i am a reinforcement learning algorithm and i want some goddamn reinforcement learning episodes to update on. state, action, reward, state, action, reward, i live for that shit

OTOH there's a thing like advice that doesn't have to be framed as advice that i really value, which is when a person crystallizes an experience i've already had but didn't have good concepts / words around. i love when that happens and i love doing it for others too