Conditioning non-specific advice

C&C the Reverse advice you hear idea, although I think the framing in my head is broader and better.

The concept I would like to get at is something like the one in Bravery Debates: “I feel pretty okay about both being sort of a libertarian and writing an essay arguing against libertarianism, because the world generally isn’t libertarian enough but the sorts of people who read long online political essays generally are way more libertarian than can possibly be healthy.”

We can imagine advice as a statistical problem, where we need to get external validity in our advice. If we are also learners should we not be concerned about how our own hypotheses generalize to the wider world outside our experience?

Every pundit has a model for what the typical member of the public thinks and directs their advice accordingly. For many reasons, the pundit’s model is likely to be wrong. The readers of various pundits are a self-selecting sample, and the pundit’s intuitive model of society is distorted and even if they surveyed their readership, which is difficult to do right anyway.

So all advice like “People should do more X” is suspect because the advice is based on the author’s assumption that the readers are in class A but they in fact could easily be in class B, who maybe should do less X, possibly because X does not work for class B people in general, or because class B people are generally likely to have done too much X and maybe need to lay off the X for a while.

This is a problem for general advice. The living world, and especially the social world, is made of adaptive systems, which are characterised by complicated control problems where the answer is often not “always more X” but rather “Hit the sweet spot of the perfect amount of X, not too little, not too much” where the “perfect amount” is a function of the context.