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sixes_and_sevens comments on Open Thread, October 27 - 31, 2013 - Less Wrong
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Comments (382)
In this context, the discussion is about receiving unnecessary advice, so I think speculating on why this is happening is entirely reasonable.
To illustrate why it's annoying, it may help to provide the most extreme example to date. A couple of months ago I made a post on the open thread about how having esoteric study pursuits can be quite isolating, and how maintaining hobbies and interests that are more accessible to other people can help offset this. I asked for other people's experience with this. Other people's experiences was specifically what I asked for.
Several people read this as "I'm an emotionally-stunted hermit! Please help me!" and proceeded to offer incredibly banal advice on how I, specifically, should try to form connections with other people. When I pointed out that I wasn't looking for advice, one respondent saw fit to tell me that my social retardation was clearly so bad that I didn't realise I needed the advice.
To my mind, asking for advice has a recognisable format in which the asker provides details for the situation they want advice on. If you have to infer those details, the advice you give is probably going to be generic and of limited use. What I find staggering is why so many people skip the process of thinking "well, I can't offer you any good advice unless you give us more deta-...oh, wait, you weren't asking for advice", and just go ahead and offer it up anyway.
People will leap at any opportunity to give advice, because giving advice a) is extraordinarily cheap b) feels like charity and most importantly c) places the adviser above the advised. It's the same impulse which drives us to pity; we can feel superior in both moral and absolute terms by patronizing others, and unlike charity there is only a negligible cost involved.
I, for example, have just erased a sentence giving you useless advice on how not to get useless advice in a comment to a post talking about how annoying unsolicited useless advice is. That is the level of mind-bending stupidity we're dealing with here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4EDhdAHrOg
Can you please use actual words to explain the underlying salience of this video? I see what you're getting at, but I'm pretty sure if you said it explicitly, it would be kind of obnoxious. I would rather you said the obnoxious thing, which I could respond to, than passively post a video with snarky implicit undertones, which I can't.
I think this isn't entirely fair. You asked what people do to keep themselves relatable to other people. That's not the same as asking for help relating to other people, but it is closer to that than you implied.
Not to say that I think the responses you got were justified, but I don't find them surprising.
When you say you find this staggering, do you mean you don't understand why many people do this?
I can speculate as to why people do this, but given my inability to escape the behaviour, I clearly don't understand it very well.
To a certain extent, I'm also surprised that it happens on Less Wrong, which I would credit with above-average reading comprehension skills. Answering the question you want to answer, rather than the question that was asked, is something I'd expect less of here.
That's fair.