Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:
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On the other hand, honest advice from highly successful people at least gives some indication of what you need to do to be successful, even if it doesn't give a good idea of the odds.
Not necessarily. Honest advice from successful people gives some indication of what those successful people honestly believe to be the keys to their success. The assumption that people who are good at succeeding in a given sphere are also good at accurately identifying the factors that lead to their success may have some merit, but I'd argue it's far from a given.
It's not just a problem of not knowing how many other people failed with the same algorithm; They may also have various biases which prevent them from identifying and characterizing their own algorithm accurately, even if they have succeeded at implementing it.