Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/addendum-to-applicable-advice/
(part 1: http://bearlamp.com.au/applicable-advice/)

If you see advice in the wild and think somethings along the lines of "that can't work for me", that's a cached thought.  It could be a true cached thought or it could be a false one.  Some of these thoughts should be examined thoroughly and defeated.

If you can be any kind of person - being the kind of person that advice works for - is an amazing skill to have.  This is hard.  You need to examine the advice and decide how that advice happened to work, and then you need to modify yourself to make that advice applicable to you.

All too often in this life we think of ourselves as immutable.  And our problems fixed, with the only hope of solving them to find a solution that works for the problem.  I propose it's the other way around.  All too often the solutions are immutable, we are malleable and the problems can be solved by applying known advice and known knowledge in ways that we need to think of and decide on.

Is it really the same problem if the problem isn't actually the problem any more, but rather the problem is a new method of applying a known solution to a known problem?

(what does this mean) Example: Dieting - is an easy example.

This week we have been talking about Calories in/Calories out.  It's pretty obvious that CI/CO is true on a black-box system level.  If food goes (calories in) in and work goes out (calories out - BMR, incidental exercise, purposeful exercise), that is what determines your weight.  Ignoring the fact that drinking a litre of water is a faster way to gain weight than any other way I know of.  And we know that weight is not literally health but a representation of what we consider healthy because it's the easiest way to track how much fat we store on our body (for a normal human who doesn't have massive bulk muscle mass).

CICO makes for terrible advice.  On one level, yes.  To modify the weight of our black box, we need to modify the weight going in and the weight going out so that it's not in the same feedback loop as it was (the one that caused the box to be fat).  On one level CICO is exactly all the advice you need to change the weight of a black box (or a spherical cow in a vacuum).  

On the level of human systems: People are not spherical cows in a vacuum.  Where did spherical cows in a vacuum come from?  It's a parody of what we do in physics.  We simplify a system down to it's basic of parts and generate rules that make sense.  Then we build up to a complicated model and try to find how to apply that rule.  It's why we can work out where projectiles are going to land because we have projectile motion physics (even though often air resistance and wind direction end up changing where our projectile lands, we still have a good guess.  And we later build estimation systems based on using those details for prediction too).  

So CICO is a black-box system, a spherical cow system.  It's wrong.  It's so wrong when you try to apply it to the real world.  But that doesn't matter!  It's significantly better than nothing.  Or the blueberry diet.

The applicable advice of CICO

The point of applicable advice is to look at spherical cows and not say, "I'm no spherical cow!".  Instead think of ways in which you are a spherical cow.  Ways in which the advice is applicable.  Places where - actually if I do eat less, that will improve the progress of my weight loss in cases where my problem is that I eat too much (which I guarantee is relevant for lots of people).  CICO might not be your silver bullet for whatever reason.  It might be grandma, it might be Chocolate bars, It might be really really really delicious steak.  Or dinner with friends.  Or "looking like you are able to eat forever in front of other people".  If you take your problem.  Add in a bit of CICO, and ask, "how can I make this advice applicable to me?".  Today you might make progress on your problem.

And now for some fun from Grognor:  Have you tried solving the problem?

Meta: this took 30mins to write.  All my thoughts were still clear after recently writing part 1, and didn't need any longer to process.

Part 1: http://bearlamp.com.au/applicable-advice/
(part 1 on lesswrong: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/nu3/applicable_advice/)

Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/applicable-advice/
Part 2: http://bearlamp.com.au/addendum-to-applicable-advice/
Part 2 on lesswrong: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/nuf/addendum_to_applicable_advice/

Einstein said, "If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions."

The Feynman Algorithm:
Write down the problem.
Think real hard.
Write down the solution.

There is a lot of advice out there on the internet. Any topic you can consider; there is probably advice about. The trouble with advice is that it can be just as often wrong as it is right. Often when people write advice; they are writing about what has worked for them in a very specific set of circumstances. I'm going to be lazy and use an easy example several times here - weight loss, but the overarching concept applies to any type of advice.

Generic: "eat less and exercise more" (obvious example is obvious)

Dieting as a problem is a big and complicated one. But the advice is probably effective to someone. Take any person who is looking to lose weight and this advice is probably applicable. Does this make it good advice? Heck no! It's atrocious. If that's all the dieting advice we needed we wouldn't invent diets like Atkins, Grapefruit, 2&5, low carb and more.

So what does, "starve for two days a week", have to it that "eat less and exercise more" doesn't? Why does the damn advice exist?

Advice like, "eat less and exercise more", is likely to work on someone in the situation of:
1. Eating too much
and
2. not exercising enough.
and
3. having those behaviours for no reason
and
4. having the willpower and desire to change those behaviours 
and 
5. never do them again.
and
6. the introspection to identify the problem as that, and start now.

With this understanding of the advice, you can say that this advice applies to some situations and not others. Hence the concept of "applicable advice".

Given that the advice, "eat less and exercise more" exists, if you take the time to understand why it exists and how it works; you can better take advantage of what it offers.

Understand that if this advice worked for someone there was a way that it worked for that someone. And considering if there is a way to make it work for someone, you can maybe find a way to make it work for you too.

How not to use Applicable advice

When you consider that some advice will be able to be adapted, and some will not, you will sometimes end up in a failure mode of using an understanding of why advice worked to explain away the possibility of it working for you.

Example: "you need to speak your mind more often".  Is advice.  If I decide that this advice is targeted at introverted people who like to be confident before they share what they have to say, but who often say nothing at all because of this lack of confidence.  I then assume that if I am not an introverted person then this advice is not applicable to me and should be ignored.

This is the wrong way to apply applicable advice.  First; the model of "why this advice worked", could be wrong.  Second, this way of applying applicable advice is looking at the scientific process wrong.

Briefly the scientific method:

1. Observe
2. Hypothesis/prediction
3. test
4. analyse
5. iterate
6. conclude

Compared to the failure mode:

1. You noticed the advice worked for someone else
2. You came up with an explanation about why that advice worked and why it won't work for you
3. You decided not to test it because you already concluded it won't work for you
4. you never analyse
5. you never iterate
6. you never confirm your conclusion but still concluded the advice won't work.

How to use applicable advice

Use the scientific method*.  As above:

1. Observe
2. Hypothesis/prediction
3. test
4. analyse
5. iterate
6. conclude

Method:

1. Observe advice working
2. Come up with an explanation for why it worked.  What world-state conditions are needed for successfully executing said advice, search for how it can be applicable to you.
3. Try to make the world into a state such that this advice is applicable
4. Evaluate if it worked
5. Repeat a few times
6. Decide if you can make it work.

*yes I realise this is a greatly simplified form of the scientific method.

Map and territory

Our observable difference - in how you should and should not be using applicable advice - comes from an understanding of what you are trying to change.  The map is what we carry around in our head to explain how the world works.  The territory is the real world.  Just by believing the sky is green I can't change the sky.  But if I believed the sky is green, I could change my belief to be more in line with reality.

If you assume the advice you encounter is applicable to someone, AKA the advice suited their map and how it applied to their territory to successfully be useful.  Then when you compare your territory and their territory - they do not match.  Instead of concluding that your territory is immune - that the advice does not apply, you can try to modify your own map to make the advice work for your territory.

Questions:

• Where have you concluded that advice will not; or does not work for you?
• Is that true?  And can you change yourself to make that advice apply?
  
• Have other people ever failed to take your advice?  What was the advice? and why do you think they didn't take the advice?
• Have you recently not taken advice given to you?  (What was it? and) Why?  Is there a way to make that advice more useful?

Epistemic status: trying not to do it wrong.

Meta: I have been trying to write this for months and months.  Owing to my new writing processes, I am seeing a lot more success.  Writing this out has only taken 2 hours today, but that doesn't count the 5 hours I had put into earlier versions that I nearly entirely deleted.  It also doesn't count that passive time of thinking about how to explain this over the months and months that I have had this idea floating around in my head.  Including explaining it at a local Dojo and having a few conversations about it.  For this reason I would put the total time spent on this post at 22 hours.