Music Video maker and self professed "Fashion Victim" who is hoping to apply Rationality to problems and decisions in my life and career probably by reevaluating and likely building a new set of beliefs that underpins them.
No doubt that sycophancy and the fear of expressing potentially friendship damaging truths allows negative patterns of behavior to continue unimpeded but I think you've missed the two most necessary factors in determining if advice - solicited or unsolicited - is a net benefit to the recipient:
1. you sufficiently understand and have the expertise to comment on their situation
&
2. you can offer new understanding they aren't already privy to.
Perhaps the situations where I envision advice is being given is different to yours?
The problem I notice with most unsolicited advice is it's either something the recipient is already aware of (i.e. the classic sitcom example is someone touches a hot dish and after the fact is told "careful that pan is hot" - is it good advice? Well in the sense that it is truthful, maybe. But the burn already having happened, it is not longer useful.) This is why it annoys people, this is why it is taken as an insult to their intelligence.
A lot of people have already heard the generic or obvious advice and there may be many reasons why they aren't following it,[1] and most of the time hearing this generic advice being repeated will not be of a benefit even if they have all the qualities you enumerate: that you're willing to accept the cost of giving advice, that they are rational enough to not take offense, they are good at taking advice and criticism, and they value honest feedback even when they disagree.
Take this example exchange:
A: "Why are you using the grill to make melted cheese, we have a toaster oven."
B: "the toaster is shorted out, it's broken"
You must sufficiently understand the recipient's situation if you are to have any hope of improving it. If you don't know what they know about the toaster oven, then unsolicited advice can't help.
Another major problem I've found with unsolicited advice is that it lacks fine grain execution detail. My least favourite advice as a freelancing creative is "you need to get your name out there" - where is there? On that big nebulous internet? How does that help me exactly? Unless I needed further reinforcement of the fact that what material I am putting online isn't reaching my current interlocutor - but it doesn't give me any clues how to go about remedying that.
Advice, for it to be useful needs more than just sympathy and care for the person's well being - it needs understanding of the situation which is the cause of their behavior.
My personal metric for the "quality" of advice is how actionable it is. This means that it can't be post-facto (like the sitcom hot pan), it needs to understand causes and context - such as why they aren't using the toaster oven, and most importantly it needs to suggest explicit actions that can be taken in order to change the situation (and which cations the recipient can or can't take can only be determined by properly understanding their situation and the causes of their behavior).
Caveat: I'm sure there's a genre of fringe cases where repetition becomes "the medium is the message" - that is they do need to hear it again. But there's a certain point where doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result is quite stark raving mad.
Not for my purposes. For starters I use a lot of image and video generation, and even then you have U-nets and DITs so I need something more generalized. Also, if I'm not mistaken, what you've described is only applicable to autoregressive transformers like ChatGPT. Compare to say T5 which is not autoregressive.
What are Transformers? Like what is concrete but accurate-enough conversational way of describing it that doesn't force me to stop the conversation dead in it's tracks to explain jargon like "Convolutional Neural Network" or "Multi-Head Attention"?
Its weird that I can tell you roughly how the Transformers in a Text Encoder-Decoder like T5 is different from the Autoregressive Transformers that generate the text in ChatGPT (T5 is parallel, ChatGPT sequential), or how I can even talk about ViT and DiT transformers in image synthesis (ViT like Stable Diffusion down and upsample the image performing operations on the entire latent, DiT work on patches). But I don't actually have a clear definition for what is a transformer.
And if I was in a conversation with someone who doesn't know much about compsci (i.e. Me - especially 5 months ago), how would I explain it:
"well for text models it is a mechanism that after a stream of words has been tokenized (i.e. blue might be "bl" and "ue" which each have a special id number) and the embeddings retrieved based on those token id numbers which are then used to compute the Query, Key, and Value vectors which often use a similarity measure like a Cosine Similarity Measure to compare the embedding of this key vector to the Qu - HEY, WHERE ARE YOU GOING! I DIDN'T EVEN GET TO THE NORMALIZATION!
Obviously this isn't a definition, this is a "how it works" explanation and what I've just written as an example is heavily biased towards the decoder. But if someone asks me "what is a transformer?" what is a simple way of saying it in conversation?
Off the top of my head it's because people are weary of Chesterton's Fence/Sealioning (feigning 'just asking questions' when actually they have an agenda which they mask with the plausible deniability of feigning naive curiosity) and as you say - the topic being sensitive so it generates a 'ugh field' are two pillars of what makes certain topics difficult to discuss.
I've noticed this pattern on a lot of, usually political topics but it could also be some kind of interpersonal drama/gossip, someone asks a you question which appears to be an invitation to get your opinion on something.
"Hey what do you think about Blork?"
You give a non-commital answer, but that neutrality is enough and they are off and away with their soliloquy on why Blork is either the greatest thing to happen to Western Civilization or the very end of it. Very rarely is it followed up with: "What do you like about Blork?" or "How do you friend's feel about Blork?" or any other question question which is rooted in a genuine desire to learn about Blork rather than a pretense to soapbox on it.
The amount of times that I've had someone monologue to me a "you know everyone gets it wrong about [thing which has a bad reputation]" despite (or perhaps because) I haven't shown any judgement, and despite the fact I have shown no interest or curiosity in discussing the topic further. I think this has taught people to be very on-guard about any 'sensitive' topic. After all, now if I have someone ask a seemingly innocent question about Blork, I'm going to shut down the conversation least I risk another monologue.
This naturally makes it very hard for people who want to understand why Chesterton's Fence is there like your situation with lead poisoning being a cause of sexism: curiosity is mistaken a veil of plausible deniability for a ready formed a position.
What I'm forgetting is there's the plausible deniability on the other side, overcompensating and exaggerating their disgust or even projecting their own feelings.
"Why are you justifying sexism? I wouldn't do that, because I'm not sexist. Do you see how not-sexist I am by accusing you of being sexist? Methinks I am not protesting too much. Do you see how progressive I am"
Take for example a controversy on Australian television involving Harry Connick Jnr, where a amateur talent contest segment of a variety show features a imitation of the Jackson 5, with the backup dancers in blackface, and the singer in exaggerated white-face. Connick Jnr was one of the judges on the panel and was furious, even demanding an on-air apology. Others pointed out that Connick may have been burned from his own past doing blackface on SNL.
Now the Connick Jnr example isn't a discussion, but it does add another possible pillar to why people make assumptions about intentions on broaching sensitive topics.
That Nixon one really wow'd me, the fact that it exaggerated his jowls but after a bit of google searching it seems like other models also seem to have been trained on the Nixon caricature rather than the man himself.
I'm also a big fan of that Fleischer style distracted boyfriend remix.
Never the less, the ease of 'prompting' if that's what you can even call it now is phenomenal.
I'm looking at this not from a CompSci point of view by a rhetoric point of view: Isn't it much easier to make tenuous or even flat out wrong links between Climate Change and highly publicized Natural Disaster events that have lot's of dramatic, visceral footage than it is to ascribe danger to a machine that hasn't been invented yet, that we don't know the nature or inclinations of?
I don't know about nowadays but for me the two main pop-culture touchstones for me for "evil AI" are Skynet in Terminator, or HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey (and by inversion - the Butlerian Jihad in Dune). Wouldn't it be more expedient to leverage those? (Expedient - I didn't say accurate)
I want to let you know I've been reflecting on the reactive/proactive news consumption all week. It has really brought into focus a lot of my futile habits not just over news consumption, but idle reading and social media scrolling in general.[1] Why do I do it? I'm always hoping for that one piece of information, that "one simple trick" which will improve my decision making models, will solve my productivity problems, give me the tools to let me accomplish goals XY&Z. Which of course begs the question of why am I always operating on this abstracted, meta-level, distanced level from goals XY&Z and the simple answer is: if I knew how to solve them directly, I'd be actively working on the sets to solve them.
That's a lot of TMI but I just wanted to give you a sense of the affect this had on me.
That's not how proactive thinking works. Imagine if a company handed you a coupon and your immediate thought was "how can I use this coupon to save money"? That's not you saving money. That's the company tricking you into buying their product.
Or those little "specials" at the Gas Station - buy one chocolate bar, get another free - the customer didn't save 100% of the price of the second chocolate bar, they lost 100% because they had no intention of buying a chocolate bar until they saw that impulse-hacking "offer".
On the flip side is the wasteful consumption that I don't read - my collection of books that I probably won't ever read. Why buy them? Seems as pointless as reading ephemeral news slop.
I think you're right. Although I'm having a hard time expressing where to draw the line between a simile and a analogy even after glancing at this article; https://www.grammarpalette.com/analogy-vs-simile-dont-be-confused/
I don't like the word "motivation" because I find one of the chief factors in whether I'm motivated to do something or not is belief. Most discussions of motivation seem to basically see it as the pain or "cost" of doing something versus the reward. However just because you do something, be it painful or easy, doesn't mean you'll get the reward.
Perhaps some fragmentary dialogue will illustrate my thinking:
Now let's compare it to this:
Personally, this is why I don't buy lottery tickets. And hopefully this illustrates why I don't like the implication that motivation is simply how easy a task is and the magnitude of reward. Because the certainty matters.
The problem becomes if you're a pessimist like me - then EVERYTHING has low certainty. Therefore you don't do much of anything. Becoming more 'motivated' isn't simply a matter of wanting it more - it is having belief.