On Advice

[sigmaleph]

Earlier, I argued that writing advice should be less focused on what you should or shouldn't do and more focused on explaining what are the desirable or undesirable consequences of specific things. This was a specific reaction to a conversation where people kept getting pissed off at each other because they were giving "should"s that failed to account for differing goals, different valuations of the options in tradeoffs, and so on.

This is, probably, not a general fact about advice-giving in general, or even writing advice in particular. Good advice can exist in approximately two different modes, which I'm going to summarise as "good defaults" vs "deeper mechanics", and which one you need is conditional on your personal situations and what you are doing.

"Good defaults" is the advice you give to someone who has just started out, has no idea what they're doing, and is overwhelmed by having too many options. If you've only just started playing a new RPG with a combinatorial explosion of races and classes and stats and backgrounds and talents and bonuses and starter equipment, probably what you want is someone saying "OK, these are the 4 basic archetypes of play styles you might like, here's a good combination of race/class/stats/etc. for each". You can probably find out the exact mechanical details of what each thing does in the wiki, but this is useless to you until you understand the game better. If you're already good at thing you're advising on, you most likely already know some good defaults, because by definition "good defaults" are the stuff that works for most people, and most people are members of the set "most people"

"Deeper mechanics" is the advice you give to either someone who has graduated from "has no idea what they're doing" and wants to explore more options, or for whom the defaults for some reason or another don't work. If your writing advice is "you should write something every day", well, I'm sure that works for you and lots of people. But if someone replies "Well, writing every day is incredibly draining and frustrating for me and I'm afraid it's burning me out on the subject", you need an understanding that goes beyond what works for you. Is the answer "that will pass, power through" or "you should relax your schedule until you find something comfortable and then adjust upwards gradually" or "caffeine is your best friend"? I don't know.

One of the things that determines which advice someone might want is, how hard is to find each kind already? A video game with a decent wiki, as mentioned above, can probably explain all the fiddly details of the mechanics, so what you want is someone to give you a way to synthesise all that information into advice for practical goals.

If you're struggling with basic everyday tasks, the reason might be because everyone in your life assumed your already know the basics and never bothered to explain, but it might instead be that you do in fact know the basics and you can't do them and you want to know which basic housekeeping tasks are necessary so you don't die and which are so your house looks nicer so you can pick which one you will prioritise.