4/23/2023 0 Comments How should you take advice online?It's impractically hard to be great at anything without being able to learn from others. Learning from people you meet in person can be great, but it's not a viable option for everyone and can still be very limited if you aren't born in the right place to meet the right people. The best living people to learn from are few and far between; without a lot of luck, they won’t normally be a part of your personal life.
One of the great things about the internet is being able to communicate with anyone in the world. Anyone who has access to very cheap and accessible technology (at least in the context of the last few decades) can do this. Even someone who is earning very little can achieve this and use it to improve their knowledge and start becoming much more successful. It's a great shame that many low-income people don't appreciate this, which is part of why they stay low-income. (Knowing English is a massive boon in this regard, but for people who start with other languages it's not very difficult to find places to start learning English online.) The difficulty comes in knowing who to talk to and how. The advice, suggestions, claims, explanations, and criticism of people who only know you through text on a screen require skill to manage productively. There are a few big questions that you need to ask when asking for advice online. Suppose hypothetically you have a problem you want to solve, a goal you want to achieve, or a skill you want to learn (I will broadly refer to this as "the problem"). You should then ask:
Who should I ask? Asking just anyone about the problem is going to cause problems. Lots of people won’t know anything about it but might think they do. In an arbitrary open discussion, you have a reasonable high chance of dealing with trolls, mean people, ignorant people, and dishonest people. It's worth asking yourself what kind of people you want to talk to about the problem. There are countless forums, mailing lists, and discussion groups out there that you could theoretically ask for advice from. It's important to be wary of bias when deciding where to discuss the problem. It's important to focus your query to people who might have relevant knowledge but if the people you ask live in an echo chamber, they might have big blind spots in their knowledge and could lead you to make the same mistakes. It's hard to detect this in the people that are discussing; the place to look for this problem is in the moderation policies of the group you choose to discuss in. If the group suppresses honest dissent or unpopular ideas, they are indicating that they operate as an echo chamber. Look out for moderators that arbitrarily ban or suspend people because of downvotes, dislikes, or other metrics of negative judgement that contain no explanation of what is wrong. Places like this should be treated with caution. It may be impossible to find a place to discuss the problem that is both open and honest, and also contains the critical knowledge that you are seeking. In this situation you might want to choose two (or maybe even more) places to discuss the problem. E.g. you could have one place that includes people with the knowledge you are pursuing (a specialist forum like a place with lots of skilled programmers), and another place that contains people willing to discuss openly and not suppress dissent (a more open and general discussion group) so you can check ideas across groups and look for blind spots and echo chamber indicators. There are also lots of potential cultural differences when you talk to people online. Even people who know English like me might be using a different dialect of English to you (for a common example I use British English rather than American English), or just not use clear grammar. There are cultural differences and expectations which might be different with people you meet online, such as what someone considers "polite". People you talk to might have particular social, political, or philosophical agendas which change how they interpret the problem and how they interpret your explanations. These don't necessarily make a discussion website a bad choice, but it's important to be aware of these possible problems. One general recommendation I have for serious discussion of any moral subject, and especially for anything related to epistemology, is the Critical Fallibilism forum run by the great philosopher Elliot Temple. https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/ What context is relevant? When you've decided which people to talk to, it's important to think about context. There are lots of things that you might be used to people you know in person being able to work out from inexplicit sources, so you might not automatically think to mention things like appearance, health, age, body language, historical behaviour, and other cues. For a simple practical example, consider shoes. When you buy shoes there are tons of parameters which you consider but might not think about consciously, like job/activity/foot size/sex/fashion preference/foot health/budget. It's important when discussing with people who don't know you personally that you identify these parameters so you can give the relevant context. Even people who know you personally (as in face to face) can easily overlook important parameters, so people who don't have that information can make much bigger false assumptions. If you're not sure what context is important, then explaining what the goal behind solving your problem might help people guess at relevant context to the problem. What do I do if I disagree? If you get advice from someone (whether online or not) that you disagree with: Don't do it! It's worth discussing the subject with them if you can. If they choose to stop talking about it (this happens a lot in online discussions) you might end up with a lot of questions and gaps in their explanations which you don't understand. You can progress on this by looking into those gaps more and trying to understand for yourself what they were saying, and perhaps by starting more discussions to fill in those gaps in your understanding if you can't work it out yourself. If you have a "feeling" of disagreement, like "something isn't right" or "I don't buy it", that's a hint that some unstated premise of yours is disagreeing with the advice. It may be worth thinking more about the context, as the advice may suggest something that doesn't make sense in your context but the person giving the advice doesn't know about that bit of context. There may be some sort of underlying moral conflict; maybe the person giving advice thinks that it's okay to pressure others to comply (a very common problem) and you don't, but it's an insidious kind of pressure (like gaslighting or other manipulations) and you haven't worked out the words to express it yet. Even if you don't know the words to explain it yet; it's worth working out why you disagree so you can put it into words. Following some advice before you've worked this out means that you're doing something that you disagree with. You can tell this person that you disagree but don't know how to put it into words. If they're a decent person they'll respect that and if they're generous they may even help you try to work out what the disagreement is. These some really good articles about working out your intuitions, how to understand them and put them into words, and why they're important. These can help you work out for yourself why you have an intuition that something is wrong. I use them myself. Categories:
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