Advice From Nowhere

Advice that you can't apply even if you tried. (Someone please think of a pithier name for this category of advice.)

• UnhelpfulAdvice?
• ImpossibleAdvice?
• UnfollowableAdvice?
• PointlessAdvice?
• ImpossibleAdvice?
• BloodyAnnoyingNonAdvice?

truly impossible or inevitable advice

• "Stop a quarter-turn before it breaks."
• "BeYourself"

  Praise Moses! You've just solved all my problems! To think, all this time, all I had to do was just be myself! See page for more.

• Work with what you've got.
• Can you make it work without changing the hardware or the software ?
• Expect the unexpected
• Consider the set of all sets that have never been considered. Hey! They're all gone!! Oh, well, never mind. -- Dr. David Batchelor
• Just use proper grammera and spelling the first time, and you won't need to go back and edit it.
• Don't die on me.
• Don't think about pink elephants.

advice that seems impossible or inevitable

• "Think ahead."

And, uh, how do I do that?

• "You shouldn't make value judgments."

Like that one?

• "How come there's never enough time to do it right, but always enough time to do it over?"

Because until we did it wrong, we didn't know how to do it right or whether it was worthwhile.

• "Trust the experts. They've been studying the problem for much longer than you have or ever will."

Which experts? For any question for which it's currently hard to find the right answer, there are experts who answer one way and experts who answer in a contrary way.

• "DontUseYourCommonSense."

But mom, it's all I've got! See page for more.

• Don't think about it. Just do it. (ShuHaRi)

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Discussion:

Things that don't work even if you tried? Well, if you did try, you might find that there is some value in each of these, although not perfect value, whatever that may be. Value for you, by the way.

"Thinking ahead" means using your imagination. Sometimes there's more historical fact hidden in there than you thought. I frequently fail to do this, and often realize how much would have been saved if I'd done it.

"You shouldn't make value judgments" ... on behalf of other people whose real values you have no way of guessing accurately. Unless you like making an ass of yourself. Maybe the advice is better worded "making value judgments on behalf of others is like mind reading, so expect similar results".

"Do it wrong versus do it over." Yes, sometimes the meanings of wrong and right don't mature until the end of the first try, but neither is this an absolute rule. Yesterday I rushed putting up house wrap because I thought I could finish in daylight, and I overlooked something important. I'm now at a net minus.

"Trust the experts." Whom to trust amounts to a value judgment. Experts frequently have more knowledge on the subject than non-experts, so it might be worth a listen at least. If you can discern facts from advice, you're set up to benefit from this arrangement.

Actually, the idea is not that these are bits of advice that don't work even if you try them, it's that you can't even try them if you try. I think usually this kind of advice is given ex post facto, when it's easy to see what would have been good to do. Maybe something like non-deterministic state machines. At the time, it was hard to see what would have been good to do, and there's no easy rule of thumb that could have helped you right then to see the good path that became so obvious later.

What I'm not getting is why you can't try them.

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See TitForTat

For more thoughts on thinking ahead, see FuturePerfectThinking

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Contributors: BenKovitz, WaldenMathews

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The title of this page reminds me of the wonderful title of a famous Arts & Crafts pamphlet by WilliamMorris 'News From Nowhere'. I always enjoyed the Garden City movement piece entitled 'Nothing Gained By Overcrowding' too! -- MartinNoutch