Yeah, I feel like this should just be screened off by whether it is indeed good or bad career advice.
Like, if something is good career advice, I think we should tell people even if they don’t like hearing it, and if something is bad career advice, we should tell people that even if they really want it to be true. But that’s a general stance I seem to disagree with lots of EAs on, but at least for me, it isn’t very cruxy whether anyone didn’t like what that advice sounded like.
I don’t disagree with elements of this stance—this kind of career advice is probably strongly positive-EV to share in some form with the average medical student.
But I think there’s a strong argument for at least trying to frame advice carefully if you have a good idea of how someone will react to different frames. And messages like “tell people X even if they don’t like hearing it” can obscure the importance of framing. I think that what advice sounds like to people can often be decisive in how they react, even if the most important thing is actually giving the good advice.
Marginal effort on making the information present better is totally valuable, and there is of course some level of bad presentation where it should be higher priority to improve your presentation than your accuracy, but my guess is in this case we are far from the relevant thresholds, and generally would want us to value marginal accuracy as quite a bit higher than marginal palatableness.
Yeah, I feel like this should just be screened off by whether it is indeed good or bad career advice.
Like, if something is good career advice, I think we should tell people even if they don’t like hearing it, and if something is bad career advice, we should tell people that even if they really want it to be true. But that’s a general stance I seem to disagree with lots of EAs on, but at least for me, it isn’t very cruxy whether anyone didn’t like what that advice sounded like.
I don’t disagree with elements of this stance—this kind of career advice is probably strongly positive-EV to share in some form with the average medical student.
But I think there’s a strong argument for at least trying to frame advice carefully if you have a good idea of how someone will react to different frames. And messages like “tell people X even if they don’t like hearing it” can obscure the importance of framing. I think that what advice sounds like to people can often be decisive in how they react, even if the most important thing is actually giving the good advice.
Yep, I totally agree.
Marginal effort on making the information present better is totally valuable, and there is of course some level of bad presentation where it should be higher priority to improve your presentation than your accuracy, but my guess is in this case we are far from the relevant thresholds, and generally would want us to value marginal accuracy as quite a bit higher than marginal palatableness.
Strongly endorsed.