I have an objection to the idea (or at least some versions of it) that isn’t covered in the post. I don’t think my objection applies to advice/counseling/that sort of thing, but certainly does to money:
The process of building my own safety net, in itself, made me a lot more effective than I would have been otherwise. I went through some really rough times in my early career, including sleeping on a park bench for a month and seriously contemplating suicide after several rejections for jobs I was highly qualified for. To fix my situation, I had to confront some hard truths about how the world works, and about the limits of my ability to plan the future accurately, that I am not sure I ever would have confronted otherwise. I wound up in such extreme circumstances because I made risky career bets on independent projects, assumed they would work out and that those successes would lead to other successes that would solve all the problems created by not having a paying job or meaningful savings for several months while I pursued an independent project, and failed to contingency plan for either a failure of the project or for the project’s success to not immediately land me a paying job consistent with the skillset it demonstrated. I also had a bad tendency to blame all my failures on difficult circumstances or other people instead of thinking hard about what I could have done differently.
I have relatives in their 60s who still seem to think a deus ex machina will swoop in and rescue them from imprudent decisions as long as that’s what feels “fair” in that situation. I had definitely absorbed some of that attitude until confronted with the harsh reality that there was no one to rescue me except myself, and that I could do so only by making decisions with a clear eye toward their practical consequences and not based on my feelings about how the world “should” work. So I worry that in being the deus ex machina, even for extremely high EV people, you would risk reducing their EV by depriving them of an important skill-building opportunity.
I have an objection to the idea (or at least some versions of it) that isn’t covered in the post. I don’t think my objection applies to advice/counseling/that sort of thing, but certainly does to money:
The process of building my own safety net, in itself, made me a lot more effective than I would have been otherwise. I went through some really rough times in my early career, including sleeping on a park bench for a month and seriously contemplating suicide after several rejections for jobs I was highly qualified for. To fix my situation, I had to confront some hard truths about how the world works, and about the limits of my ability to plan the future accurately, that I am not sure I ever would have confronted otherwise. I wound up in such extreme circumstances because I made risky career bets on independent projects, assumed they would work out and that those successes would lead to other successes that would solve all the problems created by not having a paying job or meaningful savings for several months while I pursued an independent project, and failed to contingency plan for either a failure of the project or for the project’s success to not immediately land me a paying job consistent with the skillset it demonstrated. I also had a bad tendency to blame all my failures on difficult circumstances or other people instead of thinking hard about what I could have done differently.
I have relatives in their 60s who still seem to think a deus ex machina will swoop in and rescue them from imprudent decisions as long as that’s what feels “fair” in that situation. I had definitely absorbed some of that attitude until confronted with the harsh reality that there was no one to rescue me except myself, and that I could do so only by making decisions with a clear eye toward their practical consequences and not based on my feelings about how the world “should” work. So I worry that in being the deus ex machina, even for extremely high EV people, you would risk reducing their EV by depriving them of an important skill-building opportunity.