You know, like “always split on 18,” or “having kids is the most rewarding thing you can do in life.”
What’s that one bit of advice you got from a trusted friend that you know deep, deep down would just ruin your thing?
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“All kids think they are smarter than their parents.” - my father, constantly growing up
What I learned: Never tell anyone else how to think or feel about anything. Anyone that tries to shape your thinking directly is a fool.
Intelligence is like beauty, we don’t have a very good frame of reference to perceive ourselves. Physical beauty is largely measured by the reactions of others. Like beauty, intelligence has many facets. However my favorite measuring stick is curiosity. This is how I overcame my father’s admonition; while curiosity does not guarantee intelligence, an intelligent person is always curious.
Nah… if someone keeps trying to stick a fork in the light soxket or tries to hurt other people, I think its pretty justified to try to change the thinking that leads to that behavior.
Being curious doesn’t some how prevent you from having common sense
The fact that you dont seem to understand why trying to stop someone from “sticking a fork in a light socket” might be a good idea is concerning.
The concerning part is your idiotic assertions
The response is a purposeful obtuse way to make a binary snide comment. These one comment judgments are tired and just not a good way to grade much. Be more creative at least.
If someone doesn’t know what a fork and a light socket are and can’t otherwise deduce what they are based on context, maybe it makes sense to stick a fork in a light socket.
Once.
Most chess advice. It teaches you to think in simple terms without actually thinking about a position. It’s good if you want to get passably good, but it’s a handicap once you improve.
That applies to most fields, doesn’t it? Any heuristic will be a simplification and becoming an expert in any domain involves knowing when you can apply a heuristic or approximation or model and when you cannot.
Just be yourself.
There is a reason people hide who they really are until you get to know them.
Just be yourself! Eww, not like that!
“always split on 18”? What is that supposed to mean?
Also please delete the second one, we need to trick people into having kids to keep the line going up.
Thanks for asking about split on 18! I assumed it was about not trying to marry your highschool sweetheart or something!
Split is a move in blackjack. It’s not just hit and stay.
You turn your 9-9 into two separate hands starting with 9s. The most likely card in blackjack is a ten cuz of all the face cards, so the idea is you get 19s instead of 18s
However according to blackjack cheat sheets you should not do this if the dealer is showing 7 10 or A.
I have kids and definitely like them most of them time.
Well kid #2 is an asshole but he’s the smart one so I’ll be nice in the event he becomes a doctor.
Sit on 18(or 17+).
The saying is actually “always split eights”
2 eights are 16, splitting increases your chance of getting above 16 on at least one hand.
Playing blackjack, when you have a pair and split. You don’t actually often split on a pair of 9s.
So it’s kinda like “quit while you’re still ahead” type of deal? I don’t think any type of gambling parabolas can be good advice considering, well, the nature of gambling.
No, it’s not something that is meant to be broader advice or a metaphor for something else, it’s literally advice for playing blackjack. What they’re saying is that it isn’t actually a good idea to split on an 18 when playing.
I had a buddy who was a blackjack dealer. He explained it to newb players like this: “dude, you can do that, but if you had an 18” dick, would you cut it in half?"
Now, knowing /badwomensanatomy, that’s passe’, but it stuck with a younger me.
I’d say most of single-sentence advice falls under “dubious” advice, as it really lacks any kind of nuance. It can be a guideline and perhaps words to live by, but it will rarely help in concrete situations where more specific context should be considered.
My mum always used to say “Everything works out in the end” or something else equally trite until the day I snapped “Yeah thats why theres a suicide help line, because everything always works out in the end for everybody.”
They are supposed to be single sentence reminders of complex and nuanced advice, but along the way people forget to pass along the nuance.
“Bring your authentic self to work”
Was pretty prevalent in tech for a while. Fuck no I’m not doing that.
“A George divided against itself cannot stand”
I have worked in the same office for 22 years, no one knows my birthday, what my hobbies are or where I live other than “downtown”. There is work me and then the real me and never the twain shall meet.
Rosa from Brooklyn 99?
Ha! I love it!
You sound like me. Do you want to not hang out sometime?
Absolutely! ☺
Sign me up for the not hanging out club!
I won’t hang out either.
You guys mind if I don’t tag along?
Can I join too?
I will say I’ll be there, but I’m also going to cancel.
Fair. I do that with most coworkers. I have one maybe two I consider friends and we do stuff outside if work. Those are the people that know me. Everyone else knows the work version of me.
This is sadly very true. Keep most of your coworkers, especially bosses, on a low information diet. It’s like dealing with the police. Some of them will try to use anything you say against you in the court of HR.
This is not to say you can’t make any friends at work. Just be very careful in who you pick. Make sure the person is trustworthy (and you know as much about them as they know about you).
Hell yeah. I only told my boss about my adhd diagnosis in case I need to use that as leverage some day. Otherwise I’m basically a mystery.
“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
No it doesn’t. In most cases, you’re now weaker.
What doesn’t kill you mutates and tries again.
Right?! What doesn’t kill you may almost kill you.
Yeah, that saying is so dumb. Like people never heard about polio or these days long COVID.
It does make you wiser. You may learn how to better deal with your emotions or feelings. Or how to avoid the situation in the future.
Nah, usually just more trauma after a certain point, if its anywhere near even the hyperbolic description of “Kill.”
I’ve been through enough. A mild to moderate amount of life challenges will be plenty going forward.
Yeah, it’s really best to learn by observation than direct pain lol, but some of us are too stubborn for that.
What doesnt kill you now may still be a contributing factor later down the road.
Yeah, people forget that it’s a very specific type of experience for a specific type of person where this saying actually works. Like overcoming a fear by facing it head-on is great for some people and a source of further trauma for others.
There’s a lot of people I n here who read things way to literal just so they can make a point
Agreed. All this stuff is highly context dependent or at least technically true but not wholly true
“Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life.”
or
“Do what you’re passionate about.”
Just no. Most things I like don’t pay well and I started to resent the others while doing them professionally. Turning your hobby into your job is like setting your favorite song as your alarm. That’s my experience at least.
Turning your hobby into your job is like setting your favorite song as your alarm.
That’s an excellent analogy, I’m going to steal it
I used to love computers and technology. Now I get an idea about something I want to do, regurgitate a bit, shudder, and quickly throw that idea on the shelf.
I can’t even stand looking at the inside of a computer these days. It was 3/4 of my personality when I was younger.
That analogy is perfect.
Yep.
Doing the thing you love, as your work, is a surefire way to hate the thing you once loved.
cause a lot of that love was born from the freedom to engage with it, and the escapism that it gave you.
Both of which completely disappear if you have to do it 9-5 or starve.
But like everything, theres always the exception. There are people out there, 9-5ing every day for 30 years the thing they love with no burnout… and they are usually the ones held up as examples, not the 100,000 other people who tried it, burnt out, and hated everything.
I’m doing what I love as my career, but it was a hard road to get here. I started off out of high school as a professional photographer, never charged enough, didn’t know how to run a business, got burnt out, didn’t touch a camera for a few years, then after some desk jobs, realized photography was the only career for me. I decided to do it right this time, took business courses and prayed I didn’t end up hating it again. It’s worked out for me so far.
Couldn’t agree more. I decided to become a chef as my career of choice after school, cause I liked cooking. Can’t remember me cooking at home once in the three years of my training and the year I worked the job afterwards. Now I love it again and cook (almost) exclusively for my wife and me.
Liking your job is cool but making your hobby your job and still keeping it as a hobby works out for a very small minority of people. For most it either destroys your hobby or you start resenting yout job.
“Do what you are passionate about”/" Choose a job that you love …" and
“Turning a hobby into a job”
is two different things for me.
For me anyone should try to find a job they are passionate about if it’s a possibility.
I love Space, when I started my engineering degree I did everything I could to orient my career toward aerospace and I loved it. I worked as an aerospace manufacturing engineer and I was good at it because I loved that.
I also love cooking but clearly I’m glad I did not tried to become a chef, I’m very happy that it stayed a hobby.
I don’t disagree necessarily, those are two different things in theory. However, my hobbies more or less cover everything I’m passionate about. At least the things I know I’m passionate about. Since most high paying jobs require certain degrees or years of training, and I’m also passionate about not starving, I could not actually try a lot of professions and therefore choosing something I liked recreationally was kinda implied, I thought.
I love my job, I really do, but I wouldn’t do it as a hobby. I don’t think it’s so much advice about making your hobbies a career, as it is about finding work you enjoy.
Video games, skateboarding, riding a motorcycle, all things I love, but no way I’d try to make a living at any of them.
Same. I used to do something similar to my job as a hobby but now I just don’t get on my actual computer outside of work unless I’m playing a game.
I tried building guitars for others but found that I don’t like doing things to other people’s specs. So I still build for myself. Plus video games, motorcycles, playing guitar, tabletop games, and one rotating flavor of the month hobby.
I think you and I would be friends.
Yeah, I think that a lot of people misinterpret this since “turn hobby into job” seems to be the only way people think about it.
I like cars and work in the automotive industry, and very much enjoy what I do. I also enjoy working on cars and other mechanical things as hobbies, but would absolutely loathe being a professional mechanic or technician. There’s enough separation between what I do for fun and what I do for work that it won’t sour my hobbies, but also enough overlap that my passion for my hobbies makes work far more enjoyable.
It depends, really. I turned my hobby into a profession and I am mostly happy. I lost a hobby, absolutely. I don’t practice my craft much anymore outside of work, but I do have a job I really like. And I found new hobbies over the years. But yes, I did loose a hobby.
Work smart, Not hard.
Whilst on the face of it, this is sensible message in a specific context, the way it is interpreted these days is so frustrating. Get so many people using this to avoid hard work.
You achieve nothing in life without hard work.
That is not quite the quote, and its meaning changes significantly.
“Worker smarter, not harder”. Means that when a challenge increases or you are wanting to do better/faster/more to step back and think about your methods instead of just brute forcing the problem.
No one that says should mean “do not work hard”. That is the complete wrong meaning to take from this statement.
Yeah, when I worked in factories, I wanted to do better, just increase my numbers because I like improving. I looked up to the people who would be casually doing their job while doing way more output than I could and from that I could easily tell that there were better ways than what I was doing.
I got the best results from things like optimizing my foot positions to reduce steps, thinking about how objects needed to be oriented before I picked them up, finding areas where things could be parallelized (like only pack a part while the machine is building the next one), reducing context switches (like if there’s 5 stages, do a bunch in stage 1 before moving on to stage 2 so you spend less time picking up and putting down tools).
Once you’ve optimized the way you’re doing the work (work smarter), then you can add speed to it if you want it even faster (work harder). If you skip that first step, you can end up working your ass off only to still be embarrassed by the guy that looks like he’s half asleep.
Perfect example. Thank you!
This. I used to do assembly, the reason I was great at it wasn’t that I pushed myself to the limit to make each thing as fast as possible, it’s that I built everything in batches so I didn’t have to transition between steps on each individual part. If something slowed me down, I’d make a tool specifically for that tedious task. Don’t waste energy trying to make a bad system work.
Anything about god taking you to and through things, or prayer. How’s that working for Ukraine or Gaza or a ton of other places with war, famine, violence, trafficking, etc.? Also, anything that refers to “fighting” cancer or other diseases - too bad your person is gone because they didn’t fight harder.
This reminds me of this story about the concentration camps. “If there is a god they will have to beg for our forgiveness”
They did.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zrFI2gJSuwA&pp=ygUGYmVnZ2lu
Divinity works in mysterious ways…
Most one sentance advice is just a deepity
Generally, a deepity has (at least) two meanings: one that is true but trivial, and another that sounds profound, but is essentially false or meaningless and would be “earth-shattering” if true. To the extent that it’s true, it doesn’t have to matter. To the extent that it has to matter, it isn’t true (if it actually means anything). This second meaning has also been called “pseudo-profound bullshit”.
The Venn diagram for “advice” and “bad advice” is almost a perfect circle. In general, advice is only good if three conditions are met:
- it was requested or at least clearly implied to be welcome.
- it’s given under a solid grasp of the situation, or after some serious thought.
- it’s not assumptive in nature. And, if generalising, it takes into account that generalisations fail.
Those sayings - like in the OP - almost always violate #2 and #3. And usually #1, as it’s that sort of thing that people vomit on your face when they’re really, really eager to treat you like cattle to be herded.
Okay… example. Right. Acquaintance of mine saying that I should work with computers - because I use Linux, because I can recover a password, because I can spend ten minutes (I’m not exaggerating) trying to parse what he’s asking help with. Under that “if u like it than make it you’re job! lol” approach.
Yeah… nah.
But trust me on the sunscreen.
“Treat others the way you want to be treated”.
Why’s that bad advice?
Spank me harder, Daddy!
You should treat people as they want to be treated.
Right, by listening to your desires and only hitting with consent.
Disagree only in that people are idiots and using work as an example someone would happily hit themselves in the face with a hammer because “this is how we do things”. I’m not going to hit you in the face with a hammer because you’re a moron and don’t know better.
“Der klügere gibt nach” which directly translates to “the wiser one gives in” or more or less matches the idiom “it’s better to bend than to break”.
Growing up I heard this a lot and it’s mostly use to silence those who have (well-founded) objections. Took me a while to realize that this leads to us following the stupid because they don’t give in which subsequently makes the wise one the stupid one.
Though the grass may kneel before the slightest breeze, the mighty oak does not bow even to the strongest gale.
The Idiom is regularly abused and misunderstood. Its about being smart what fights are worth fighting. Often heard by kids from their Patents when they fight over “nothing”
It’s basically “choose your battles.” Some battles can be won, but only for minimal gain and a lot of effort. So is it really worth fighting, or do you simply concede the loss so you can better spend your limited time and effort elsewhere?
Similarly, if you have kids, being completely authoritarian is a losing strategy.
Yeah, having kids made me realize how important it is to choose my battle.
I prefer being strict on a limited set of important rules and more lenient on the rest rather than trying to do too much and just giving up on everything when i’m exhausted.
Like it’s fine if my two years old is a bit messy on the table and does not finish his plate as long as he’s trying the food and let us have our dinner too in a relative peace.
