Sept. 26, 2026
I often hear people say things like, “That was great advice,” or “That was a terrible suggestion.”
Whether the advice is judged to be right or wrong is usually based on one of two factors:
- Whether it sounds intuitively plausible in the moment
- Whether it later produces a desirable outcome
The second approach may appear sensible, but it turns out that both reasoning approaches are irrational.
(For example, even if you happen to win the lottery, that positive outcome doesn’t mean the original decision was rational. Almost literally everyone who plays the lottery loses, either completely or on average.)
Relatedly, I often hear employees characterize feedback they’ve received as accurate or inaccurate.
The other day, I heard someone say, “I think his feedback was 80% right but 20% wrong.”
But things like advice and feedback are (usually) not the kinds of things that can be right or wrong.
Both are types of guidance regarding what actions one should take under uncertain conditions. As such, their success rates are inescapably probabilistic.
- It may be situational: some guidance applies well under certain conditions and poorly under others.
- It may depend on the person: perhaps what works for you doesn’t work as well for someone else.
- It may be generally unpredictable: sometimes an action is effective in one instance but ineffective in another, for reasons we don’t understand.
Consequently, the key to effectively applying advice and feedback is to treat them only as descriptions of how things may work, at least in certain situations.
They’re just more tools in your toolkit, examples of particular options among many others.
You don’t need to verify if a particular piece of advice is “true” or “right.” Even if you do, you’ll inevitably run into situations that contradict your conclusion, sending you back to the drawing board.
Instead, you simply need to discover the situations in which a piece of advice does or does not apply (for you). This can be done through critical thinking, reflecting on your own experiences, and of course experimentation.
Caveat: The only exception is when there is no actual uncertainty. When a piece of guidance overwhelmingly leads to positive or negative results, across all people and situations, then it can reasonably be described as right or wrong.
Of course, in those cases everyone tends to agree, so we rarely think of such guidance as “advice” anyway.
