How To Vs. What To
When should you seek decision advice? One factor is decision size: the bigger the decision, the more effort you should devote, including effort to get advice. Oddly, on our biggest decisions, other people seem to go out of their way to offer us advice that we don’t want to hear or follow. We rarely seek out advice, and when we do it is usually on much smaller decisions.
For example, we like HowTo books, but not WhatTo books. How to manage your computer, not what machine to manage. How to please your partner, not what partner to please. How to fix your house, not where to live. How to drive fast, not what speed to drive. How to get promoted, not what job to work at. How to raise your kids, not how many kids to raise. And so on.
One reason we avoid getting advice is that it lowers our status relative to those who give advice. Of course this is also makes asking for advice a good way to flatter and supplicate. Not sure if this explains the puzzle though. But all this doesn’t seem to bode well for fielding decision markets on the biggest organizational decisions.
1) Future readers: It's worth remembering that http://lesswrong.com/lw/ia/... came before this post, and this post is in the context of it.
2) There *are* some "What To" books with billions of readers, and proponents. However they seem to be centralized into a few well-believed books, such as The Holy Bible, and The Qur'an. Perhaps there's something implicit in this 'What To' book idea that lends itself to old actionable statements being hard to rid one's self of.
3) Going further than Kenny Easwaran goes, I wonder if the possible feedback mechanisms possible in any particular media determine the status games involved in asking for/giving/receiving "what to" data. Books are intrinsically more difficult to give feedback on than blog posts, and both are more intrinsically difficult to give feedback on than some kinds of new media that is specifically dedicated to feedback.
Maybe you're right about advice books, but as someone else pointed out, these sorts of decisions tend to call for much more customized advice. I think people are much more likely to ask friends for advice on whether they should keep seeing someone they're going out with, than to ask friends for advice on where to go to dinner this evening.