Yeah. That’s one of my major complaints about RSS; a lot of their advice is very good advice for a circumstance most people aren’t in, but they don’t seem to have any awareness at all that the experience is not representative, so they just present it as advice. But a lot of it, especially the stuff about power, is really only applicable if you’re in a pretty toxic environment, and even there it’s maybe not the best strategy.

And someone asked me once whether the people in those environments don’t also deserve advice, and well, of course they do. But the advice is dangerous enough to other people that it really ought to be qualified.

Analogy that wandered into my head recently: Imagine an advice blog about maintaining your health, written by someone who is diabetic and who has somehow ended up assuming everyone is. So it’s full of good advice like “make to take extra insulin if you expect to eat a lot of sweet foods and not get much exercise”. But it turns out that, for many people, “inject extra insulin into yourself” is not only unnecessary, but possibly fatal.

And it’s really good to learn survival strategies for bad environments, but it’s also important to recognize that those strategies are specific to such environments…