general rules

Rules that work in many situations are valuable. If you can cook a burger, you're a McDonald's employee. If you can specify the rules for cooking a burger, you're a McDonald's executive.

Thinking in abstractions and general rules gives you enormous power to generalize to new situations. It helps make you capable and confident. Of course, thinking generally has costs in correctness: growing up means becoming wrong.

I want to focus on a different cost though: the larger the number of logical steps from your rule to the action you actually take, the less naturally and automatically you will act. It will take longer to make those steps, so you will react slower. You may not realize what you want to say until after the time has passed to say it. You will find yourself dominated by system 2 and might be paralyzed in analysis.

This means that it's not enough to simply articulate general rules and values. You need to train a concrete policy that's consistent with those values, to react quickly in cases where it can be confident. But that takes time and work: advice is hard to take, and being yourself takes practice.