Yet another reason I don’t give much generic advice

So I have an FAQ now for contest-studying advice, but there’s a “frequently used answer” that I want to document now that doesn’t fit in the FAQ format because the question looks different to everyone that asks it.

The questions generally have the same shape: “would it be better to do X or Y when studying?”. Like:

• Is it better to use GeoGebra when practicing geometry?
• Should I work on some new OTIS units or go back through some old ones that I didn’t finish?
• Should I work on hard problems in my strongest subject or medium problems in my weaker subjects?
• Would it be better if I learned this or that first?

and things like this.

And the answer is, for a lot of pairs (X,Y), if you’re so unsure that you’re asking me about it, then you should just do whatever you feel like. And there are three big reasons why.

1. I probably don’t know the answer in general. If you wanted to know the answer to any of these questions with any reasonable confidence, you’d like to do something resembling a controlled study, where you randomly group a bunch of students into two categories and look for a statistically significant effect. Suffice to say, that hasn’t happened.
2. I probably don’t know the answer for you, even if I did know the answer in general. You need to realize that you are the world expert in you.It reminded me of this really cringey question that some parent asked once: “I read this study that girls learn on a different curve, and they need to learn the same amount of material before so-and-so, therefore to succeed they need to build a foundation two years ahead of boys…”. To which I wanted to reply¹, “statistics don’t matter for N = 1”. Unless you happen to have, say, 10000 children and don’t have the time to get to know them all individually, then even correct information about statistically significant effects can still be totally useless.
3. Most importantly: energy management dominates everything else. This is the big one.There’s a common failure mode where if I say “X is maybe better than Y”, then people feel like they have to do X rather than Y, even though they’d rather do Y in a vacuum. And then they end up doing a small amount of X rather than a large amount of Y, leading to a net loss.

   That’s why unless I feel Y is truly much worse than X, I usually prefer to remain neutral.