Against premature help spaghetti

October 18, 2026

I really enjoy helping people when they have problems. However, prematurely jumping into helping people can result in the counterparty feeling like you haven't really understood them and don't care about understanding them. Maybe the counterparty would've really liked to explain to you how they feel about the problem.

Prematurely jumping into solving the problem can feel like the other person is minimizing the problem or criticizing you: "why haven't you taken basic step X to solve your problem? that's pretty lame!". Minimizing someones' problem is embarrassing for them if the problem is indeed quite simple, and annoying if it's not simple and you just haven't understood why the problem is hard.

Perhaps a good algorithm here is:

1. "Hey! That sounds really rough. Tell me more about that."
2. Paraphrase what you heard.
3. "Do you feel like I've heard you?"
   1. If no try harder.
4. I have some ideas for things that might help with your problem, although I'm not sure they'll help b/c I lack context and maybe you've already tried them. Are you interested in me trying to problem solve tgt with you?