Have I talked about this recently?
It feels like there's two sorts of advice. Or maybe a spectrum of advice with an axis which I have particularly noticed.
Some advice is implicitly obvious once it's pointed out. If you say "turn capslock off" when someone can't see why their password doesn't work, it's hard to reject if you know what capslock does at all. Sometimes it's obvious once you try it, like "try pressing capslock" when you don't know what it capslock does.
Other advice is implicitly "you won't be able to tell whether it's working or not, just trust me and keep doing it". Anything fairly long term, any "do this every day and you'll be more organised/fitter/healthier/have less chance of X".
And some advice is somewhere between.
I realised aphorisms are generally the _first_ sort of advice. Sometimes "the early bird catches the worm". Sometimes "measure twice, cut once". But when you *think* "are there obvious risks to delaying? are there obvious risks to moving too quickly?" it often obvious which is more risky, and you know to avoid that. (And in a minority of cases it's not clear and its more of a judgement call.)
But I think those aphorisms are still useful, not because they're ALWAYS true, but because they're a useful reminder to consider them when you might otherwise have forgotten to.
But I think we usually need to treat advice like this. Like, it should usually be obvious WHY it's better. Otherwise, it might be worth bearing in mind as something that *might* be useful, but not be treated as absolute.
There are times when it's useful to adopt something without understanding. If you can't see any clear pros and cons, doing it the way a more experienced person does is OFTEN good, because they probably wouldn't do that if there were obvious problems, and there may be non-obvious benefits which they can't immediately explain.
But I think, when someone gives advice, it's worth considering, "does this make sense to me"? And if not, "is it likely to be safer than what I was doing anyway".