You’re lifting a weight. The personal trainer eyeing you up as a potential client stops you midlift: “your form is awful”, “supplement creatine for loading benefits and quick muscle gains”, “do this complicated exercise with complicated machinery”.

A skin influencer on your feed: take retinol for anti-aging results.

You’re browsing Reddit r/programming: use X programming language, oh and always write tests!

There is no compelling evidence this kind of advice won’t harm you in the long term. Creatine might be “heavily researched”, but there are no long term studies looking at biological variables deterimental to health. Perhaps the study measures lifted weight, but not variables like blood pressure, which shoots up when you take it, leading to long-term health impacts. You are taking invisible, silent risks, and for small gains (looking slightly bigger for your upcoming trip to Constantinople).

This kind of advice does not meet the “would this make sense for the rest of my life?” test.

If a future event is going to kill you, do everything you can to prevent it from happening. But if you’re just trying to fill up the arm sleeves (commendable aesthetic goal), creatine probably isn’t worth the risks.

Use X programming language? Write tests? This stuff is not important in many situations. Unfortunately, many (all?) cultures penalize participants for not slavishly following convention/status markers (say “phenomenological” and not simply “pattern” in research communities). Your customers don’t care if your code is “bad.” The Monty Python cast has a nice anecdote here: basically, John Cleese asked the video editor why he cut the funniest clip out. The editor said it was because someone left an object in the scene that shouldn’t have been there. The editor was trying to impress other film editors, not make a funny movie, which is the actual goal.

Framing advice as “do X for the rest of your life” helps you determine whether doing X really makes sense at all. Is the knowledge robust to change, or are these people changing what they do every month? If you integrate a habit that is not time-tested or robust to change, you may very well end up being the sucker filling the bank accounts of charlatan influencers while whatever they sold you kills you.

Most advice sucks.

Further Reading

Reddit user reports Creatine increases Systolic Blood Pressure