No doubt that sycophancy and the fear of expressing potentially friendship damaging truths allows negative patterns of behavior to continue unimpeded but I think you’ve missed the two most necessary factors in determining if advice—solicited or unsolicited—is a net benefit to the recipient:
1. you sufficiently understand and have the expertise to comment on their situation & 2. you can offer new understanding they aren’t already privy to.
Perhaps the situations where I envision advice is being given is different to yours?
The problem I notice with most unsolicited advice is it’s either something the recipient is already aware of (i.e. the classic sitcom example is someone touches a hot dish and after the fact is told “careful that pan is hot”—is it good advice? Well in the sense that it is truthful, maybe. But the burn already having happened, it is not longer useful.) This is why it annoys people, this is why it is taken as an insult to their intelligence.
A lot of people have already heard the generic or obvious advice and there may be many reasons why they aren’t following it,[1] and most of the time hearing this generic advice being repeated will not be of a benefit even if they have all the qualities you enumerate: that you’re willing to accept the cost of giving advice, that they are rational enough to not take offense, they are good at taking advice and criticism, and they value honest feedback even when they disagree.
Take this example exchange:
A: “Why are you using the grill to make melted cheese, we have a toaster oven.”
B: “the toaster is shorted out, it’s broken”
You must sufficiently understand the recipient’s situation if you are to have any hope of improving it. If you don’t know what they know about the toaster oven, then unsolicited advice can’t help.
Another major problem I’ve found with unsolicited advice is that it lacks fine grain execution detail. My least favourite advice as a freelancing creative is “you need to get your name out there”—where is there? On that big nebulous internet? How does that help me exactly? Unless I needed further reinforcement of the fact that what material I am putting online isn’t reaching my current interlocutor—but it doesn’t give me any clues how to go about remedying that.
Advice, for it to be useful needs more than just sympathy and care for the person’s well being—it needs understanding of the situation which is the cause of their behavior.
My personal metric for the “quality” of advice is how actionable it is. This means that it can’t be post-facto (like the sitcom hot pan), it needs to understand causes and context—such as why they aren’t using the toaster oven, and most importantly it needs to suggest explicit actions that can be taken in order to change the situation (and which cations the recipient can or can’t take can only be determined by properly understanding their situation and the causes of their behavior).
Caveat: I’m sure there’s a genre of fringe cases where repetition becomes “the medium is the message”—that is they do need to hear it again. But there’s a certain point where doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result is quite stark raving mad.
Perhaps a situation to avoid giving advice in is if you think your advice is likely to be genuinely worthless because you have no expertise, knowledge, or intelligence that is relevant to the matter and you don’t trust your own judgment at all. Otherwise if you respect the other person, you’d consider them able to judge the usefulness of your advice for themselves.
You can’t know for sure that they’ve heard some advice before. Also you are providing the information that the piece of advice occurred to you, which in and of itself is often interesting/useful. So if you’re giving someone advice they are likely to have heard before this means there is a small chance that’s wrong and it’s still useful, and a larger chance that it has value zero. So in expectation the value is still positive. If you don’t give the advice, you are prioritizing not looking stupid or not offending them, which are both selfish motives.
Related to (2) is that telling someone you disapprove or think less of them for something, i.e. criticizing without providing any advice at all, is also a good signal of respect, because you are providing them with possibly useful information at the risk of them liking you less or making you feel uncomfortable.
No doubt that sycophancy and the fear of expressing potentially friendship damaging truths allows negative patterns of behavior to continue unimpeded but I think you’ve missed the two most necessary factors in determining if advice—solicited or unsolicited—is a net benefit to the recipient:
1. you sufficiently understand and have the expertise to comment on their situation
&
2. you can offer new understanding they aren’t already privy to.
Perhaps the situations where I envision advice is being given is different to yours?
The problem I notice with most unsolicited advice is it’s either something the recipient is already aware of (i.e. the classic sitcom example is someone touches a hot dish and after the fact is told “careful that pan is hot”—is it good advice? Well in the sense that it is truthful, maybe. But the burn already having happened, it is not longer useful.) This is why it annoys people, this is why it is taken as an insult to their intelligence.
A lot of people have already heard the generic or obvious advice and there may be many reasons why they aren’t following it,[1] and most of the time hearing this generic advice being repeated will not be of a benefit even if they have all the qualities you enumerate: that you’re willing to accept the cost of giving advice, that they are rational enough to not take offense, they are good at taking advice and criticism, and they value honest feedback even when they disagree.
Take this example exchange:
A: “Why are you using the grill to make melted cheese, we have a toaster oven.”
B: “the toaster is shorted out, it’s broken”
You must sufficiently understand the recipient’s situation if you are to have any hope of improving it. If you don’t know what they know about the toaster oven, then unsolicited advice can’t help.
Another major problem I’ve found with unsolicited advice is that it lacks fine grain execution detail. My least favourite advice as a freelancing creative is “you need to get your name out there”—where is there? On that big nebulous internet? How does that help me exactly? Unless I needed further reinforcement of the fact that what material I am putting online isn’t reaching my current interlocutor—but it doesn’t give me any clues how to go about remedying that.
Advice, for it to be useful needs more than just sympathy and care for the person’s well being—it needs understanding of the situation which is the cause of their behavior.
My personal metric for the “quality” of advice is how actionable it is. This means that it can’t be post-facto (like the sitcom hot pan), it needs to understand causes and context—such as why they aren’t using the toaster oven, and most importantly it needs to suggest explicit actions that can be taken in order to change the situation (and which cations the recipient can or can’t take can only be determined by properly understanding their situation and the causes of their behavior).
Caveat: I’m sure there’s a genre of fringe cases where repetition becomes “the medium is the message”—that is they do need to hear it again. But there’s a certain point where doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result is quite stark raving mad.
Perhaps a situation to avoid giving advice in is if you think your advice is likely to be genuinely worthless because you have no expertise, knowledge, or intelligence that is relevant to the matter and you don’t trust your own judgment at all. Otherwise if you respect the other person, you’d consider them able to judge the usefulness of your advice for themselves.
You can’t know for sure that they’ve heard some advice before. Also you are providing the information that the piece of advice occurred to you, which in and of itself is often interesting/useful. So if you’re giving someone advice they are likely to have heard before this means there is a small chance that’s wrong and it’s still useful, and a larger chance that it has value zero. So in expectation the value is still positive. If you don’t give the advice, you are prioritizing not looking stupid or not offending them, which are both selfish motives.
Related to (2) is that telling someone you disapprove or think less of them for something, i.e. criticizing without providing any advice at all, is also a good signal of respect, because you are providing them with possibly useful information at the risk of them liking you less or making you feel uncomfortable.