The main thing people fail to consider when giving advice is that advice isn’t what’s wanted.
I fully agree, this post was trying to get at what happens when people do want advice and thus may take bad advice.
Advice comes with no warranty. If some twit injures themselves doing what I told them to (wrongly) then that’s 100% on them.
I think in some cases this is generally a fair stance (though I think I would still like to prevent people from misapplying my advice if possible), but if you are in a position of power or influence over someone I’m not sure it applies (e.g. sports coaches telling all their players to work harder and not taking the time to make sure that some of them aren’t being pushed to overtraining by this advice).
Failing all of that, say “What choice would you make if I wasn’t here?” and then barring them saying something outlandish you just say “Then do that”. One way or another they’ll get better at thinking for themselves.
That sounds like a very reasonable approach.
Agree, I think the problem definitely gets amplified by power or status differentials.
I do think that people often forget to think critically about all kinds of things because their brain just decides to accept it on the 5 second level and doesn’t promote the issue as needing thorough consideration. I find all kinds of poorly justified “facts”/advice in my mind because of something I read or someone said that I failed to properly consider.
Even when someone does take the time to think about advice though I think it’s easy for things to go wrong. The reason someone is asking for advice may be that they simply do not have the expertise to evaluate claims about challenge X on their own merits. Another possibility is that someone can realize the advice is good for them but overcorrect, essentially trading one problem for another.