I can never resist those columns in newspapers and magazines that pretend to offer expert advice on everyday problems – they are so entertaining. Many of them are about what to wear on particular occasions, although here on Long Island there is no sign that this kind of advice is ever followed. In a recent advice column a woman who planned to wear an off-the-shoulder dress to an outdoor event asked how to avoid being cold. The columnist advised her to put on a shawl or a coat. I could have told her that, and I’m no expert in ladies' fashions.
We are plagued by people giving advice on any and every little problem. The internet has made it a thousand times worse. Anyone, with or without qualifications but with a video camera, can post their own instructional video on anything from extreme tai chi to building a bomb. There may be as many as a million of these sites, nobody knows. The bar of expertise is set so low that I’ve been tempted to launch my own advice column, or even a video, offering advice that I know for certain to be reliable. For example: how not to get wet when it rains; how to change your typewriter ribbon; how to talk to your friends without using the internet. We’re all experts now. My guess is as good as yours.
Much of this information is self-cancelling and therefore harmless, because every piece of advice generates an equal and opposite piece of advice, and usually they’re both wrong. This is particularly clear when it comes to advice about health: eggs are good, eggs are bad, sunshine is good, sunshine is bad, and so on. Experts disagree as much in medicine, where supposedly they have some hard facts, as in politics or religion, where facts are nonexistent. Expertise has become a matter of faith rather than facts.
Most of us will choose the truth we like best. This is exactly my own philosophy, and I suspect that of everyone else on the planet shares it. If I’m told that spinach is good for me I dismiss the advice on the grounds that the research is inadequate, and probably funded by the Spinach Growers’ Council. If I hear that red wine is good for me, I assume, without further investigation, that the research is 100% reliable.
In the advice-giving business there are amateurs and professionals. The amateurs, usually members of your family or anonymous instructors on YouTube, can safely be ignored. But it was certified, highly qualified professionals who brought us the Boeing 737 Max disaster and the opioid catastrophe, to say nothing of the Titanic and the smartphone.
We’ve all sat passively listening to doctors, car mechanics, lawyers or politicians spouting palpable nonsense. Even when we know better we hesitate to contradict them, because perhaps “they” have arcane sources of knowledge hidden from us. Nine times out of ten, they don’t.
Oscar Wilde said that the only thing to do with good advice is ignore it. You have to admire the President who is surrounded by advisers, every one claiming to be an expert on something, and all very sure of themselves. But he doesn’t pay the slightest attention to any of them.
Copyright: David Bouchier
