ON INTERNET ADVICE
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"Many receive advice, few profit by it."
Publius Syrus, 42 A.D.
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Conversations with several acquaintances during the past year or so have alerted me to a new and apparently fast-growing phenomenon --- the lay-person's seeking out of, and largely unquestioning reliance upon, various types of advice from sources delivering the same over the Internet. The seeking out part is not the problem --- the unquestioning reliance part is. To give an idea of how far this has spread, even the sorts of periodicals you see only at the supermarket checkout counter now contain disquisitions on which websites are most useful for which of your advisory needs.
The variety of such advice is enormous --- the impulse to seek it seemingly irresistible (at least to a certain type of personality) --- and the results mixed, with a pronounced tendency, if my acquaintances' experience is a guide, to unsatisfactory outcomes. Let's take a look at some of the possible reasons for this:
1. The inquirer is seldom able to properly evaluate the credentials of the adviser. More often, probably, the inquirer does not even think to attempt such an evaluation.
2. Prominent and credible people have in some cases sold their names (and thus their reputations) to others. There is a particularly egregious example of this in the medical field.
3. The inquirer frequently does not know the questions to ask, let alone the answers to expect. If the questions are inadequate or inaccurate the answers are bound to be likewise.
4. The inquirer has limited (and perhaps no) recourse against the adviser if the advice is wrong. Jurisdictional barriers and physical distance will often make it non-feasible to seek legal recourse in event of harm.
5. The adviser is usually skilled enough to hedge his level of responsibility (usually by various sorts of disclaimers) and the inquirer typically does not realize (until perhaps too late) the significance of this.
6. The advice is invariably quite "generic", and thus is not at all useful for any but the most common and straightforward of factual situations.
7. Not all inquirers are sufficiently attuned to the issues of disinterestedness and objectivity. Possible commercial motives of the advisers are sometimes discernible by the inquirer, sometimes not.
8. There is a tendency on the part of the inquirer not to get advice from a number of independent sources and then use them as a cross-check on each other.
There may well be issues which I have not thought of --- please treat the above list simply as evidence that I have a keen grasp of the obvious --- but it seems clearly arguable, at this point, that for most lay-persons, most of the time, there are serious hazards in relying solely on internet sources of advice. There are ways to reduce the risks, at least in theory, but probably no effective way to eliminate them.
A friend of mine, upon reading a prior version of these brief remarks, suggested an analogy to the well-recognized modern hunger for "instant gratification", to which he added the observation that, to many people, speed is the single quality that trumps all others, so much so that today's motto might well be "better quick than correct". Sort of a TV game show approach to life, except that on TV correctness is often treated at least on a parity with speed.
So give this some thought the next time you find yourself being seduced by the apparent speed, ease, economy and effectiveness of the internet-based solution --- it may well have the same mixed (albeit perhaps temporarily quite pleasant) results as other, less technical, more traditional, forms of seduction.
All considered, the benefit of internet advice is rather more illusory than the inquirer imagines --- as I view it, the expected economy and effectiveness are not realized and what you are left with is the speed and ease. Oh well, maybe two out of four isn't so bad, but you'd be better off if it were the other two.
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