DRMacIver's Notebook
Disingenuous Advice
Disingenuous Advice
I’m a big fan of giving advice. You should give more advice. Appropriately and effectively, but helping people is good and advice, done well, is one of the easiest ways to help people.
But a thing I’ve been noticing for a while is that a lot of advice isn’t really designed to help people. It’s designed to discharge your responsibility, real or imagined, for helping them, in a way that makes having the problem their problem rather than yours.
The characteristic features of this sort of disingenuous advice are:
- It’s not exactly bad advice. It’s important that it could, in theory, solve the problem.
- It tends to be quite one-size-fits-all. It shows very little engagement with the actual problem - if you were going to put in enough effort to tailor your advice, you’d probably make at least some effort to give reasonable advice.
- It tends to be quite simple, so as to make it seem easy. It’s the sort of thing that you could very naturally use the word “just” in.
- It seems to encourage closing off further conversation until you’ve tried to follow the advice. Reasons why the advice won’t work sound like excuses.
- It is, in fact, very hard to follow this advice and even following the advice isn’t guaranteed to work.
The prompt for me to start noticing this pattern is how often “go to therapy” is this. Therapy is a perfectly valuable tool that, if you can afford it, can help with many categories of emotional problems. It also tends to be suggested very blindly, for large categories of problems that it’s not especially suited for, and to people who are probably not well set up to benefit from it (e.g. because they can’t afford it, or because the real problem is that their life sucks in very tangible ways and their negative emotions mostly stem from that). But by suggesting going to therapy you make it very clear that their problems aren’t yours, you’ve suggested a solution now, they should go make it a therapist’s problem.
“Learn to code” as a response to career problems is another common one. It’s not necessarily bad advice - software is a pretty good career option for some people. But it’s not a catch all solution to career problems - not everyone is actually well suited to work in software, retraining is hard, getting your first software job is hard, and there may be many better lateral transfers for most people that actually get to use their current experience.Also not all jobs can be software jobs you do actually have to move atoms as well as bits.
Another example that came up on discord recently was students having to ask permission to go to the bathroom in class, and how bad this is (especially given that it can be refused). The advice “you should have gone to the bathroom between classes” absolves your responsibility to them by making it the student’s fault for their lack of forethought.
All of these very effectively discharge your responsibility without being in any way helpful. They are, at best, checklist advice, without any suggestion that you’re willing to do the rest of the checklist or, heaven forbid, actually offer real advice once the checklist is completed.
Now, often it’s perfectly reasonable not to want their problem to be yours. If it’s some stranger on the internet asking you to feel bad for them and care about their problems then… I don’t know, I probably think you should feel bad for them. Certainly it’s not fard, but it might be mustahabb.I got the Islamic tiers of moral obligation from some random Tumblr post that no longer seems to exist on the internet but it’s very useful and somewhat better grain than most of the equivalent English words. The point I’m making here is that this is a morally good act that you are not required to do. But this is hard, and most people don’t want to do it. What they do want, however, is to feel good about themselves, so giving a plausible appearance of caring is helpful. Or, even better, being able to credibly suggest that in fact the speaker is bad for having this problem and it’s their fault for not having solved it already, thus not only discharging your obligations but making it clear that you didn’t have any obligations to discharge in the first place.
This is particularly bad behaviour when you’re not in the “strangers on the internet” scenario and it’s someone who you do have some sort of responsibility to - a personal relationship, one of your reports at work, a student of yours, etc. There it is not just a disavowal of responsibility that you don’t want to have, it’s a refusal to accept the responsibility that you do have.
Even when you don’t have any responsibility to the person, I do think it is your responsibility not to give this sort of disingenuous advice. As well as being dishonest, the sheer ubiquity of this behaviour is a failure of collective responsibility, and while you might have no individual responsibility to the advice recipient, I do think you have an individual responsibility not to make these collective problems worse.