I like the three suggested approaches instead of giving advice directly. All three seem like good ideas.
However, all three of your approaches seem like things that could still be done in combination with giving advice. “Before giving advice, try to fully understand the situation by asking questions” seems like a reasonable way to implement your first suggestion, for instance. Personal experiences can be used to give context for why you are giving the advice you are giving, and clearing up misconceptions can be an important first step before giving more concrete advice. This doesn’t mean that these approaches need to be combined with giving advice, but they aren’t in opposition to it and can perhaps be the thing that shifts us from bad advice to good advice.
In general I see you trying to tip us into a more collaborative frame with friends or collegues who come to us with problems. Instead of immediately trying to solve their problem independently, try to work with them to better understand the issue and see if you have something worthwhile to add. This makes sense to me.
I find your second paragraph oversimplified. It’s not at all clear that being in different circumstances means your advice doesn’t apply to others. There are many situations where it’s exactly because you come from a different perspective that you can expect to have useful advice.
My final criticism is with respect to the idea that advice is no longer applicable in the modern world of the internet. I don’t think this is true. A lot of the time people simply don’t know what options are available and so wouldn’t even consider looking for entire classes of solutions without being given advice that guides them to it. There have been many cases in my own life when I’ve benefited from advice when I didn’t even realise I had a problem: I was doing something in a way that worked but was highly suboptimal, and when a friend saw what I was doing suggested a simpler and more elegant solution that immediately made things easier for me. I wouldn’t even have thought to ask (or to search the internet) for a solution to this problem, because I already had a solution, and so didn’t think of it in terms of having a problem to be solved. In these cases unsolicited advice was highly useful for me.
I think there’s a good reading of what you are saying as “advice is overrated”, and you are trying to shift us to a more collaberative framework. Since advice is overrated and reactive advice is overused, maybe a heuristic like “don’t give advice” is useful to shift us away from a typical immediate reaction to friends with problems where we typically try to solve the problem immediately rather than simply asking questions to delve deeper.
I like the three suggested approaches instead of giving advice directly. All three seem like good ideas.
However, all three of your approaches seem like things that could still be done in combination with giving advice. “Before giving advice, try to fully understand the situation by asking questions” seems like a reasonable way to implement your first suggestion, for instance. Personal experiences can be used to give context for why you are giving the advice you are giving, and clearing up misconceptions can be an important first step before giving more concrete advice. This doesn’t mean that these approaches need to be combined with giving advice, but they aren’t in opposition to it and can perhaps be the thing that shifts us from bad advice to good advice.
In general I see you trying to tip us into a more collaborative frame with friends or collegues who come to us with problems. Instead of immediately trying to solve their problem independently, try to work with them to better understand the issue and see if you have something worthwhile to add. This makes sense to me.
I find your second paragraph oversimplified. It’s not at all clear that being in different circumstances means your advice doesn’t apply to others. There are many situations where it’s exactly because you come from a different perspective that you can expect to have useful advice.
My final criticism is with respect to the idea that advice is no longer applicable in the modern world of the internet. I don’t think this is true. A lot of the time people simply don’t know what options are available and so wouldn’t even consider looking for entire classes of solutions without being given advice that guides them to it. There have been many cases in my own life when I’ve benefited from advice when I didn’t even realise I had a problem: I was doing something in a way that worked but was highly suboptimal, and when a friend saw what I was doing suggested a simpler and more elegant solution that immediately made things easier for me. I wouldn’t even have thought to ask (or to search the internet) for a solution to this problem, because I already had a solution, and so didn’t think of it in terms of having a problem to be solved. In these cases unsolicited advice was highly useful for me.
I think there’s a good reading of what you are saying as “advice is overrated”, and you are trying to shift us to a more collaberative framework. Since advice is overrated and reactive advice is overused, maybe a heuristic like “don’t give advice” is useful to shift us away from a typical immediate reaction to friends with problems where we typically try to solve the problem immediately rather than simply asking questions to delve deeper.