Help Wanted: America’s love affair with amateur advice

A: Not a blessed thing.

If you pay a psychiatrist, you have to worry that they have a conflict of interest. If you really get well, you won't need them anymore. They have an inherent motive to help you only enough to take credit for things going better, not enough to set you free from needing their services.

If you turn to family, coworkers, or friends, the odds are very high that you will face similar conflicts of interest. Family inheritance. Family allies (the "favorite" child/sibling/cousin). Etc.

It's really hard to find someone to talk to whose personal biases are less problematic than those entrenched ties. A stranger or advice columnist may not give good advice, but they are somewhat less likely to give advice designed to encourage you to cut your own throat for their personal benefit.

People like me who like actually being useful and hate that kind of crap are sometimes drawn to giving advice for free in online forums. I read this because the title made me think it would be about that trend. There are endless places on the internet where you can anonymously ask for advice without admitting to your boss that you don't actually know how to do X or admitting to your spouse that you are thinking of leaving, etc. I think a similar article about that in specific would likely be far more interesting.

I think this just speaks the the modern trend of anti-intellectualism. Distrust of an expert because of phantom biases and the regression toward getting advice from your "tribe".

You might come back to a restaurant if you enjoyed your experience. The incentive is to give you as good a meal as possible. If you're hungry, you won't come back.

Doctors have a more concrete job to do. There's plenty of malpractice in the medical industry, by the way.

Psychiatry? It's much less concrete what a patient's needs are than other forms of business. It's perfectly reasonable for someone to bring up a potential conflict of interest there.

Equating things at random which don't make logical sense doesn't invalidate the point someone is trying to make.

Why is that? I think it's just as likely they are willing to give advice they think the majority of their audience will agree with regardless of how well it helps the person in question. In this case, the conflict is fame vs usefulness.

I think every source will have some perverse incentives, so you can't just go by whether one exists, but instead by how likely it is, what the repercussions are if they're caught, and are there cultural or personal biases that work against those perverse incentives.

Does your psychiatrist seem like someone that actually wants to help people? Do they appear to be greedy or in financial trouble? Perhaps worrying they are trying to keep you as income is unwarranted, or perhaps it should be reconsidered after progress is stalled or they don't seem to have anything useful to contribute.

Are you going to family members or friends that you believe care about you and your well-being, and/or that are upstanding people in their own right? Perhaps that should be what you focus on instead of perceived favoritism or vying for inheritance.

Sometimes good advice is hard to take, and points out flaws you would rather not address given an alternative. Discounting everyone that might actually have knowledge of the situation and other perspectives in lieu of a distant third party seems like a convenient way to discount that advice when it doesn't match expectations because "they just don't understand the situation well enough".