The Declining Value of Personal Advice

27 Jun

There used to be a time when before buying something, you asked your friends and peers about advice, and it was the optimal thing to do. These days, it is often not a great use of time. It is generally better to go online. Today, the Internet abounds with comprehensive, detailed, and trustworthy information, and picking the best product, judging by its quality, price, appearance, or what have you, in a slew of categories is easy to do.

As goes for advice about products, so goes for much other advice. For instance, if a coding error stumps you, your first move should be to search StackOverflow than Slack a peer. If you don’t understand a technical concept, look for a YouTube video or a helpful blog or a book than “leverage” a peer.

The fundamental point is that it is easier to get high-quality data and expert advice today than it has ever been. If your network includes the expert, bless you! But if it doesn’t, your network no longer damns you to sub-optimal information and advice. And that likely has welcome consequences for equality.

The only cases where advice from people near you may edge ahead of readily available help online is where the advisor has access to private information about your case or where the advisor is willing to expend greater elbow grease to get to the facts and think of advice that aptly takes account of your special circumstances. For instance, you may be able to get good advice on how to deal with alcoholic parents from an expert online but probably not about alcoholic parents with the specific set of deficiencies that your parents have. Short of such cases, the value of advice from people around is lower today than before, and probably lower than what you can get online.

The declining value of interpersonal advice has one significant negative externality. It takes out a big way we have provided value to our loved ones. We need to think harder about how we can fill that gap.