Advice Can Be Lethal

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Unless you measure what you're telling another to do against absolute Truth.

You can actually do more harm with giving so-called advice to someone than by saying nothing - or just wishing them success. The other side needs empathy - so perhaps only those that ACTUALLY had the same situation and rose above it and succeeded are in a position to assist someone in need.

I swear, sometimes more harm than good is done in the realm of good intentions!

do you have a specific example in mind?

Yeah - like *everyone else does it, so why shouldn't you?*

I agree...I used to follow the "advice" of others who pushed me to act NT. It made me feel so badly about myself, like I was a total freak and didn't have the right to be who I am. They made me feel there was something wrong with how I am. That destroyed my self esteem, as did pretending to be someone I wasn't. I dumbed down my speech considerably, stopped talking very much at all so it wouldn't be obvious, memorized how to act in all kinds of situations, and buried my talents because they were considered "showing off" (even if they asked me to play for them or read them my work!). I started not doing my best in school so no one would see that I was intelligent. I became suicidal after a few years of this. I was such a fraud! After some time in the hospital and a wonderful counselor, I'm starting to learn to be who I am.

That advice nearly killed my soul and my body!! ! Keep in mind, if an NT is giving an aspie advice, there are a lot of factors in our life they just do not understand and never will. That needs to always be taken into consideration!

I will not offer you advice, but if you need to talk, I have a sympathetic ear...so I'm told!

Ideas influence decisions.
Decisions shape actions.
Actions have consequences.
Therefore, concern yourself with eliminating frivolous ideas, which ultimately disturb the Tao.

-- Feng Tzu

I sometimes offer advice here and in other forums. Anyone is welcome to follow this advice, ignore it, or come up with a better way of tackling the task in hand. I'm not going to tell someone to do something crazy because I have a conscience and I want to sleep at night.

Ed Almos

i agree! this is why the only advice humans should give one another is disease prevention

Unless the speaker is intentionally abusive or smug, then just hear them as if you were watching them on tv speaking to the general audience and if you don't agree or like what they advise, then just analyze them for where they are coming from and what they believe to be true and then remember the details that led to whatever your conclusion will be for the next time you come across some similar advice.

That's not advice - it's a rationalization an illogical justicifation for doing something. I'm not sure you understand what the word "advicee" means, judging by your comments. Moreover, your overly cynical and nearly incoherent stance forgets two things:

1) We are all responsible for making value judgements ourselves about any information that we come across, and this includes subjective, experiential information that comes int eh form of "advice." This is why human beings cultivate critical thinking skills.

2) We still retain free will even if someone offers us advicee, and that means we don't have to follow that advicee if we don't wish to.

And what exactly do you mean by "absolute truth"? Nonsense, apparently. We have no way of possessing "absolute truth" which is why we need crticial thinking skills, and why we must constantly re-evaluate our own thinking and convictions as well as information we recieve from others and the world.

If you lack those critical thinking skills - and you must cultivate them through effort, experience and education (i.e., you don't magically possess them, as many people like to smugly assume) - chances are you'll be intellectually intimidated by people who pose differing viewpoints and offer contradictory or seemingly ill-thought advice. This seems to be your case. I mean, seriously, why else would you be so afriad of adivce that no one cn force you to take, unless you cannot think for yourselves to decide what's good for yourself?

So in the end, I have evaulated your own "advice" that you're offering here (hypocritically, I add), and judgee it to be pretty bad advice, and so naturally, I'll choose not to follow it.

anyhow

Advice should only be given or received, as an option. It's an option that the person might not have thought of before. If it's an option with risks and you know the risks, you should include this in the advice given.

At least, that's my advice, for giving advice...

I totally agree. My older sister, who, at the time, was very jealous of me, gave me terrible advice that I followed, because she has always been an authority figure for me and, being a big lawyer, she is very well versed in the art of persuasion, and it led to many years or crap. Crap.

Is this critique consistent with a realistic appraisal of the sophistication and development of critical thinking skills that can reasonably be expected from a pre-schooler? Given the information and capacity for critical thinking we can reasonably expect from a pre-schooler, should we expect them to induce the conclusion that they know better than every single adult whose advice and teaching they have found reliable and productive in every context where they are capable of realistically assessing the quality of the assertions? I honestly do not think so.

I suggest that by the time one is characterised by the sophistication and development of the critical thinking skills you refer to, and a sufficient knowledge base to apply it to, and in the absence of information (such as knowledge of AS) that provides any reason for challenging a conclusion that appears superficially to be supported by all available evidence, one would have no reason to even question the accepted fact, ingrained before one had the capacity to critically reason their way to their own independent conclusion.

If you were blind and everyone insisted that there was no difference between your capacities and everyone else's, all without any explicating the fact of 'sightedness' or that they (in distinction to yourself) were characterised by this trait, why would you doubt that 'everyone else navigates their way around without knocking into things, why cant you?' was a perfectly reasonable question that summarized some personal failing (rather than disability) on your part? What reasonable cause would exist in such a case to arrive at the conclusion that everyone else was able to navigate without knocking into things because they have a capacity you know not of? I have no way to know what it is like to attempt to do things I struggle with as a NT person, so what reasonable cause would I have had (before I knew anything about AS) for assuming that everyone I encountered but me was differently-abled rather than merely being characterised by a 'a better attitude', or some such personality characteristic? How the heck could I guess that the assertions 'it's the same for everyone else but they just get on with it, you need to stop being fussy, stubborn, a quitter, or just put more effort in' were universally wrong? My only source of information regarding what it was like for anyone but myself were such claims, so by what premise could I have arrived at any other conclusion?

I don't agree. As others said it's a choice to accept advice or not. The best way to learn something is to learn from others mistakes. When others try to force their opinions on you then I would say that is crossing a line.

What isn't being taken into account is that advice to a preschooler is in a different category than advice to an adult. As a general rule, well-intentioned advice to an adult who is able to think rationally shouldn't be lethal. Annoying, easily; depressing, possibly, but usually only if the giver has a genuine lack of comprehension or ill will toward the advisee. Although, that last is disturbingly frequent; so be wary of all advice, especially from NTs (like me) and those of a radically different cultural heritage - if you were raised atheist, a Christian, Moslem, Jew, Hindu, etc. who was raised in an extremely religous home will not be able to understand parts of your worldview even if they mean well, and you will not understand theirs.

For example, my parents raised me extremely Mormon. I have no fundamental comprehension of what it is like not to believe there is a God. I understand there are people who feel that way, but in my gut I just don't get it. On the other hand, I do not believe in being LDS at this point, and they genuinely are incapable of comprehend that I might have an understanding of the doctrines they believe in and not believe their religion is The One True Faith. Whether it is deliberate self-blinding or just how they are, it isn't going to change and they aren't going to stop trying to get me to attend church with them, no matter what I do or say. This means that everything they have to say to me has to be filtered through the knowledge that it has been filtered through their beliefs.

That's was more about taking advice; about giving it, be aware that yours is also filtered through your beliefs/perceptions, which may or may not be valid for the advisee.

After my father died and I had to do something for my family, I purposely reeled in my snark and just sucked it up. It has been a stupid experience that if I were emotionally invested in anyone would have been a storm of backstabbing blah blah blah. But mainly I was just bored as s**t but I felt it would have been unkind of me to snark at scared out of towners to just be themselves and stop putting on airs. I finally started posting on this forum and reading the posts because I graduated my family about a week ago. I'm done with them. Now I can be myself again. My father's scoldings to be normal and not monstrous were harrowing to me especially if I had gotten a beating before he came home so it was like a pounding on an existing bruise but he didn't know how terrible she had been during the day because she always rushed to the door and expressed her sorrow and frustration about how difficult it had been for her all day and how it was really hard to take. I don't think it was the aspieness that made him not question her. I don't want to think why he fell for herstories all the time when he didn't really enjoy being in her presence himself. I don't know. My main feeling about my father is pity. I have no problem suspecting him of laziness for convenience's sake about investigating her. Finally before he died he walked in on it because he came home in the middle of the day and he heard her as she was about to start and he told her that if she ever touched me again that he would leave her and then he told me when we were alone that he never knew she could be this way, that he never imagined she would do that. I told him that she has always been this way with me and that I didn't believe that he didn't see it. I figured he was okay with the way she treated me (because he would scold me about how mean I was to my mother. Really? I was mean to her by staying in my room so she could come in and find fault with me and drag me around the house by my hair screaming at and kicking me? I find that I can't talk to other abused kids because they are so freaked out and emotional about it that my coldness if not clinical description sounds abusive to them. I don't know if I am nonweepy because I am an aspie or because I was born accurate. So yeah, being advised to be normal can suck coming from a dumdum who also happens to be an aspie himself.