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Originally Posted by smooth
being a hypocrite does affect the quality of someone's advice...if you don't practice what you preach how can you attest to its viability?
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Well, I'd first say that Dr. Laura, to a significantly large extent, probably
does practice what she preaches.
But let's take two pure hypotheticals, for two possible answers to your question.
Person A advises people to practice monogamy with the protection of condoms, yet spent his life doing neither and ended up with multiple STDs. Person A can attest somewhat to the viability of the advice because he can point to himself as an undesirable alternative.
Person B advises people never to embezzle, yet continues to embezzle himself and never gets caught. Person B might not be able to attest to the viability of the advice
at all. But the quality of the advice is unchanged. It's still damn good advice.
If you're alleging that hypocrisy harms the credibility of the advisor, well, sure. But that doesn't necessarily imply in the slightest that the advice is bad. It could mean that the intended audience was looking for excuses not to follow good advice.