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Originally Posted by FoolThemAll
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.
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I disagree.
First of all, someone can give bad advice that accidentally leads to good results...it doesn't make their advice "good."
Just like one can make an invalid or faulty argument with a true conclusion--that doesn't then make the premises or overall argument valid.
In the case of person B: listening to the hypocritcal "don't embezzle" is not "damn good advice"...it's poor advice. Good advice would be embezzle like me, this is how I don't get caught. That is what he has experience with and it's those experiences that give him the ability to dispense with credible and reliable advice.
In Dr. Laura's case, however, she happens to be a hypocrit *and* dispenses bad advice. She's just plain wrong most of the time when she opens her mouth and lets judgemental crap fall out of it. Perhaps some of her stuff had a place in the early 80's...maybe when her training and credentials were still valid...but it doesn't have any legitimacy anymore from what I know about relationships and how to raise a family from a personal and professional perspective (I'm not a therapist, but they come from my school and my wife was a juvenile counselor).