In your experience, when you are describing a situation, perhaps not even soliciting a advice, but someone offers it anyway, and that advice begins with something like “Why don’t you just…” (or “You should just…”, or pretty much anything like that, containing the word ‘just’ or synonyms), what percentage of the time does that advice fail to adequately address the setting that you’re describing?
For me, it’s overwhelmingly most of the time. Like more than 90% of the time, I am certain.
I’m sure there must be a name for this phenomenon - ‘advice-itis’ or something, where people assume every conversation is a consultation seeking their sage counsel, and every problem that exists is very simple.
You should just accept that people act this way to feel important about themselves. So why don’t you just start out by saying you are not seeking advice, just sharing an experiance?
Thinking back, remembering all the times somebody gave me an obvious solution to a problem by saying “why don’t you just…” and it turned out to be an actual easy solution I simply hadn’t thought of, I can count the number of those occasions on the finger of one finger.
Mencken’s Law - " Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong."
I think what you are describing is a type of self-importance that people tend to have about themselves. It can show as arrogance, egotistical, pompous and conceited behavior. Or simply put, they are a know-it-all type of person.
Myself I know a few people who consistently turn anything you say as an excuse to talk about themselves, that is they are narcissist.
Both type of people can be irritating to talk with.
OTOH sometimes it is an attempt to understand the issue. Perhaps better if it was preceded with an “I don’t understand. Why don’t you …”
To me it is typically less a narcissistic assessment that you too dumb to see the obvious answer than an engagement with what is being shared.
I’ll even admit to being guilty of it, though in different phrasing. I am not going to be afraid to ask what may seem like a stupid question. If it isn’t obvious to me why a simple solution that even I can think of wouldn’t work, and I am interested in what you are talking about, then hearing why is the only way I will learn more.
So I hear it sometimes but to me it is a good interaction.
I would say with work, it is a high number…at least 80%. I am THE expert in my field and when there are problems, my supervisors or others in other departments will say…“Why don’t you (we) do …XXXX, to solve the problem”. In reality, they don’t understand the nuances and its a bad idea.
With my wife, however, …I would say that 70%ish; her solutions to my/our home/personal issues is a very good idea. Its likely because she is close enough to the issue to grasp the nuances of the problem.
On the third hand, there are a lot of people who make their life unnecessarily difficult. They want to add complications to every problem they face.
They’ll tell you about how difficult a problem is and mention all of the unnecessary complications they’ve included. You tell them “Why don’t you just…” and give them an obvious solution to their central problem, which involves setting aside al the complications and dealing with them as separate issues.
That’s my experience. If someone’s asking “Why don’t you just…”, it’s because they don’t know the answer to that question. If you tell them why you don’t, then they’ll gain a better understanding of the problem.
And of course, sometimes, the answer to “Why don’t you just…” is, in fact, “D’oh, that didn’t even occur to me, of course that would work”.
If someone says “why don’t you just…” they literally are asking why the solution they’re suggesting won’t work, which implies that they do indeed acknowledge that there may be a very good reason they are unaware of.
Why don’t you just understand that?
Eta; other people said the same thing. Why didn’t I just read the thread all the way through before replying?
For my part, when in this situation, I typically phrase it more like “I assume there’s a good reason X isn’t a solution” because I want to acknowledge my lack of information.
People who do this think they are trying to help but there’s more than a little condescension involved, even if subconscious.
The middle one is a good one to use for enumeration in this case.
I have experienced vanishingly few cases where such a question did not involve a bit of Dunning-Kruger to some degree.
That’s the thing, though. If I am trying to understand a problem, I don’t lead with a potential solution - I ask questions about the problem.
It’s rarely an attempt to understand the problem and more usually an attempt to come up with an answer. It’s also rarely malicious (and I suspect driven by years of formal education in giving the “right” answer in school) but not often helpful.
I have had a similar experience especially in my line of work (social work). It’s more of an engagement interaction and not someone throwing out a definitive answer.
In personal interactions I also experience this but I am often grateful. I am the kind of person who frequently lumbers through life oblivious to my surroundings until it hits me in the face.
Most people I do technical support for (family) understand by now that their advice probably wouldn’t be productive. Earlier on, there were quite a few occasions when I’d have to respond (in order to get them to stop kibitzing) “yes, I tried that. 10 minutes ago, while you were watching, but I guess somehow you didn’t recognize it.”
It’s a vaguely Dunning-Kruger thing, where people who are unskilled at something also lack the insight to recognize that they are unskilled. So it devolves to the Dilbert PHB’s famous line, “… anything I don’t understand is easy to do.”
Or “Oh. I assume you have already tried doing X?” which will lead to why X didn’t work, and proceed to other possibilities, always assuming they are asking for your advice.
I have a friend who assumes every non-positive comment about anything is a request for her advice, which she gives in the format “You should …” or just giving orders. It’s relatively easy to ignore, and she doesn’t usually follow up to see if I did it, so ignoring it is what I usually do.
I love it when people ask me, “Why don’t you just…” Many of my best solutions came to me when I had to think through my response to their suggestion. For example, I might start off with “Well, to do that I would need something shaped like…like that thing I have out in my shed!”
Productive brainstorming starts out with considering possibilities. If I had the chance, I’d have a Zoom meeting with several friends to solicit their suggestions to solve my problems. And having to explain why you CAN"T do it this way very often leads to how you CAN do it this other way.
Here’s your answer, which I wholeheartedly agree with:
Right, exactly this! I endorse the view that an overwhelming proportion of the time “why don’t you just …” type questions reveal a basic ignorance of the problem.
A special subset of this ignorance is what I’d call “the armchair expert” – someone who has just enough knowledge to propose a solution that might actually be possible (I emphasize “might”) but whose knowledge is so superficial that they’re clueless about what it would take to actually implement such a thing, which in addition to staggering complexity might require technology not available on this planet and might never be. But to the armchair expert, it’s already a solved problem!
Sometimes it can be even worse than “why don’t you just …”. I was once describing the general outlines of a business application to a bunch of business types, and when I got to the point of describing a design challenge we faced, one of them said “I’m way ahead of you” and proceeded to describe how the system should work.
I had to let them blather on before finally resuming the presentation with a politely worded comment about why their idea was fundamentally unworkable, and after wasting at least ten minutes on this, then proceeded to describe the design we already had which actually would work. What this person hoped to gain by interjecting a harebrained idea into an area they knew nothing about is hard to fathom, but I suppose it might have been some sort of arrogant belief that they were smarter than anyone else.
