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Whenever someone posts advice online or writes an advice book, people bend over backwards to believe them. Any questioning of the advice’s validity is done hesitantly. Audiences desperately offer gurus the benefit of the doubt.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this has led to widespread deceit in the advice giving business.
John T. Reed famously went through “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” and ripped it apart. He points out internal consistencies, factual errors, and incorrect specialized opinions in the book. For some reason, fans of the book contact Reed with bizarre defenses of it, which he also posts and rips apart. In spite of this article and other media embarrassments of the author, it has sold over 32 million copies and spawned a media franchise with a series of branded books, videos, seminars, and board games.
XXXX and YYYY sell a system for writing a best-selling novel for $199. On its face, this is a pretty absurd claim. I looked up both of their names when they were first promoting the system, and they’d recently written a LitRPG book. I assume their original intention was to hold up the novel as an example of their great system, but instead the book bombed. It certainly isn’t a bestseller.
If they’re unable to write a best-selling novel themselves, how likely is their system to teach other people how to do it?
On Reddit, a user was detailing his investing and early retirement scheme to try to drive traffic to his blog. He claimed that he was earning 1% to 2% weekly from his investment strategy. People in the subreddit were eating up his story, congratulating him, and asking for more information to do the same thing themselves.
A 1% weekly return, compounded, would give a 68% annual return, which is three times the average annual return Warren Buffett has made. Buffett is considered by many to be the greatest investor of all time. Someone claiming to be able to consistently get these kinds of returns is lying at an absurd level.
Defamation
In my second example, I don’t name the authors or their book. I don’t even identify the Reddit user in the third example. When I first wrote this article, I named and shamed, then discussed with my wife the consequences of doing so. The likelihood of a scoundrel who is willing to commit fraud to also file a frivolous lawsuit seemed higher than the value of denouncing them in a blog post.
This, in a nutshell, is at the heart of why people tread so softly around liars giving bad advice.
Anyone engaging with advice on the internet should be deeply cautious, validate claims, and be suspicious. People have learned that “get rich quick” is a red flag, but they’ll excitedly accept “become wealthy fast”.
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