To gain insight into some matter, it is important to be exposed to different thoughts, experiences, whatnot, on that matter. The recurring reader might have seen me repeatedly warn against government censorship, ideologically uniform echo chambers, and the like, for this very reason.
However, the topic extends far beyond politics, up to and including that there is great value to be found in the anecdotal (cf. below) and that reading two different math textbooks, using different approaches to the same matter, can be very valuable. Likewise, obstacles and attitude problems are by no means limited to politics.
Consider the many cases of good, poor, and non-use of the Internet to gather information on issues like human interactions, how to best approach a private problem, or similar. Here there is a wealth of information that can be had, where various forums or news groups tell or discuss personal experiences, where different attempts, results, angles, whatnot, can be used as a basis without the pain of own experimentation. (Where much own experimentation would have been limited to one attempt, because any one attempt would have changed the situation too much to make further attempts possible, and much other would have fallen in the category “learning from costly error”.)
However, this is surprisingly hard for reasons that include:
The typically extremely low search-engine ranking given to forums compared to one-angle discussions by self-proclaimed experts or random journalists, who, to boot, are often fairly stupid and/or ignorant. (While such stupidity/ignorance, if in doubt, will be far less important in the type of aggregation of takes that a forum can deliver.)
As to newsgroups and other early places of discussion on the Internet, they have largely been buried by the rise of (web-based) forums, including forum aggregations like Quora and Reddit, and the highly unfortunate misdevelopment that is the “Stackexchange” network.
This is the worse, as many of the replacements come with unnecessary restrictions on users and usability, e.g. that Tor access (even for passive reading!) is blocked or that JavaScript and/or cookies are unnecessarily required. Particularly frustrating are those (notably, later versions of Quora and Reddit) that show questions/original posts, while artificially and unnecessarily restricting access to answers and comments, where, on these sites, the material worth reading is usually found.
That too many givers of answers on “question–answer” sites have a horribly flawed attitude. The German gutefragee site is particularly bad. Not only do many posters apparently relish being mean to those who ask questions, but the specific condemnation of (in some variation) “You can’t expect an answer to such a question! Everyone is different, so there can be no answer! Use your head!” is very common. However, the point of using such sites is exactly that everyone is different, that asking in a forum setting will give different answers and perspectives—and that this is the strength of such sites. Effectively, exactly the reason why asking a question is a good idea is used by these idiots to condemn the question as a bad idea. This is the sadder as the name amounts to “goodquestion” (no space), and that good questions are accused of being poor ones by poor answers.
I do not use such sites to ask own questions for several reasons—and my predictable anger at such idiots is one of them. Even when it happens to others, I grow annoyed; if it happened to me, I might flip.
Other issues include privacy concerns, that several sites (of other types) where I have registered have spammed me and/or leaked the email address used to spammers, and the aforementioned restrictions on users and usability, which are the worse for those who wish to post (as opposed to passively read).
Other common issues include second-guessing the question, trying to impute impure motives (up to and including sexism and racism) to perfectly factual sounding questions, and the odd misapprehension that someone who answers a question would be superior to the one who asks the question. To the latter, I note many cases of someone asking a question with an intent at Adult–Adult communication and receiving an answer that is Parent–Child. (The “gutefrage” example is a special case.) The superiority misapprehension is the more annoying, as the answers often show ignorance and/or lack of insight.
Examples are tricky as (a) topics that are generally understandable tend to contain a large element of subjectiveness and taste, and (b) those with a reasonably “canonically correct” answer/approach/whatnot tend to be understandable only to those with some degree of domain knowledge—often, a high degree.
However, consider Linux administration and claims by various “experts” in the “Stackexchange” network. Here,
I have, for instance, seen advice like “Add [kernel module] to [config file]. Reboot your computer. If everything
works, keep the file. If not, reboot into rescue mode and restore the file.”—as if the modprobe
command, one of the most basic to Linux administration,
did not even exist. (Even a reader with no knowledge of kernel modules and whatnot is likely to understand
a wish to avoid reboots and, when occurring, unnecessary visits to the rescue mode.)
Better advice would be “Execute modprobe [kernel module]. If everything
works, add [kernel module] to [config file], so that the change will survive your next reboot.”.
The correct approach to questions (outside very narrow areas, where some sole truth might be present) is “What would you do in the same situation?”, “What are your experiences with X?”, or whatever might apply to the case at hand—in order to evoke exactly the multitude of angles that allows for a better understanding and a more informed own decision. However, the far more limited approach resp. interpretation of approach of “Tell me what I should do!” is common, which reduces the value of the discussion. (Somewhat common among askers of questions; very common among those who give answers. The “gutefrage” example, e.g., typically stems from one or several givers of answers.)
The problems around uni-perspective articles extends to other areas, say, in that many books are too reduced to conclusions and shallow reasoning, while being sparse on underlying data and different perspectives. For instance, someone who wants to learn something about business might be better off reading a few biographies about business men, where he can gain some idea of what they did right and wrong, what brought success and failure, etc., than a few books with pre-chewed recommendations by self-appointed business experts.
The “pre-chewed” angle is potentially off-topic, but is still of importance: Learning is the deeper, more lasting, more insightful, whatnot, the more own thought has been spent on the topic. This own thought is more likely to follow from going through a few scenarios than a few recommendations. Moreover, the scenarios usually bring more in terms of “food for thought” through containing more detail and context.
More generally, the more biographies (“auto-”, in particular) that I have read, the more value I have seen in them, and I regret that I did not pay enough attention to them when I was younger.
The issue of “anecdotal evidence” is somewhat similar: If we take, on the one hand, a researcher who spends months on a particular survey (preparing, executing, evaluating data, writing up a paper, whatnot) to determine whether some certain narrow conjecture holds true, and, on the other, even a layman who just spends the same amount of time speaking to various persons on matters relating to this conjecture, chances are that the layman will gain a far better understanding than the researcher. Likewise, what historian is more likely to be insightful? The one who spends months digging through obscure records in a mechanical search for some set of facts or the one that spends the same time thinking on and around history?
Which is not necessarily to say that the respective “formers” are doing anything wrong. Fact finding is a massively important part of science and a low payout in terms of personal understanding must be seen in the context of a potential increase of knowledge in the overall scientific community.
There are, however, several conclusions to be drawn, including that a researcher does not necessarily have the understanding of his overall field that a naive layman might suppose, that someone looking for personal insight should think hard about where he gets the most bang for his buck, and that having grad students do boring legwork might not be the best way to further them. (Of course, boring legwork done by grad students is boring legwork not done by the advising professor.)
A definite negative is does who try to reduce information in many other areas and for many other purposes (e.g. customer experiences for business improvements) to cheap “on a scale from 1 to 5” over more anecdotal information. For instance, I once wrote a thoughtful feedback letter to some business and received as sole answer a boilerplate letter with some variation of “We are sorry to hear that you are dissatisfied. Please fill out the attached feedback form.”—and a feedback form that contained items of a “1 to 5” character and queries about how satisfied or unsatisfied I was with the business, my last contact, telephone support, whatnot. These, of course, would have brought next to no value to the business and would have been a complete waste of my time. As to my thoughtful letter, I can only surmise that some low-level grunt just archived it with no further measures taken.
Such crude indicators can be outright dangerous in that they can lead to actions that are not just pointless (say, when customers have a problem with the lack of quality of something and the business counters by merely increasing the quantity) but outright harmful, because the cause for dissatisfaction is the opposite of what the evaluators believe (say, that a complaint arises because there is too much of something and the evaluators assume that the customers actually wanted even more of that something). This is particularly problematic because businesses (product managers, whatnot) often have preconceived opinions about what the customers do want or should want that do not apply over the entire customer base—and sometimes are entirely detached from reality. Ditto politicians and many other groups that draw on similar evaluations.
There is, in fact, much positive to be said about the “anecdotal” part—the problem resides with “evidence”: The anecdotal can be a great source of information and understanding, but must be seen with caveats like the risk of a sampling bias or a bias of interpretation—and such issues make the anecdotal poor evidence.
In a next step, unfortunately, books that have an anecdotal approach usually bring little value for other reasons: The approach, properly attempted, could bring great value to the reader; however, usually it is used to either push a certain viewpoint by cherry-picked examples (with which anything can be “proved”) or to merely entertain low-brow readers, in which case the writing is poor and the details and context that could bring value are left out. (Note my go-to example of “How to Win Friends and Influence People”.)