Last March, I pointed to an article about the dangers of giving investment advice. Then I followed up a few days later advising people to avoid giving advice at all. In that post I wrote:

Advice is cheap and rarely productive, and nobody ought to be taking it without understanding the thought process of the person giving it.

Today Tyler Cowen wrote the following in a post about the economics of advice:

You don’t know what a person really thinks until you hear his or her advice. Along these lines, if you really want to know what a person thinks, ask for advice and he or she will open up.

So perhaps there’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem with advice that I hadn’t previously considered.