Rationally Speaking #80 - Dear Abby

Rationally Speaking Podcast

New York City Skeptics

Society & Culture, Skepticism, Science, Philosophy

4.6 • 787 Ratings

🗓️ 10 February 2013

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In honor of the passing of Dear Abby columnist Pauline Philips, Massimo and Julia talk about the history and philosophy of advice. How do you rationally evaluate advice, and how do you give rational advice? Along the way they discuss some of Dear Abby's snarkiest moments, the origins of the advice column in 1680, and some of the worst advice ever given.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.
0:22.4	For more information, please visit us at NYCCEPtics.org.
0:30.8	Welcome to rationally speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.
0:40.4	I'm your host, Massimo Piliucci, and with me as always is my co-host, Julia Galev.
0:44.8	Julia, what are we going to talk about today?
0:47.2	Well, Massimo, in honor of the recent passing of the advice columnist, Dear Abbey,
0:51.8	we've decided to make this episode of rationally speaking
0:55.4	all about advice and advice columns.
0:57.5	Are we going to give any advice?
0:58.7	Are we going to give any advice?
1:01.0	Yeah, I was planning on giving a lot of meta advice about how to give advice.
1:04.5	Excellent.
1:05.5	That was my plan.
1:06.5	Right.
1:07.5	So we were going to talk about how to give advice, how to take advice, like how to
1:13.3	evaluate it, and also any ethical or philosophical issues involved in the advice column format
1:19.6	and in the giving of advice in general. Sound good? And all of that in less than 40 minutes.
1:25.2	Yeah, it's such a good deal, especially for your money.
1:28.0	Exactly. Okay. So what about D.R. Abby? You know that? I didn't know a bunch about her.
1:33.3	You know, I've heard about, of course, her column. I never read it, actually. But as it turns out,
1:38.3	we're talking big numbers here. Apparently, Dia Abbey had, as a column, appeared in 1,400 newspapers worldwide with a daily
1:48.5	readership of about 110 million people. And she received something along the orders of 10,000
	...

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