How is this any different than, say, asking the question of a Magic 8-ball? Why should people give this any more credibility? Seems like a cultural problem.
If you go on to the pet subs on reddit you will find a fair bit of bad advice.
The cultural issue is the distrust of expert advice from people qualified to answer and instead going and asking unqualified sources for the information that you want.
People use computers for fast lookup of information. The information that it provides isn't necessarily trustworthy. Reading WebMD is no substitute for going to a doctor. Asking on /r/cats is no substitute for calling a vet.
> The cultural issue is the distrust of expert advice from people qualified to answer and instead going and asking unqualified sources for the information that you want.
I'm not convinced that lack of trust in experts is a significant factor. People don't go to WebMD because they don't trust the doctors. They do it because they're worried and want to get some information now. Computers, as you note, can give you answers - fast and for free. Meanwhile, asking a doctor requires you to schedule it in advance, making it days or weeks before you get to talk to them. It's a huge hassle, it might cost a lot of money, and then when you finally get to talk to them... you might not get any useful answer at all.
In my experience, doctors these days are increasingly reluctant to actually state anything. They'll give you a treatment plant, prescribe some medication, but at no point they'll actually say what their diagnosis is. Is it X? Is it Y? Is it even bacterial, or viral, or what? They won't say. They'll keep deflecting when asked directly. The entry they put in your medical documentation won't say anything either.
So when doctors are actively avoiding giving people any information about their health, and only ever give steps to follow, is it a surprise people prefer to look things up on-line, instead of making futile, time-consuming and expensive attempts at consulting the experts?
We've been conditioning people to trust the output of search engines for years and now suddenly we are telling them that it was all fun and games. This is highly irresponsible.
I don't agree. The output of a search engine has been a list of links for years. We check the accuracy of the content of the linked results and we might not like any of them, and change the query.
The problem is when we use voice or an equivalent text as the result. Because the output channel has a much lower bandwidth we get only one answer and we tend to accept that as true. It's costlier to get more answers and we don't have alternatives in the output, as in the first three results of an old standard search engine.
