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Comment by staticassertion | Hacker News Reader

You're on a discussion forum where the topic is colon cancer. Surely you understand that people are going to discuss it?

It's a bit hard to tell from your post what you're saying. Certainly I can imagine being annoyed by constantly being given health advice from layman. But this is... a forum.

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There's a bazillion ways to discuss a topic that don't involve giving advice with unearned confidence. Even just saying "My experience is that doing X helped" instead of "You should do X" is a massive massive difference.

One thing I've noticed is that Americans typically use the latter while conversing.

(Nearly) everybody does, it's not an American thing. It takes a bit of personal discipline to avoid it.

As someone who has worked in three different countries in a variety of positions, Americans conversed in that way in proportions far larger than other countries.

Now this may be due to sampling on my end, but I did find the difference extraordinary when asking the same questions to different people.

That's fine. It's just unclear to me if the parent poster is being critical exclusively of people "irl" giving unsolicited advice or if they're speaking to the forum of users who come here explicitly to discuss topics like these.

If it's the former, I'm ambivalent. I don't give advice as a general rule. If it's the latter, I find that totally silly.

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