FREEDMAN - Expert advice can not be good and at the same time simple and pleasant.

Good expert advice will be at odds with every aspect of the sort of advice that draws us to it,

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If an expert can explain how

• any of us
• is sure to make things better
• via a few simple, pleasant steps,

then plenty of people are going to listen.

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We want our expert advice boiled down to ABC's, essentials, executive summaries, and guides for idiots and dummies. To be sure, if we could handle all the complications, we wouldn't need experts. But if there's a happy medium, most of us don't appear interested in it.
Here are some other characteristics we seem to look for in expert advice:

• Clear-cut: Most of us would prefer to be told what the right answer is, without confusing ifs, ands, or bats. ….
• Doubt-free: We can be turned off by experts who don't transmit full confidence in their advice. Why listen to an expert who's not sure if she's right? …
• Universal: How confusing and bothersome to have to sort through a forest of choices in order to select one that's specific to our personality, experience, age, ethnicity, symptoms, finances, life goals, and so on. … One-size-fits-all advice, on the other hand, not only is easier to apply-but has the ring of important truth.
• Upbeat: Psychologists have long known that most people drift toward positive points of view, even to the point of being irrational, and gloomy advice can clash with this "optimism bias," as it's called. …
• Actionable: What good are expert findings that merely explain things? People usually want to be told what to do to improve their situation. …
• Palatable: Most of us are loaded with biases, beliefs, and prejudices. It's asking a lot to try7 to get people to swallow advice that challenges these ingrained ideas, no matter how grounded the advice may be. …
• Dramatic claims: Expert advice and findings are far more likely to capture our attention and get us rooting for them if they promise to make big, positive changes in our life. …
• Stories: Sometimes expert advice doesn't hit home until we hear it placed in the context of someone's experience or in a compelling narrative. …
• Numbers: Numbers add a sense of precision and authority to an observation, even it entirely illusory. …
• Retroactive fixes: Whenever something traumatic happens, we pay special attention to advice aimed at preventing it from happening again, even if there's little chance it will happen, or at least happen in the same way. …

We happen to be complex creatures living in a complex world,
so why would we expect answers to any interesting questions to be simple? …

Because our beliefs tend to be simplistic and optimistic, it will probably be incompatible with them.

In other words, good expert advice will be at odds with every aspect of the sort of advice that draws us to it,

But that clash between resonant advice and advice that's likely to be good apparently doesn't stop experts from offering what at least sounds like the straightforward, complete, one-size-fits-all answers we're looking for.

SOURCE
David H. Freedman
Why experts keep failing us and how to know when not to trust them
LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY,2010