And I would say that it's even worse when you can't type your question. Too many people know my mother's maiden name, my first car, my high school -- and I assume much of this information can be had publicly as well. If I were to imagine trying to get this information on someone, I'd just call them or their family, pretend to be some High School Reunion Committee, and say "We are celebrating the class of 1987 at Shrub High" and they'd probably go "Oh no, I'm graduated in 1992 at Rose Garden High". Then reply "Oh really? I guess you're the wrong Joe Blow, I'm sorry for your trouble, thanks bye."
Multiple attack vectors over one secure password, ridiculous. I think GMail at least does the semi-sane thing and instead of security questions, uses a phone number to verify you if you would ever lose your password.
And that's what is needed, identity verification if the password fails. Not a cheap way to do that in an automated and very dumb way.
There was, also for years, really dumb advice such as to never write a password down. That is unrealistic given the number of passwords someone needs to know today and leads to using the same password again and again. Now, you don't have to write it unencrypted, you could use Rot13 or, even better, some other code of your devising -- but it's better than keeping all this in your head in this day and age.
Ok, but most of these mechanisms using security questions don't just tell you the new password or allow you to reset it. They email you the new password. So unless the hacker has access to your email, guessing your security questions won't do much good. If a site is allowing you to reset your password directly, then that's obviously a security risk. But I don't think this is how it's usually done.
