I referred only to people who have some systematized winning.
I did assume you held the position that these people are somehow identifiable. If your point was merely “there exist some people out there who are systematic winners”… then I’m not sure I get your point.
How is “snake oil charlatan” connected to having things go well and wanting to capitalize on it?
Because “I figured out the key to success, I succeeded, and now I want to share my secrets with you” is the story that sells, regardless of actual prior circumstance or method.
Would you want to be taught by someone who didn’t have things go well for them? And if they didn’t want to capitalize on it in some fashion, why would they be teaching it?
I don’t think you understand why I bring up charlatans. This is a signaling problem. You’re right… I would demand some kind of evidence of success from a teacher. But if these prerequisites are at all easier to come by than the real thing, there’s going to be a lot of faking going on.
If you break down what you’ve just said, it should be easy to see why I think this sort of “thinking” is just irrationally-motivated reaction—the firing off “boo” lights in response to certain buttons being pushed.
My, you are confident in your theories of human motivation. You said (minus subsequent disclaimers, because this is what I was responding to), “teachers of the practical arts [...] have the comfort of systematized winning”. It seems to me that this “comfort” is claimed far out of proportion to its actual incidence, which bears very directly on the whole issue of distinguishing “useful” signal from noise. If you do have legitimate insights, you’re certainly not making yourself any more accessible by pointing to others in the field. If your point was merely “some deluded people win”… then I’m not sure I get your point.
No—I’m saying that the simplest way to assess belief U is to try acting as if it were true. In fact, the ONLY way to assess the usefulness of U is to have one or more persons act as if it were true. Because without that, you aren’t really testing U, you’re testing U+X, where X is whatever else it is you believe about U, like, “I’m going to see if this works”, or “I think this is stupid”.
This response isn’t really addressing my point of contention, with the result that I mostly agree with the rest of your comment (sans last paragraph). So I’ll try to explain what I mean by “T”. You say “skepticism is useful before you do something”, and it’s precisely this sort of skepticism that T represents. You leapt straight into explaining how I’ve just got to embrace U in order to make it work, but that doesn’t address why I’m even considering U in the first place. Hence “I first need a true belief T that U is useful”. Pardon me for a moment while I look into how useful it is to believe I’m a goat.
The irrational fear I keep talking about here is people being attached to the idea that if they refrain from self-questioning of this type, that they will suddenly become delusional theists or something.
Again, I think you’re overstating this fear, but now that you mention theism, I can’t help but notice that all of the arguments you just gave (that I pretty much agree with) for unquestioningly accepting a belief you’ve already decided to experimentally swallow… work equally well for theism. So what is it exactly, if not some flavor of T, that allows me to distinguish between the two?
You’re right… I would demand some kind of evidence of success from a teacher. But if these prerequisites are at all easier to come by than the real thing, there’s going to be a lot of faking going on.
Well, in the case of at least marketing and pickup, you can generally observe the teacher’s own results, as long as you’re being taught directly. For acting, you could observe the ability of the teacher’s students. Copywriting teachers (people who teach the writing of direct marketing ads) can generally give sales statistics comparisons of their improvements over established “controls”. (Btw, in the direct marketing industry, the “control” is just whatever ad you’re currently using; it’s not a control condition where you don’t advertise or run a placebo ad!)
IOW, the practical arts of persuasion and belief do involve at least some empirical basis. One might quibble about what great or excellent acting or pickup might be, but anybody can tell bad acting or failed pickup. And marketing is measurable in dollars spent and actions taken. Marketers don’t always understand math or how to use it, but they’re motivated to use statistical tools for split-testing.
If your point was merely “some deluded people win”… then I’m not sure I get your point.
The ancient Greeks thought fire was an element, but that didn’t stop them from using fire. Developing a practical model and a “true” theory are quite often independent things. My point is that you don’t need a true theory to build useful models, or to learn and use them. And in most practical arts related to belief or persuasion, you will need to “act as if” certain beliefs are true, whether or not they are, because those beliefs nonetheless represent a model for reproducing behaviors that produce results under some set of circumstances.
For example, Seth Roberts’ theory of calorie-flavor association is probably not entirely true—but acting as if it were true produces results for some people under some circumstances. This represents progress, not failure.
“I first need a true belief T that U is useful”.
Right—and my process for that, with respect to self-help techniques, is mainly to look at the claims for a technique, and sort for ones that can be empirically verified and claim comparable or improved benefits relative to the ones that I’ve already tried. Assuming that the cost in time to learn the technique is reasonable (say, a few hours), and it can be implemented and tested quickly, that’s sufficient T probability for me to engage in a test.
I can’t help but notice that all of the arguments you just gave (that I pretty much agree with) for unquestioningly accepting a belief you’ve already decided to experimentally swallow… work equally well for theism. So what is it exactly, if not some flavor of T, that allows me to distinguish between the two?
Religion doesn’t claim repeatable empirical benefits—in fact they pretty carefully disclaim any. Zen is one of the few religions that contain procedures with claimed empirical benefits (e.g. meditation producing improved concentration and peace of mind), and those claims have actually held up pretty well under scientific investigation as well as my personal experimentation.
So, for me at least, your “T” consists mostly of claimed empirical benefits via a repeatable procedure capable of very short evaluation times—preferably suitable for immediate evaluation of whether something worked or it didn’t.
I do have two things that most people evaluating such things don’t. At first, I tried a lot of these same techniques before I understood monoidealism and somatic markers, and couldn’t get them to work. But once I had even the rudiments of those ideas—not as theory but as experience—I got many of the same things to work quite well.
That suggests very strongly to me that the major hidden variable in interpersonal variation of self-help technique applicability has less to do with the techniques themselves or any inherent property of the learner, than whether or not they’ve learned to distinguish conscious and unconcsious thoughts, and their abstract conception of an emotion or event from from its physical representation as a body sensation or as an internal image or sound. Most people (IME) seem to naturally confuse their internal narration about their experiences, and the experiences themselves. (Sort of like in “Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain”, where people confuse their symbols or abstractions for faces and hair with what they’re actually seeing.)
Separating these things out are the primary skills I teach (as a vehicle to make other self-help techniques accessible) and many people require some sort of live feedback in order to learn them. There is some mild anecdotal evidence that prior experience with meditation helps—i.e. the students who pick them up faster seem somewhat more likely to report prior meditation experience. But I haven’t even tried to be rigorous about investigating that, since even non-meditators can learn the skill.
(Hm, now that I’ve written this, though, I wonder whether some of the Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain exercises might be helpful in teaching these skills. I’ll have to look into that.)
My, you are confident in your theories of human motivation.
If you look closely at what I said, I was explaining why I thought what I thought about your response, not saying that my thought was correct; I just wanted to explain why I had the impression that I did, not justify the impression or argue that it was actually true. That’s a subtlety that’s hard to convey in text, I suppose.
I did assume you held the position that these people are somehow identifiable. If your point was merely “there exist some people out there who are systematic winners”… then I’m not sure I get your point.
Because “I figured out the key to success, I succeeded, and now I want to share my secrets with you” is the story that sells, regardless of actual prior circumstance or method.
I don’t think you understand why I bring up charlatans. This is a signaling problem. You’re right… I would demand some kind of evidence of success from a teacher. But if these prerequisites are at all easier to come by than the real thing, there’s going to be a lot of faking going on.
My, you are confident in your theories of human motivation. You said (minus subsequent disclaimers, because this is what I was responding to), “teachers of the practical arts [...] have the comfort of systematized winning”. It seems to me that this “comfort” is claimed far out of proportion to its actual incidence, which bears very directly on the whole issue of distinguishing “useful” signal from noise. If you do have legitimate insights, you’re certainly not making yourself any more accessible by pointing to others in the field. If your point was merely “some deluded people win”… then I’m not sure I get your point.
This response isn’t really addressing my point of contention, with the result that I mostly agree with the rest of your comment (sans last paragraph). So I’ll try to explain what I mean by “T”. You say “skepticism is useful before you do something”, and it’s precisely this sort of skepticism that T represents. You leapt straight into explaining how I’ve just got to embrace U in order to make it work, but that doesn’t address why I’m even considering U in the first place. Hence “I first need a true belief T that U is useful”. Pardon me for a moment while I look into how useful it is to believe I’m a goat.
Again, I think you’re overstating this fear, but now that you mention theism, I can’t help but notice that all of the arguments you just gave (that I pretty much agree with) for unquestioningly accepting a belief you’ve already decided to experimentally swallow… work equally well for theism. So what is it exactly, if not some flavor of T, that allows me to distinguish between the two?
Well, in the case of at least marketing and pickup, you can generally observe the teacher’s own results, as long as you’re being taught directly. For acting, you could observe the ability of the teacher’s students. Copywriting teachers (people who teach the writing of direct marketing ads) can generally give sales statistics comparisons of their improvements over established “controls”. (Btw, in the direct marketing industry, the “control” is just whatever ad you’re currently using; it’s not a control condition where you don’t advertise or run a placebo ad!)
IOW, the practical arts of persuasion and belief do involve at least some empirical basis. One might quibble about what great or excellent acting or pickup might be, but anybody can tell bad acting or failed pickup. And marketing is measurable in dollars spent and actions taken. Marketers don’t always understand math or how to use it, but they’re motivated to use statistical tools for split-testing.
The ancient Greeks thought fire was an element, but that didn’t stop them from using fire. Developing a practical model and a “true” theory are quite often independent things. My point is that you don’t need a true theory to build useful models, or to learn and use them. And in most practical arts related to belief or persuasion, you will need to “act as if” certain beliefs are true, whether or not they are, because those beliefs nonetheless represent a model for reproducing behaviors that produce results under some set of circumstances.
For example, Seth Roberts’ theory of calorie-flavor association is probably not entirely true—but acting as if it were true produces results for some people under some circumstances. This represents progress, not failure.
Right—and my process for that, with respect to self-help techniques, is mainly to look at the claims for a technique, and sort for ones that can be empirically verified and claim comparable or improved benefits relative to the ones that I’ve already tried. Assuming that the cost in time to learn the technique is reasonable (say, a few hours), and it can be implemented and tested quickly, that’s sufficient T probability for me to engage in a test.
Religion doesn’t claim repeatable empirical benefits—in fact they pretty carefully disclaim any. Zen is one of the few religions that contain procedures with claimed empirical benefits (e.g. meditation producing improved concentration and peace of mind), and those claims have actually held up pretty well under scientific investigation as well as my personal experimentation.
So, for me at least, your “T” consists mostly of claimed empirical benefits via a repeatable procedure capable of very short evaluation times—preferably suitable for immediate evaluation of whether something worked or it didn’t.
I do have two things that most people evaluating such things don’t. At first, I tried a lot of these same techniques before I understood monoidealism and somatic markers, and couldn’t get them to work. But once I had even the rudiments of those ideas—not as theory but as experience—I got many of the same things to work quite well.
That suggests very strongly to me that the major hidden variable in interpersonal variation of self-help technique applicability has less to do with the techniques themselves or any inherent property of the learner, than whether or not they’ve learned to distinguish conscious and unconcsious thoughts, and their abstract conception of an emotion or event from from its physical representation as a body sensation or as an internal image or sound. Most people (IME) seem to naturally confuse their internal narration about their experiences, and the experiences themselves. (Sort of like in “Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain”, where people confuse their symbols or abstractions for faces and hair with what they’re actually seeing.)
Separating these things out are the primary skills I teach (as a vehicle to make other self-help techniques accessible) and many people require some sort of live feedback in order to learn them. There is some mild anecdotal evidence that prior experience with meditation helps—i.e. the students who pick them up faster seem somewhat more likely to report prior meditation experience. But I haven’t even tried to be rigorous about investigating that, since even non-meditators can learn the skill.
(Hm, now that I’ve written this, though, I wonder whether some of the Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain exercises might be helpful in teaching these skills. I’ll have to look into that.)
If you look closely at what I said, I was explaining why I thought what I thought about your response, not saying that my thought was correct; I just wanted to explain why I had the impression that I did, not justify the impression or argue that it was actually true. That’s a subtlety that’s hard to convey in text, I suppose.