Okay… first, “shut up and do the impossible” may sound like it has a nice ring to you, but there’s something specific I mean by it—a specific place in the hierarchy of enthusiasm, tsuyoku naritai, isshokenmei, make an extraordinary effort, and shut up and do the impossible. You’re talking enthusiasm or tsuyoku naritai. “Shut up and do the impossible” is for “reduce qualia to atoms” or “build a Friendly AI based on rigorous decision theory before anyone manages to throw the first non-rigorous one together”. It is not for testing P. J. Eby’s theories of willpower. That would come under isshokenmei at the highest and sounds more like ordinary enthusiasm to me.
Second, there are, literally, more than ten million people giving advice about akrasia on the Internet. I have no reason to pay attention to your advice in particular at its present level of rigor; if I’m interested in making another try at these things, I’ll go looking at such papers as have been written in the field. You, I’m sure, have lots of clients and these clients are selected to be enthusiastic about you; keeping a sense of perspective in the face of that large selection effect would be an advanced rationalist sort of discipline wherein knowledge of an abstract statistical fact overcame large social sensory inputs, and you arrived very late in the OBLW sequence and haven’t caught up on your reading. I can understand why you don’t understand why people are paying little attention to you here, when all the feedback on your blog suggests that you are a tremendously intelligent person whose techniques work great. But to me it just sounds like standard self-help with no deeper understanding. “Just try my things!” you say, but there are a thousand others to whom I would rather allocate my effort than you. You are not the only person in the universe ever to write about productivity, and I have other people to whom I would turn for advice well before you, if I was going to make another effort.
It is your failure to understand why the achievements of others are important—why a science paper reporting the result of one experiment on willpower, has higher priority for examination by me than you and all your brilliant ideas and all your enthusiasm about them and all the anecdotal evidence about how it worked for your clients, that is your failure to understand the different standards this community lives by—and your failure to understand why science works, and why it is not just pointless formality-masturbation but necessary. Yes, there’s a lot of statistical masturbation out there. But conducting a controlled experiment and quantifying the result, instead of just going by anecdotal evidence about what worked for who, really is necessary. This is not generally appreciated by human beings and appreciating that fact, that it is counterintuitively necessary to do science, that it is not obvious but it really is necessary, is one of the entrance passes to the secret siblinghood of rationalists. This is perhaps something I should write about in more detail, because it’s one of those things so basic that I tend to take it for granted instead of writing about it.
As for your idea that others’ attention to pay attention to you in particular indicates a willpower failure on their part… that’s what we call “egocentric biases in availability”, namely, you think you are a much larger part of others’ mental universe than in fact you are. So much credibility as to try your suggestion instead of a million other suggestions is something that has to be earned. You haven’t earned it, only berated people for not listening to you. There are communities where that works, like self-help, where people are used to being berated, but in the vaster outside universe it will get you nowhere. You have to see the universe as others see it in order to get them to listen to you, and this involves understanding that they do not see you the way you see yourself.. To me you are simply one voice among millions.
But conducting a controlled experiment and quantifying the result, instead of just going by anecdotal evidence about what worked for who, really is necessary.
Necessary for determining true theories, yes. Necessary for one individual to improve their own condition, no. If a mechanic uses the controlled experiment in place of his or her own observation and testing, that is a major fail.
“Just try my things!” you say,
I’ve been saying to try something. Anything. Just test something. Yes, I’ve suggested some ways for testing things, and some things to test. But most of them are not MY things, as I’ve said over and over and over.
At this point I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that it’s impossible for me to discuss anything related to this topic on LW without this pervasive frame that I am trying to convince people to “try my things”… when in fact I’ve bent over backwards to point as much as possible to other people’s things. Believe it or not, I didn’t come here to promote my work or business.
I don’t care if you test my things. They’re not “my” things anyway. I’m annoyed that you think I don’t understand science, because it shows you’re rounding to the nearest cliche.
I actually advocate using a much higher standard of empirical testing of change techniques than is normally used in measuring psychological processes: observation of somatic markers (see Wikipedia re: the “somatic marker hypothesis”, if you haven’t previously).
Unlike self-reporting via questionnaire, many somatic markers can be treated as objective measures of results, because they are externally visible (facial expressions, posture change, etc.) and thus can be observed and measured by third parties. We can all agree whether someone flinches or grimaces or hangs their head in response to a statement—we are not dependent on the person themselves to tell us their internal reaction, nor do we have to sort through their conscious attempts to make their initial reaction look better.
True, I do not have a quantified scale for these markers, but it is nonetheless quantifiable—and it’s a direct outgrowth of a promising current neuroscience hypothesis. We can certainly observe whether a response is repeatable, and whether it is changed by any given intervention.
If someone wanted to turn that into controlled science, they’d have a lot of work ahead of them, but it could be done, and it would be a good idea. The catch, of course, is that you’d need to validate a somatic marker scale against some other, more subjective scale that’s already accepted, possibly in the context of some therapy that’s also relatively-validated. It seems to me that there are some chicken-and-egg problems there, but nothing that can’t be done in principle.
When I advocate that people try things, I mean that they should employ more-objective means of measurement—and on far-shorter timescales—than are traditionally used in the self-help field.
When I test some newfangled self-help modality (e.g. EFT, Sedona, etc.) it usually doesn’t take more than 30 minutes after learning the technique to know if it’s any good or not, because I have a way of measuring it that doesn’t depend on me doing any guessing. Either I still flinch or I don’t. Either I get a sinking feeling in my gut or I don’t. I know right then, in less time than it would take to list all the holes in their crazy pseudoscience theories about how the technique is supposed to work. (EFT, for example, works for certain things but its theory is on a par with Anton Mesmer’s theory of animal magnetism.)
I don’t know how you can get any more objective than that, at the level of individual testing. So, if there is anything that I’ve consistently advocated here, is that it’s possible to test self-help techniques by way of empirical observation of somatic marker responses both “before” and “after”. But even this is not “my” idea.
The somatic marker hypothesis is cutting-edge neuroscience—it still has a long way to go to reach the status of accepted theory. That makes using it as a testing method a bit more bleeding edge.
But for individual use, it has the advantage of being eminently testable.
Regarding the rest of your comment, I don’t see how I can respond, since as far as I can tell, you’re attacking things I never said… and if I had said them, I would agree with your impeccable critique of them. But since I didn’t say them… I don’t see what else I can possibly say.
Okay… first, “shut up and do the impossible” may sound like it has a nice ring to you, but there’s something specific I mean by it—a specific place in the hierarchy of enthusiasm, tsuyoku naritai, isshokenmei, make an extraordinary effort, and shut up and do the impossible. You’re talking enthusiasm or tsuyoku naritai. “Shut up and do the impossible” is for “reduce qualia to atoms” or “build a Friendly AI based on rigorous decision theory before anyone manages to throw the first non-rigorous one together”. It is not for testing P. J. Eby’s theories of willpower. That would come under isshokenmei at the highest and sounds more like ordinary enthusiasm to me.
Second, there are, literally, more than ten million people giving advice about akrasia on the Internet. I have no reason to pay attention to your advice in particular at its present level of rigor; if I’m interested in making another try at these things, I’ll go looking at such papers as have been written in the field. You, I’m sure, have lots of clients and these clients are selected to be enthusiastic about you; keeping a sense of perspective in the face of that large selection effect would be an advanced rationalist sort of discipline wherein knowledge of an abstract statistical fact overcame large social sensory inputs, and you arrived very late in the OBLW sequence and haven’t caught up on your reading. I can understand why you don’t understand why people are paying little attention to you here, when all the feedback on your blog suggests that you are a tremendously intelligent person whose techniques work great. But to me it just sounds like standard self-help with no deeper understanding. “Just try my things!” you say, but there are a thousand others to whom I would rather allocate my effort than you. You are not the only person in the universe ever to write about productivity, and I have other people to whom I would turn for advice well before you, if I was going to make another effort.
It is your failure to understand why the achievements of others are important—why a science paper reporting the result of one experiment on willpower, has higher priority for examination by me than you and all your brilliant ideas and all your enthusiasm about them and all the anecdotal evidence about how it worked for your clients, that is your failure to understand the different standards this community lives by—and your failure to understand why science works, and why it is not just pointless formality-masturbation but necessary. Yes, there’s a lot of statistical masturbation out there. But conducting a controlled experiment and quantifying the result, instead of just going by anecdotal evidence about what worked for who, really is necessary. This is not generally appreciated by human beings and appreciating that fact, that it is counterintuitively necessary to do science, that it is not obvious but it really is necessary, is one of the entrance passes to the secret siblinghood of rationalists. This is perhaps something I should write about in more detail, because it’s one of those things so basic that I tend to take it for granted instead of writing about it.
As for your idea that others’ attention to pay attention to you in particular indicates a willpower failure on their part… that’s what we call “egocentric biases in availability”, namely, you think you are a much larger part of others’ mental universe than in fact you are. So much credibility as to try your suggestion instead of a million other suggestions is something that has to be earned. You haven’t earned it, only berated people for not listening to you. There are communities where that works, like self-help, where people are used to being berated, but in the vaster outside universe it will get you nowhere. You have to see the universe as others see it in order to get them to listen to you, and this involves understanding that they do not see you the way you see yourself.. To me you are simply one voice among millions.
Necessary for determining true theories, yes. Necessary for one individual to improve their own condition, no. If a mechanic uses the controlled experiment in place of his or her own observation and testing, that is a major fail.
I’ve been saying to try something. Anything. Just test something. Yes, I’ve suggested some ways for testing things, and some things to test. But most of them are not MY things, as I’ve said over and over and over.
At this point I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that it’s impossible for me to discuss anything related to this topic on LW without this pervasive frame that I am trying to convince people to “try my things”… when in fact I’ve bent over backwards to point as much as possible to other people’s things. Believe it or not, I didn’t come here to promote my work or business.
I don’t care if you test my things. They’re not “my” things anyway. I’m annoyed that you think I don’t understand science, because it shows you’re rounding to the nearest cliche.
I actually advocate using a much higher standard of empirical testing of change techniques than is normally used in measuring psychological processes: observation of somatic markers (see Wikipedia re: the “somatic marker hypothesis”, if you haven’t previously).
Unlike self-reporting via questionnaire, many somatic markers can be treated as objective measures of results, because they are externally visible (facial expressions, posture change, etc.) and thus can be observed and measured by third parties. We can all agree whether someone flinches or grimaces or hangs their head in response to a statement—we are not dependent on the person themselves to tell us their internal reaction, nor do we have to sort through their conscious attempts to make their initial reaction look better.
True, I do not have a quantified scale for these markers, but it is nonetheless quantifiable—and it’s a direct outgrowth of a promising current neuroscience hypothesis. We can certainly observe whether a response is repeatable, and whether it is changed by any given intervention.
If someone wanted to turn that into controlled science, they’d have a lot of work ahead of them, but it could be done, and it would be a good idea. The catch, of course, is that you’d need to validate a somatic marker scale against some other, more subjective scale that’s already accepted, possibly in the context of some therapy that’s also relatively-validated. It seems to me that there are some chicken-and-egg problems there, but nothing that can’t be done in principle.
When I advocate that people try things, I mean that they should employ more-objective means of measurement—and on far-shorter timescales—than are traditionally used in the self-help field.
When I test some newfangled self-help modality (e.g. EFT, Sedona, etc.) it usually doesn’t take more than 30 minutes after learning the technique to know if it’s any good or not, because I have a way of measuring it that doesn’t depend on me doing any guessing. Either I still flinch or I don’t. Either I get a sinking feeling in my gut or I don’t. I know right then, in less time than it would take to list all the holes in their crazy pseudoscience theories about how the technique is supposed to work. (EFT, for example, works for certain things but its theory is on a par with Anton Mesmer’s theory of animal magnetism.)
I don’t know how you can get any more objective than that, at the level of individual testing. So, if there is anything that I’ve consistently advocated here, is that it’s possible to test self-help techniques by way of empirical observation of somatic marker responses both “before” and “after”. But even this is not “my” idea.
The somatic marker hypothesis is cutting-edge neuroscience—it still has a long way to go to reach the status of accepted theory. That makes using it as a testing method a bit more bleeding edge.
But for individual use, it has the advantage of being eminently testable.
Regarding the rest of your comment, I don’t see how I can respond, since as far as I can tell, you’re attacking things I never said… and if I had said them, I would agree with your impeccable critique of them. But since I didn’t say them… I don’t see what else I can possibly say.