OK, so starting with the foundational belief of NVC, it’s important that learners of NVC not think any of that is true, and not to be misled by its association with the sound methods it apparently underlies. I haven’t seen any advocate of NVC say as much, but I haven’t delved into it.
Er… I think you misunderstand me. Most people don’t give a flying football whether that statement is true or not. The functional purpose of the statement is (IMO) to encourage people to rethink an existing bias to assume that certain classes of communication are normal, natural, expected, and/or the only available option.
So, the statement serves a functional purpose, and if it’s thrown out, it needs to be replaced with something else. I am not saying that people should be taught to consider it untrue, and I doubt that the NVC folks do so. I’m just saying that if I were to teach NVC, I would ideally replace that statement with something that was both more true and more useful.
All I’m trying to say here is that it’s silly for a rationalist (whose goal is to acquire skill in a given field) to discard a set of methods from serious consideration or study, simply on the basis of obviously-wrong and obviously-stupid theories. (If Richard Wiseman had done that, we wouldn’t have luck research, for example.)
Why should we expect the system to do a job of accumulating an effective set of methods that’s not easily improvable, if its teachers and practitioners believe these falsities? If they believe them, why are we confident they haven’t made erroneous, harmful extrapolations based on the theory being true?
For the same reasons we expect candlemakers to be able to make candles, even when they believed pholgiston exists. And that is because, generally speaking, theories follow successful practice of some kind.
For example, Anton Mesmer noticed that if he did certain things, he could get people to behave in odd ways. He then made up a nonsense theory (“animal magnetism”) to explain this peculiarity. The practice of hypnotism still exists today, despite a near-complete absence of an epistemically-sound theory for its method of operation.
Theories preceding practices are exceedingly rare, because people don’t usually make up their theories out of nothing; generally, they make them up to explain their observations. And it is these observations that a rationalist should concern themselves with, rather than the theories that were made up to explain them.
While their system is optimized for slightly different goals than NVC, HNP includes NVC’s goals
HNP includes the goal of becoming a more compassionate person?
[Other HNP vs. NVC stuff]
I think you’re still mistaking me for an advocate of NVC, or someone trying to compare these two sets of practices. My sole purpose in this thread is to correct the all-too-common mis-perception that rationalists should discard bodies of practical knowledge that are packaged with verbal falsities. Such an attitude is poisonous to progress, since it needlessly discards quite a lot of otherwise perfectly-usable evidence and observations.
Most people don’t give a flying football whether that statement is true or not.
I don’t directly care whether they care about it or not, I care about the belief’s effect, regardless of whether or not students care, and I am concerned.
Theories preceding practices are exceedingly rare,
Fortunately, non-stupid theories following practices abound, though they are obviously not universal.
[I]t’s silly...to discard a set of methods from serious consideration or study, simply on the basis of obviously-wrong and obviously-stupid theories.
It’s a good thing I didn’t discard them, and instead qualified my skepticism based on my familiarity with it. You criticize me for downgrading my estimation of the likelihood value is worth extracting from NVC (huge piles of ore abound around a mining town near where I grew up, one could easily acquire millions of dollars worth of silver, though only extract it at the cost of at least twice that in refining costs. Hence, the silver ore is worthless,) after I read their silly theories. If they had said brilliant things, independently derived but in accord with the latest and greatest science, would I have been right to upgrade its predicted utility in my mind?
Er… I think you misunderstand me. Most people don’t give a flying football whether that statement is true or not. The functional purpose of the statement is (IMO) to encourage people to rethink an existing bias to assume that certain classes of communication are normal, natural, expected, and/or the only available option.
So, the statement serves a functional purpose, and if it’s thrown out, it needs to be replaced with something else. I am not saying that people should be taught to consider it untrue, and I doubt that the NVC folks do so. I’m just saying that if I were to teach NVC, I would ideally replace that statement with something that was both more true and more useful.
All I’m trying to say here is that it’s silly for a rationalist (whose goal is to acquire skill in a given field) to discard a set of methods from serious consideration or study, simply on the basis of obviously-wrong and obviously-stupid theories. (If Richard Wiseman had done that, we wouldn’t have luck research, for example.)
For the same reasons we expect candlemakers to be able to make candles, even when they believed pholgiston exists. And that is because, generally speaking, theories follow successful practice of some kind.
For example, Anton Mesmer noticed that if he did certain things, he could get people to behave in odd ways. He then made up a nonsense theory (“animal magnetism”) to explain this peculiarity. The practice of hypnotism still exists today, despite a near-complete absence of an epistemically-sound theory for its method of operation.
Theories preceding practices are exceedingly rare, because people don’t usually make up their theories out of nothing; generally, they make them up to explain their observations. And it is these observations that a rationalist should concern themselves with, rather than the theories that were made up to explain them.
HNP includes the goal of becoming a more compassionate person?
I think you’re still mistaking me for an advocate of NVC, or someone trying to compare these two sets of practices. My sole purpose in this thread is to correct the all-too-common mis-perception that rationalists should discard bodies of practical knowledge that are packaged with verbal falsities. Such an attitude is poisonous to progress, since it needlessly discards quite a lot of otherwise perfectly-usable evidence and observations.
I don’t directly care whether they care about it or not, I care about the belief’s effect, regardless of whether or not students care, and I am concerned.
Fortunately, non-stupid theories following practices abound, though they are obviously not universal.
It’s a good thing I didn’t discard them, and instead qualified my skepticism based on my familiarity with it. You criticize me for downgrading my estimation of the likelihood value is worth extracting from NVC (huge piles of ore abound around a mining town near where I grew up, one could easily acquire millions of dollars worth of silver, though only extract it at the cost of at least twice that in refining costs. Hence, the silver ore is worthless,) after I read their silly theories. If they had said brilliant things, independently derived but in accord with the latest and greatest science, would I have been right to upgrade its predicted utility in my mind?