There are so many arguments trying to be had at once here that it’s making my head spin.
Here’s one. What do we mean by self-help?
I think by self-help Scott is thinking about becoming psychologically a well-adjusted person. But what I think Jacobian means by “rationalist self-help” is coming to a gears level understanding of how the world works to aid in becoming well-adapted. So while Scott is right that we shouldn’t expect rationalist self-help to be significantly better than other self-help techniques for becoming a well-adjusted person, Jacobian is right that rationalist self-help is an attempt to become both a well-adjusted person AND a person who participates in developing an understanding of how the world works.
So perhaps you want to learn how to navigate the space of relationships, but you also have this added constraint that you want the theory of how to navigate relationships to be part of a larger understanding of the universe, and not just some hanging chad of random methods without satisfactory explanations of how or why they work. That is to say, you are not willing to settle for unexamined common sense. If that is the case, then rationalist self-help is useful in a way that standard self-help is not.
A little addendum. This is not a new idea. Socrates thought of philosophy as way of life, and tried to found a philosophy which would not only help people discover more truths, but also make them better, braver, and more just people. Stoics and Epicureans continued the tradition of philosophy as a way of life. Since then, there have always been people who have made a way of life out of applying the methods of rationality to normal human endeavors, and human society since then has pretty much always been complicated enough to marginally reward them for the effort.
There are so many arguments trying to be had at once here that it’s making my head spin.
Here’s one. What do we mean by self-help?
I think by self-help Scott is thinking about becoming psychologically a well-adjusted person. But what I think Jacobian means by “rationalist self-help” is coming to a gears level understanding of how the world works to aid in becoming well-adapted. So while Scott is right that we shouldn’t expect rationalist self-help to be significantly better than other self-help techniques for becoming a well-adjusted person, Jacobian is right that rationalist self-help is an attempt to become both a well-adjusted person AND a person who participates in developing an understanding of how the world works.
So perhaps you want to learn how to navigate the space of relationships, but you also have this added constraint that you want the theory of how to navigate relationships to be part of a larger understanding of the universe, and not just some hanging chad of random methods without satisfactory explanations of how or why they work. That is to say, you are not willing to settle for unexamined common sense. If that is the case, then rationalist self-help is useful in a way that standard self-help is not.
A little addendum. This is not a new idea. Socrates thought of philosophy as way of life, and tried to found a philosophy which would not only help people discover more truths, but also make them better, braver, and more just people. Stoics and Epicureans continued the tradition of philosophy as a way of life. Since then, there have always been people who have made a way of life out of applying the methods of rationality to normal human endeavors, and human society since then has pretty much always been complicated enough to marginally reward them for the effort.