2) Is rationalist self-improvement superior over other approaches.
Let me start with the second issue.
Rob writes further down that the idea of TABs/implementation intentions was crystallized in 1999. It might be true for academia, but I don’t the concept is very different from the way “anchor” is used in NLP two decades earlier.
I would even think that the older NLP concepts are further developed. Both in terms of modeling behavior (book: The EMPRINT Method) and in terms of creating the new behavior (book: Know How: Guided Programs for Inventing Your Own Best Future).
I don’t think the part work that is done in NLP is fundamentally different then the Internal Double Crux that CFAR teaches. There are plenty of other self help frameworks that have their own way to do part work as well.
The rationalist community has a habit of valuing clarity and epistemic rigor that the NLP community unfortunately doesn’t have and there are cases where epistemic rigor is translating into better outcomes in cases where it’s easy to delude yourself.
I do believe that (1) is true but I don’t have good public evidence for that claim.
Somewhat unrelated, but one can think of RSI as being a *meta* self-improvement approach — it’s what allows you to pick and choose between many competing theories of self-improvement.
Aside from that, I didn’t read the academic literature on TAPs before trying them out. I tried them out and measured how well they work for me, and then decided when and where to use them. Good Rationalist advice is to know when to read meta-analyses and when to run a cheap experiment yourself :)
This seems correct to me. There are already self-improvement approaches to attempt and modify. Using epistemic rationality to achieve instrumental rationality is less about creating an RSI, and more about evaluating and improving upon existing SIs.
There seem to be two different questions:
1) Does self-improvement approaches work?
2) Is rationalist self-improvement superior over other approaches.
Let me start with the second issue.
Rob writes further down that the idea of TABs/implementation intentions was crystallized in 1999. It might be true for academia, but I don’t the concept is very different from the way “anchor” is used in NLP two decades earlier.
I would even think that the older NLP concepts are further developed. Both in terms of modeling behavior (book: The EMPRINT Method) and in terms of creating the new behavior (book: Know How: Guided Programs for Inventing Your Own Best Future).
I don’t think the part work that is done in NLP is fundamentally different then the Internal Double Crux that CFAR teaches. There are plenty of other self help frameworks that have their own way to do part work as well.
The rationalist community has a habit of valuing clarity and epistemic rigor that the NLP community unfortunately doesn’t have and there are cases where epistemic rigor is translating into better outcomes in cases where it’s easy to delude yourself.
I do believe that (1) is true but I don’t have good public evidence for that claim.
Somewhat unrelated, but one can think of RSI as being a *meta* self-improvement approach — it’s what allows you to pick and choose between many competing theories of self-improvement.
Aside from that, I didn’t read the academic literature on TAPs before trying them out. I tried them out and measured how well they work for me, and then decided when and where to use them. Good Rationalist advice is to know when to read meta-analyses and when to run a cheap experiment yourself :)
Given that RSI is an acronym that has already a fixed meaning, adding a new meaning is likely going to be confusing for a lot of readers.
This seems correct to me. There are already self-improvement approaches to attempt and modify. Using epistemic rationality to achieve instrumental rationality is less about creating an RSI, and more about evaluating and improving upon existing SIs.