have trademarked terms like Always/Already Listening and Rackets
The idea of emotional Rackets was used (invented? not sure) by Eric Berne in his 1973 book What do you say after you say hello?, which is a posthumously published sequel to the much more famous Games people play. (Both are strongly recommended, but read the Games first and the Hello second; the latter assumes familiarity with the former.)
The idea of “narratives” is… on one hand, meaningful and useful in proper context, and we should probably notice it way more often… on the other hand, easily abused as a fully general counter-argument and thought-stopper. Like, whatever you say, I can put it into quotation marks and dismiss it by saying: “this is a narrative”. But, if you think about it, the same could be done the other way round: whatever the Landmark coach says, is also a narrative. The entire teaching of Landmark is a narrative. Of course, the difference is that when the coach dismisses your narrative, the group will laugh with him… but if you tried the same, the group would not support you, because ultimately, listening to the Landmark narrative is what you all paid for.
Also, something being a narrative doesn’t imply that it is false or useless. You can put true and useful statements into quotation marks, too. Narratives are, using LW lingo, cached thoughts; conclusions computed in the past, which may be incorrect or obsolete, so it makes sense to notice them as such, and re-evaluate. But if you just blindly throw them away, you may be also throwing away some useful information. If the coach insists that you defend the idea, verbally, from the first principles, this limits you to only using legible knowledge (actually, only the subset of it that would be socially accepted by the coach and the group), dismissing your experience and intuition and other pre-verbal knowledge (what your neural network has learned, without putting it into words; vague shapes you have noticed after looking at hundreds of data points). Yes, your pre-verbal knowledge may be wrong, too. But “publicly verbally defensible, before an audience with a strong leader” is not the same as “true”.
What is wrong with the pressure to evangelize a good thing? Well, the fact that at this moment you only know that the thing sounds good. More precisely: it sounds good to a person who just heard it, under strong group pressure, and didn’t have time to think about it, and more importantly, to apply it in real life. The proper way is: “learn, test, share”, but you are pressured to skip the test and go “learn, share”. (In my experience, this is evidence that the test is likely to fail; therefore the pressure to share before testing.) You are pressured to provide a false testimony: to testify that something works, when all you know is that it sounds plausible and feels convincing.
Sometimes increased productivity is achieved by neglecting the other aspects of your life. For example, if you quit your job and focus on whatever it is you wanted to focus at, you get extra 8 hours a day. (Then you run out of money.) If you stop spending time with your friends and family, you get even more time to devote to your goals. In short term, you can also reduce sleep. Later, the consequences will catch you. Maybe you will find a new balance that works better for you: you will start again sleeping regularly, meet some of your friends but maybe abandon others, find a way to make money using your new project. Or maybe you will return to your old life, because the new way was unsustainable. My point here is: don’t celebrate the change before you know that the new balance is sustainable in long term.
(The same applies to companies. Inspired by similar teachings, you can increase your company productivity in short term by adopting some cultish teaching, motivating your employees by psychological manipulation, making them work overtime, measuring everything and pushing them to work faster… and your first quarter will probably be quite profitable. Then, everyone who can find another job will quit, and the remaining ones will burn out and start making mistakes at work. By that time, you have probably already paid lots of money to the coaches, and recommended them to all your business contacts.)
(Maybe there is an analogy with bipolar disorder, that the seminar can induce a state analogical to the manic episodes: euphoria, increase of energy and psychomotoric activity, increased self-esteem, grandiosity, disinhibited social behavior, increased goal-oriented activity, feeling unstoppable… but also impaired judgment, high-risk behavior, excessive spending.)
Okay… I have focused too much on the negative here. I tried to provide a counter-weight to the Landmark narrative. For the record, I agree with the idea that people have many wrong cached thoughts, that improvements are probably possible, and easier under group pressure. Many techniques used by Landmark are probably useful. I would love to learn them and use them; ideally in a setting where I am not being brainwashed into giving all my money and friends to Landmark. That said, I expect the actual results would be… better than control group, but less impressive than advertised. Because some changes would be unsustainable in long term, some projects would fail because they also depended on luck, and generally because of the planning fallacy. It might work better if multiple rationalists attended the course together and then remained in regular contact with each other (and with other rationalists who did not attend the course), providing to each other the social pressure (to avoid the situation where the only way to re-live the experience is to pay for another expensive seminar) but also sanity checks. Personally, I would also precommit to not evangelize the teachings, until I actually used them for several months and verified that they actually improved my life; doing otherwise would feel dishonest.
The idea of emotional Rackets was used (invented? not sure) by Eric Berne in his 1973 book What do you say after you say hello?, which is a posthumously published sequel to the much more famous Games people play. (Both are strongly recommended, but read the Games first and the Hello second; the latter assumes familiarity with the former.)
The idea of “narratives” is… on one hand, meaningful and useful in proper context, and we should probably notice it way more often… on the other hand, easily abused as a fully general counter-argument and thought-stopper. Like, whatever you say, I can put it into quotation marks and dismiss it by saying: “this is a narrative”. But, if you think about it, the same could be done the other way round: whatever the Landmark coach says, is also a narrative. The entire teaching of Landmark is a narrative. Of course, the difference is that when the coach dismisses your narrative, the group will laugh with him… but if you tried the same, the group would not support you, because ultimately, listening to the Landmark narrative is what you all paid for.
Also, something being a narrative doesn’t imply that it is false or useless. You can put true and useful statements into quotation marks, too. Narratives are, using LW lingo, cached thoughts; conclusions computed in the past, which may be incorrect or obsolete, so it makes sense to notice them as such, and re-evaluate. But if you just blindly throw them away, you may be also throwing away some useful information. If the coach insists that you defend the idea, verbally, from the first principles, this limits you to only using legible knowledge (actually, only the subset of it that would be socially accepted by the coach and the group), dismissing your experience and intuition and other pre-verbal knowledge (what your neural network has learned, without putting it into words; vague shapes you have noticed after looking at hundreds of data points). Yes, your pre-verbal knowledge may be wrong, too. But “publicly verbally defensible, before an audience with a strong leader” is not the same as “true”.
What is wrong with the pressure to evangelize a good thing? Well, the fact that at this moment you only know that the thing sounds good. More precisely: it sounds good to a person who just heard it, under strong group pressure, and didn’t have time to think about it, and more importantly, to apply it in real life. The proper way is: “learn, test, share”, but you are pressured to skip the test and go “learn, share”. (In my experience, this is evidence that the test is likely to fail; therefore the pressure to share before testing.) You are pressured to provide a false testimony: to testify that something works, when all you know is that it sounds plausible and feels convincing.
Sometimes increased productivity is achieved by neglecting the other aspects of your life. For example, if you quit your job and focus on whatever it is you wanted to focus at, you get extra 8 hours a day. (Then you run out of money.) If you stop spending time with your friends and family, you get even more time to devote to your goals. In short term, you can also reduce sleep. Later, the consequences will catch you. Maybe you will find a new balance that works better for you: you will start again sleeping regularly, meet some of your friends but maybe abandon others, find a way to make money using your new project. Or maybe you will return to your old life, because the new way was unsustainable. My point here is: don’t celebrate the change before you know that the new balance is sustainable in long term.
(The same applies to companies. Inspired by similar teachings, you can increase your company productivity in short term by adopting some cultish teaching, motivating your employees by psychological manipulation, making them work overtime, measuring everything and pushing them to work faster… and your first quarter will probably be quite profitable. Then, everyone who can find another job will quit, and the remaining ones will burn out and start making mistakes at work. By that time, you have probably already paid lots of money to the coaches, and recommended them to all your business contacts.)
(Maybe there is an analogy with bipolar disorder, that the seminar can induce a state analogical to the manic episodes: euphoria, increase of energy and psychomotoric activity, increased self-esteem, grandiosity, disinhibited social behavior, increased goal-oriented activity, feeling unstoppable… but also impaired judgment, high-risk behavior, excessive spending.)
Okay… I have focused too much on the negative here. I tried to provide a counter-weight to the Landmark narrative. For the record, I agree with the idea that people have many wrong cached thoughts, that improvements are probably possible, and easier under group pressure. Many techniques used by Landmark are probably useful. I would love to learn them and use them; ideally in a setting where I am not being brainwashed into giving all my money and friends to Landmark. That said, I expect the actual results would be… better than control group, but less impressive than advertised. Because some changes would be unsustainable in long term, some projects would fail because they also depended on luck, and generally because of the planning fallacy. It might work better if multiple rationalists attended the course together and then remained in regular contact with each other (and with other rationalists who did not attend the course), providing to each other the social pressure (to avoid the situation where the only way to re-live the experience is to pay for another expensive seminar) but also sanity checks. Personally, I would also precommit to not evangelize the teachings, until I actually used them for several months and verified that they actually improved my life; doing otherwise would feel dishonest.