If you think that the Shangri-La diet “promotes healthy eating” and is scientifically-based, what’s wrong with promoting it as ‘one weird trick to effortlessly lose fat’? It has the latter as an express goal, and is certainly, erm, weird enough.
what’s wrong with promoting it as ‘one weird trick to effortlessly lose fat’?
What’s wrong is that you are reinforcing the “grab the shiniest thing which promises you the most” mentality and as soon as the Stuff-Your-Face-With-Cookies diet promises you losing fat TWICE AS FAST!!eleven! the Shangri-La diet will get defenestrated as not good enough.
the Shangri-La diet will get defenestrated as not good enough.
See, the difference is that the Shangri-La diet has some scientific backing, which the Stuff-Your-Face-With-Cookies diet conspicuously lacks. So, the former will win in any real contest, at least among people who are sufficiently rationally-minded[1]. Except that it won’t, if you can’t promote your message effectively. This is where your initial pitch matters.
[1] (People who aren’t rationally-minded won’t care about ‘rationality’, of course, so there’s little hope for them anyway.)
If you use the word scientific that way I think you lose a quite valuable word. I consider NLP to be extrapolated from evidence. I even have seen it tested directly a variety of times.
At the same time I don’t consider it to be scientific in the popular usage of ‘scientific’.
For discussion on LW I think Keith Stanovich criteria’s for science are good:
Three of the most important [criteria of science] are that (1) science employs methods of systematic empiricism; (2) it aims for knowledge that is publicly verifiable; and (3) it seeks problems that are empirically solvable and that yield testable theories.
If you think that the Shangri-La diet “promotes healthy eating” and is scientifically-based, what’s wrong with promoting it as ‘one weird trick to effortlessly lose fat’? It has the latter as an express goal, and is certainly, erm, weird enough.
What’s wrong is that you are reinforcing the “grab the shiniest thing which promises you the most” mentality and as soon as the Stuff-Your-Face-With-Cookies diet promises you losing fat TWICE AS FAST!!eleven! the Shangri-La diet will get defenestrated as not good enough.
See, the difference is that the Shangri-La diet has some scientific backing, which the Stuff-Your-Face-With-Cookies diet conspicuously lacks. So, the former will win in any real contest, at least among people who are sufficiently rationally-minded[1]. Except that it won’t, if you can’t promote your message effectively. This is where your initial pitch matters.
[1] (People who aren’t rationally-minded won’t care about ‘rationality’, of course, so there’s little hope for them anyway.)
I do believe that it works, but “scientific backing”? Did I miss some new study on the Shangri-La diet, or what are you talking about?
People often use “scientific backing” to mean “this extrapolates reasonably from evidence” rather than “this has been tested directly.”
If you use the word scientific that way I think you lose a quite valuable word. I consider NLP to be extrapolated from evidence. I even have seen it tested directly a variety of times. At the same time I don’t consider it to be scientific in the popular usage of ‘scientific’.
For discussion on LW I think Keith Stanovich criteria’s for science are good:
Agreed, good definition of science-backed.