Most scientific self help books in my experience piece together a bunch of studies of dubious quality and hang a narrative on it. When you investigate the studies a lot of them don’t hold up well methodologically. And that’s before you even get into the quality of the narrative.
So basically I’m agreeing with your point. Engaging with lots of self help material is doing some non-explicit stuff to the way you model the world that winds up helping. You remain stronger even if much of the underlying material winds up falsified. I’ve definitely noticed an improvement in my day to day epistemology as I’ve done more personal research and learned to quickly identify patterns that indicate something is likely bogus. I think this might just be that humans have consistent ways of dissembling when they know their point isn’t solid.
Engaging with lots of self help material is doing some non-explicit stuff to the way you model the world that winds up helping
Or, being the sort of person who engages with lots of self-help material does something. ;-) It might be that if you’re not that sort of person, reading a lot of it won’t help.
I’ve read gobs and gobs of self-help books, have literally hundreds in dead-trees form alone. I am not the sort of person that self-help books can help, though, because I’m generally more interested in learning and figuring things out than I am a faithful and uncritical implementer of the advice presented. If I were such a person, I would undoubtedly have benefited much more (in utilons vs. hedons) from the reading that I’ve done.
I find that there is a category of person who executes at least one thing from something they read, attend, or otherwise consume. Those people get more results than everybody else put together, almost regardless of what material they consume.
I guess what I’m saying is, the material actually doesn’t matter. What somebody does with it, does. It’s ridiculously easy to read and analyze and critique tons of self-help books and vet them for scientific merit, compared to uncritically applying the contents of even a few. At least, if you’re the type who would rather do the former than the latter. ;-)
You remain stronger even if much of the underlying material winds up falsified. I’ve definitely noticed an improvement in my day to day epistemology as I’ve done more personal research and learned to quickly identify patterns that indicate something is likely bogus.
I think this kind of misses the point entirely. Ignasz Semmelweiss’ radical idea of handwashing for doctors is an example of the sort of thing that doesn’t pass the bogon filter: his theory for why it worked was actually bogus. He thought it was some sort of poison (germs not having been discovered yet), and scientists quite rightly pointed out that there was no known poison that could work in such small quantities as were required.
A lot of self-help and “spiritual” advice is like this: 100% bogus theories nonetheless describing actions that produce results similar to the ones promised. The whole “law of attraction” genre of books contain endless amounts of rubbish about quantum whackadoodle and solipsist fantasies… and they also contain concrete cognitive and emotional processes that bear a considerable resemblance to the ones researched by Richard Wiseman under the heading of “luck theory”, showing that “lucky” people notice and take advantages of opportunities that “unlucky” people do not, and that certain attitudes and behaviors will lead to one becoming more “lucky” in this sense.
In other words, law of attraction stuff actually contains beliefs that pay rent, mixed in with a huge helping of meaningless theory. Similar phenomena can be found in religious practices, PUA training, and other semi-pseudo-scientific fields of endeavor. If you ignore the theories given, and focus on “what concrete actions are being proposed, and what anticipated experiences are these actions supposed to pay off in?”, then you very often find that, just like Semmelweis, self-help gurus are quite often making accurate predictions about what will happen, despite having a 100% bogus theory about why those things will happen.
Skimming or skipping theory will also let you read a lot faster, and you can also tell a lot more easily when two superficially dissimilar authors or books are actually telling you to do the same things and anticipate the same results, despite violent disagreements about the theory of how or why those actions will produce those results.
OTOH, if you waste time even reading the theories, let alone trying to prove them true or false, you’ll have a far less pleasant and useful time. Theory in self-help materials is motivational window-dressing: its function is to supply a mnemonic intuition pump to the reader, so that they will be motivated to perform the actions, and remember which actions to perform when, for what purposes. If you read anything more into the theories, it’s a waste of time—and that applies even if the theory is one that has some sort of genuine science behind it.
Most scientific self help books in my experience piece together a bunch of studies of dubious quality and hang a narrative on it. When you investigate the studies a lot of them don’t hold up well methodologically. And that’s before you even get into the quality of the narrative.
So basically I’m agreeing with your point. Engaging with lots of self help material is doing some non-explicit stuff to the way you model the world that winds up helping. You remain stronger even if much of the underlying material winds up falsified. I’ve definitely noticed an improvement in my day to day epistemology as I’ve done more personal research and learned to quickly identify patterns that indicate something is likely bogus. I think this might just be that humans have consistent ways of dissembling when they know their point isn’t solid.
Or, being the sort of person who engages with lots of self-help material does something. ;-) It might be that if you’re not that sort of person, reading a lot of it won’t help.
I’ve read gobs and gobs of self-help books, have literally hundreds in dead-trees form alone. I am not the sort of person that self-help books can help, though, because I’m generally more interested in learning and figuring things out than I am a faithful and uncritical implementer of the advice presented. If I were such a person, I would undoubtedly have benefited much more (in utilons vs. hedons) from the reading that I’ve done.
I find that there is a category of person who executes at least one thing from something they read, attend, or otherwise consume. Those people get more results than everybody else put together, almost regardless of what material they consume.
I guess what I’m saying is, the material actually doesn’t matter. What somebody does with it, does. It’s ridiculously easy to read and analyze and critique tons of self-help books and vet them for scientific merit, compared to uncritically applying the contents of even a few. At least, if you’re the type who would rather do the former than the latter. ;-)
I think this kind of misses the point entirely. Ignasz Semmelweiss’ radical idea of handwashing for doctors is an example of the sort of thing that doesn’t pass the bogon filter: his theory for why it worked was actually bogus. He thought it was some sort of poison (germs not having been discovered yet), and scientists quite rightly pointed out that there was no known poison that could work in such small quantities as were required.
A lot of self-help and “spiritual” advice is like this: 100% bogus theories nonetheless describing actions that produce results similar to the ones promised. The whole “law of attraction” genre of books contain endless amounts of rubbish about quantum whackadoodle and solipsist fantasies… and they also contain concrete cognitive and emotional processes that bear a considerable resemblance to the ones researched by Richard Wiseman under the heading of “luck theory”, showing that “lucky” people notice and take advantages of opportunities that “unlucky” people do not, and that certain attitudes and behaviors will lead to one becoming more “lucky” in this sense.
In other words, law of attraction stuff actually contains beliefs that pay rent, mixed in with a huge helping of meaningless theory. Similar phenomena can be found in religious practices, PUA training, and other semi-pseudo-scientific fields of endeavor. If you ignore the theories given, and focus on “what concrete actions are being proposed, and what anticipated experiences are these actions supposed to pay off in?”, then you very often find that, just like Semmelweis, self-help gurus are quite often making accurate predictions about what will happen, despite having a 100% bogus theory about why those things will happen.
Skimming or skipping theory will also let you read a lot faster, and you can also tell a lot more easily when two superficially dissimilar authors or books are actually telling you to do the same things and anticipate the same results, despite violent disagreements about the theory of how or why those actions will produce those results.
OTOH, if you waste time even reading the theories, let alone trying to prove them true or false, you’ll have a far less pleasant and useful time. Theory in self-help materials is motivational window-dressing: its function is to supply a mnemonic intuition pump to the reader, so that they will be motivated to perform the actions, and remember which actions to perform when, for what purposes. If you read anything more into the theories, it’s a waste of time—and that applies even if the theory is one that has some sort of genuine science behind it.