But in this case it would appear that formal studies were done and failed to back up the claims previously supported by self-experimentation
If you think that’s the case, you didn’t read the whole Wikipedia page on that, or the cite I gave to a 2001 paper that independently re-creates a portion of NLP’s model of emotional physiology. I’ve seen more than one other peer-reviewed paper in the past that’s recreated some portion of “NLP, Volume I”, as in, a new experimental result that supports a portion of the NLP model.
Hell, hyperbolic discounting using the visual representation system was explained by NLP submodalities research two decades ago, for crying out loud. And the somatic marker hypothesis is at the very core of NLP. Affective asynchrony? See discussions of “incongruence” and “anchor collapsing” in NLP vI, which demonstrate and explain the existence of duality of affect.
IOW, none of the real research validation of NLP has the letters “N-L-P” on it .
You cannot verify anything by self-experimentation to nearly the same strength as by “properly validated rituals and papers”. The control group is not there as impressive ritual. It is there because self-experimentation is genuinely unreliable.
Unreliable for what purpose? I would think that for any individual’s purpose, self-experimentation is the ONLY standard that counts… it’s of no value to me if a medicine is statistically proven to work 99% of the time, if it doesn’t work for ME.
You cannot verify anything by self-experimentation to nearly the same strength as by “properly validated rituals and papers”. The control group is not there as impressive ritual. It is there because self-experimentation is genuinely unreliable.
Unreliable for what purpose? I would think that for any individual’s purpose, self-experimentation is the ONLY standard that counts… it’s of no value to me if a medicine is statistically proven to work 99% of the time, if it doesn’t work for ME.
This sounds like being uninterested in the chances of winning a lottery, since the only thing that matters is whether the lottery will be won by ME, and it costs only a buck to try (perform a self-experiment).
This sounds like being uninterested in the chances of winning a lottery, since the only thing that matters is whether the lottery will be won by ME, and it costs only a buck to try (perform a self-experiment).
And yet, this sort of thinking produces people who get better results in life, generally. Successful people know they benefit from learning to do one more useful thing than the other guy, so it doesn’t matter if they try fifty things and 49 of them don’t work, whether those fifty things are in the same book or different books, because the payoff of something that works is (generally speaking) forever.
Success in learning, IOW, is a black-swan strategy: mostly you lose, and occasionally you win big. But I don’t see anybody arguing that black swan strategies are mathematically equivalent to playing the lottery.
IMO, the rational strategy is to try things that might work better, knowing that they might fail, yet trying to your utmost to take them seriously and make them work. Hell, I even read “Dianetics” once, or tried to. I got a third of the way through that huge tome before I concluded that it was just a giant hypnotic induction via boredom. (Things I read later about Scientology’s use of the book seem to actually support this hypothesis.)
This became infeasible with the invention of printing press. There is too much stuff out there, for any given person to learn. Or to ever see all the titles of the stuff that exists. Or the names of the fields for which it’s written. There is too much science, and even more nonsense. You can’t just tell “read everything”. It’s physically impossible.
P.S. See this disclaimer, on second thought I connotationally disagree with this comment.
There is too much stuff out there, for any given person to learn. Or to ever see all the titles of the stuff that exists. Or the names of the fields for which it’s written. There is too much science, and even more nonsense. You can’t just tell “read everything”. It’s physically impossible.
What happened to “Shut up and do the impossible”? ;-)
More seriously, what difference does it make? The winning attitude is not that you have to read everything, it’s that if you find one useful thing every now and then that improves your status quo, you already win.
Also, when it comes to self-help, you’re in luck—the number of actually different methods that exist is fairly small, but they are infinitely repeated over and over again in different books, using different language.
My personal sorting tool of choice is looking for specificity of language: techniques that are described in as much sensory-oriented, “near” language as possible, with a minimum of abstraction. I also don’t bother evaluating things that don’t make claims that would offer an improvement over anything else I’ve tried, and I have a preference for reading authors who’ve offered insightful models and useful techniques in the past.
Lately, I’ve gotten over my snobbish tendency to avoid authors who write things I know or suspect aren’t true (e.g. stupid quantum mechanics interpretations); I’ve realized that it just doesn’t have as much to do with whether they will actually have something useful to say, as I used to think it did.
the number of actually different methods that exist is fairly small, but they are infinitely repeated over and over again in different books, using different language.
PJ, is there a survey / summary / list of these methods online? Could you please link, or, if there’s no such survey, summarize the methods briefly?
90% of everything is hypnosis, NLP, or the law of attraction—and in a very significant way, they are all the same thing “under the hood”, at different degrees of modeling detail and with different preferred operating channels.
NLP has the most precise models, and the greatest emphasis on well-formedness criteria and testing. (At least, the founders had those emphases; “pop NLP” often seems to not even know what well-formedness is.) Hypnosis, OTOH, is just a trancy-form of NLP, LoA, or both.
Pretty much everything in the self-help field can be viewed as a special case, application, or “tips and hints” variation of one of those three things, but using individual authors’ terminology, metaphors, and case histories. The possible failure modes are pretty much the same across all of them, too.
There is, by the way, one author who writes about non-mystical applications of the so-called “law of attraction”: Robert Fritz. He’s the only person I’m aware of who’s brought an almost-NLP level of rigor and precision to that concept, and with absolutely no mystical connotations or bad science whatsoever. He doesn’t call it LoA; he refers to it as the “creative process”, and shows how it’s the process that artists, musicians, and even inventors and entrepreneurs normally use to create results. (i.e., a strictly mental+physical process that engages the brain’s planning systems, much like what I showed in my video, but on a larger scale.)
His books also contain the largest collection of documented failure modes (biases and broken beliefs) that interfere with this process, based on his workshops and client work. I’ve found it to be invaluable in my own practice.
(The biggest shortcoming of Fritz’s work compared to some more mystical LoA works, however, is that he doesn’t address general emotional state or “abundance mindset” issues, at least not directly.)
non-mystical applications of the so-called “law of attraction”
BTW, I think that the Law of Attraction is basically a manifestation of successful self-priming (plus the other self-conditioning phenomenon Anna Salamon posted about—can’t find the post). And yes, the pull motivation trick seems to fit here perfectly.
You should know better what you need, what’s good for you, than a random number generator. And you should work on your field of study being better than a procedure for crafting another random option for such a random choice. I wonder how long it’ll take to stumble on success if you use a hypothetical “buy a random popular book” order option on Amazon.
P.S. See this disclaimer, on second thought I connotationally disagree with this comment.
Guilty. It doesn’t particularly apply in this case, since the argument is that randomness is the best available option for now, because intelligence doesn’t work yet for this case. I’m overidentifying with the general negative move I’ve made on pjeby, and as a result I’ve indulged myself in a couple of wrong responses, in a comment above and to an extent in a preceding one, although both also hold a fair amount of truth, but express it with dishonest connotation.
This comment was based on an argument with a person who explicitly insisted that tossing a coin is better than deciding for yourself.
This comment was based on an argument with a person who explicitly insisted that tossing a coin is better than deciding for yourself.
Kindly point to the specific words which you think meant that, so that I can see whether I need to be more clear, or whether you just rounded to a cliche.
Edit to add: Whoops, I just did the same thing to you. I see now that your comment was saying that you were rounding to a cached argument from a discussion with somebody else about tossing coins, not implying that that was what I said. Sorry for the confusion.
It doesn’t particularly apply in this case, since the argument is that randomness is the best available option for now, because intelligence doesn’t work yet for this case.
But pjeby isn’t even saying that – even reading completely random books, which AFAICT he doesn’t advocate, invokes a powerful optimization process (writers and publishers).
You always do the random thing relative to the options you are given. That doesn’t change the problem, as far as I can see, just applies it to a different situation
You can’t literally make only random actions. You can’t make random muscle movements. You may use random long-term goals, which can be analogized with being a fanatic, or middle-term goals, analogy with a crazy person, or random short-term goals, analogous to being clinically mad. In any case, whatever I could mean by random action, it’s necessarily already quite abstract, selected from few intelligent options.
You sound like someone arguing that evolution shouldn’t be able to work because it’s all “blind chance”. Learning, like evolution, is “unblind chance”: what interests me is a combination of what I encounter plus what I already know.
The more I learn, the more I learn about what is and isn’t useful, and I’ve found it useful to drop (or at least reduce the priority of) certain filters that I previously had, while tightening up other filters. That’s not really “random”, in the same way that natural selection is not “random”.
That still isn’t the same as self-experimenting with every procedure that was ever thought up and supported by a visible enough school. As an intelligent being, you should be able to do better than randomness, and well better than evolution. That’s the power of intelligence.
That still isn’t the same as self-experimenting with every procedure that was ever thought up and supported by a visible enough school.
Still strawman? pjeby said:
My personal sorting tool of choice is looking for specificity of language: techniques that are described in as much sensory-oriented, “near” language as possible, with a minimum of abstraction. I also don’t bother evaluating things that don’t make claims that would offer an improvement over anything else I’ve tried, and I have a preference for reading authors who’ve offered insightful models and useful techniques in the past.
The phrase makes some kind of sense to me (although not in that particular case), so in case you’re not just trying to drop a geeky reference, let me try to explain what I make of this phrase.
Assume members of alien species X have two reasoning modes A and B which account for all their thinking. In my mind, I model these “modes” as logical calculi, but I guess you could translate this to two distinct points in the “space of possible minds”.
An Xian is at any one time instance either in mode A or B, but under certain conditions the mode can flip. Except for these two reasoning modes, there is a heuristic faculty, which guides the application of specific rules in A and B. Some conclusions can be reached in mode A but not in B, and vice versa, so ideally, an Xian would master performing switches between them.
Now here’s the problem: Switching between A and B can only happen if a certain sequence of seemingly nonsensical reasoning steps is taken. Since the sequence is nonsensical, an Xian with a finely tuned heuristic for either A or B will be unlikely to encounter it in the course of normal reasoning.
Now, say that Bloob, an accomplished Xian A-thinker, finds out how to do the switch to B and thus manages to prove a theorem of high-value. Bloob will now have major problems communicating his results to his A-thinking peers. They will look at a couple of his proof steps, conclude that they are nonsensical and label him a crackpot.
Bloob might instead decide (whatever that word means in my story) to target people who are familiar with the switch from A to B. He can show them one of the proof steps, and hope that their heuristic “remembers” that they lead to something good down the road. Such a nonsensical proof step may be saying “Shut up and to the impossible”.
So, I suspect that humans do have something like those reasoning modes. They are not necessarily just two, it might not be appropriate to call all of them reasoning, but the main point is that thinking a thought might change the rules of thinking.
I think this idea is very close to the whole area of NLP, hypnosis, and some new-age ideas, e.g., Carlos Castaneda explicitly wants to “teach” you how to shift your mind-state around in the space of possible minds (which is egg-shaped incidentally). Not that any of these have ever done anything for me, but I also haven’t tried following them.
From self-experimentation (sorry), Buddhist meditation seems to be a kind of thinking that can change the rules of thinking, and I think there is some evidence that it actually changes the brain structurally.
Given the possibility of certain thoughts changing the rules of thinking, what is the rational thing to do? If there’s a good answer to this I’m grateful for a link.
Assume members of alien species X have two reasoning modes A and B which account for all their thinking. In my mind, I model these “modes” as logical calculi, but I guess you could translate this to two distinct points in the “space of possible minds”. …
An Xian is at any one time instance either in mode A or B, but under certain conditions the mode can flip. Except for these two reasoning modes, there is a heuristic faculty, which guides the application of specific rules in A and B. Some conclusions can be reached in mode A but not in B, and vice versa, so ideally, an Xian would master performing switches between them. …
So, I suspect that humans do have something like those reasoning modes. They are not necessarily just two, it might not be appropriate to call all of them reasoning, but the main point is that thinking a thought might change the rules of thinking.
Excellent comment! You have hit the nail very nearly square on the head. Allow me to make one minor adjustment to your aim, and then relate your analogy back to the fields of self-help, NLP, Zen, normal waking consciousness, etc.
See, it’s not the content of the thought that switches modes, but how you think the thought, or rather, what portion of your thoughts you pay attention to.
In suspension of disbelief—and hypnosis, suggestion, etc.-- you simply refrain from commenting on your experience in-progress, because it interferes with the perception of the experience itself. (See e.g. current studies on how explicit commenting can reduce satisfaction with decision making and accuracy of classification.)
So if “B” is experience, and “A” is commenting-about-experience, to the extent that you do both at the same time, one or the other will suffer, just like your experience of a movie will be degraded by a running commentary by audience members… unless you prefer the humor of the commentary to the experience of the movie. (But in that case, the movie still suffers relative to the commentary, you just like it better that way!)
Now, whether you refrain from commenting on something is partly determined by what you already believe. Movies that violate my understanding of say, computer technology, will be much more tempting to internally dispute or comment on, thus voiding my enjoyment and use of “B”-mode thinking. In contrast, someone who knows less about computers will not be induced to comment by the same scene, and thus not suspend their disbelief.
Self-help techniques use B-mode thinking, but the more intelligent you are, the more ways you can find to object to the “truthfulness” of thoughts that you nonetheless would find useful to have installed in your “B” system. But if you give in to the temptation to meta-comment on those thoughts, then you will not succeed in installing them in the “B” system… assuming you didn’t already throw the book down in disgust, long before even trying to!
Religion works in roughly the same way, of course: you’re discouraged from meta-commenting, so various B-mode thoughts can be installed and left running.
Of course, we all know that this is bad, but it’s not because B-mode itself is bad, it’s because religions include many poor-quality beliefs, in addition to the ones that might have some personal or social utility!
Part of the foundation of NLP, however, is a set of principles known as the “outcome frame” and “ecology”—attempts to codify quality standards for “B-mode beliefs”, based on well-formedness rules for the beliefs themselves, and standards for evaluating the likely long-term systemic effects of carrying that belief.
Most of the original NLP clique have also been very careful, when defining their techniques, to offer guidelines for what kind of beliefs to install in people, and how to avoid “junk beliefs”.
(For example, one is cautioned to prefer installing beliefs of capability rather than ability, e.g. “I can learn to do this better”, not “I am the best there is”.)
Most self-help material—including much popular work on NLP, alas—does not adhere to such standards.
From self-experimentation (sorry), Buddhist meditation seems to be a kind of thinking that can change the rules of thinking, and I think there is some evidence that it actually changes the brain structurally.
My experience of Zen meditation is that it trains you to refrain from commenting on your thoughts and experiences, which is why it provides benefits for learning skills that require you to focus on experience instead of commenting. (See e.g. “The Inner Game of Tennis”.) So, AFAICT, it’s definitely related to the same “B” mode as other self-help modalities, and really just consists of practicing trying to stay in B mode, no matter what thoughts try to pull you into A mode.
In contrast, hypnosis tries to get you so relaxed that it seems like “too much work” to do any “A” mode thinking, versus just drifting along with your ongoing “B” experience.
NLP techniques, including my own, work on controlled alternation of attention between the A and B modes.
And normal consciousness for most people also alternates between A and B, but “A” dominates, and we actually spend good money (e.g. on movies and other entertainment, hobbies, etc.) so we can spend some quality time in “B”.
(For example, one is cautioned to prefer installing beliefs of capability rather than ability, e.g. “I can learn to do this better”, not “I am the best there is”.)
I’d generally agree with that, but I was recently at an excellent qi gong workshop taught by Yang Yang, who told the students to do qi gong with an attitude of “I am a master”. As far as I can tell, this has the advantage of overriding habits of thinking “I’m just a student, I’m not very good at this”. It might also override habits of thinking “I have to show how good I am”.
I’d generally agree with that, but I was recently at an excellent qi gong workshop taught by Yang Yang, who told the students to do qi gong with an attitude of “I am a master”
Note that “I am a master” is not falsifiable, unless you also have some idea of what being a master consists of. This isn’t a problem if you believe (for example) that a master is someone who is always learning and improving, and who makes mistakes.
Of course, at that point, you are right back to having a capability belief. ;-)
Also, when it comes to self-help, you’re in luck—the number of actually different methods that exist is fairly small, but they are infinitely repeated over and over again in different books, using different language.
My personal sorting tool of choice is looking for specificity of language: techniques that are described in as much sensory-oriented, “near” language as possible, with a minimum of abstraction. I also don’t bother evaluating things that don’t make claims that would offer an improvement over anything else I’ve tried, and I have a preference for reading authors who’ve offered insightful models and useful techniques in the past.
Okay. Another take. Is this really true? How long would it take for a new-commer to walk through every available option? How much would it cost? What is the chance he should expect before starting the whole endeavor that any of the available options will help? For the last question, the lottery analogy fits perfectly, no “works only for ME” excuse.
I’ve read dozens of self-help books and numerous websites, etc. and pjeby’s claims of repetition seem mostly true (and his point that some who have unscientific philosophies have great practical advice is definitely true in my experience).
That huge numbers of books are about the same things, in different language? Absolutely. Books that contain something genuinely new in self-help are exceedingly rare in my experience. Books that have one or two new twists or better metaphors for explaining the same things are enormously common.
Take for example, “the law of attraction”. I don’t believe it has any objective external basis: rather, it’s a matter of 1. motivation and 2. making your own luck—i.e. “chance favors the prepared mind”. However, the quality of information about its practical applications varies widely, and some of the most woo-woo crazy books—like one of the ones supposedly written by a spirit being channeled from another universe—actually have the best practical information for leveraging the psychological benefits of belief.
I’m specifically talking about the “emotional energy scale” model from the book “Ask and It Is Given”. Note that I don’t know if they invented that model or swiped it from some psych researcher… and I don’t really care. By putting that information into a useful context, they gave me more usable information than raw experimental data would have provided.
Now, if I were looking for “truth”, I’d certainly trust peer-reviewed research more than I’d trust a channeled being from beyond. But if the being from beyond offers a useful model distinction, I don’t especially care if it’s true.
Now, some people reading this are going to think because I mentioned the LoA that I believe all that quantum garbage—but I do not. I do believe, however, that self-fulfilling prophecies are useful, and the LoA literature is a great source of raw practical data in the application of self-fulfilling prophecy, as long as you ignore all their theories about why anything works, and focus on testing specific physical and mental techniques, and break down the attitudes.
For example, one fascinating commonality of themes in this literature: the idea of gratitude or abundance, giving things freely to others and it will be given unto you, and a “friendly universe”. It’s interesting that, although some of these writers are borrowing from each other, others seem to have independently stumbled on an idea or attitude that reflects this notion: that in some larger way, “everything happens for a reason” or “the world is an abundant and giving place”.
Most will also insist on the importance of adopting this mindset for achieving results, which makes me wonder: could it be that there is some hardwired machinery in our brains that is triggered by conditions of perceived “abundance”? Is it then triggered by acting as-if conditions are abundant, in the same way that smiling can trigger happiness or friendliness?
It’s certainly food for further thought, although in my current simplified model of LoA, I assume that this is more of a test condition: i.e., if someone cannot act as-if they are in abundance, then they have not successfully made whatever internal transition is required. This seems a more parsimonious model at this point, than assuming that the actions themselves are relevant.
How long would it take for a new-commer to walk through every available option?
They would probably be FAR better off picking ONE book and sticking to it with absolute Zen-master determination, especially if they choose a book that offers sensory based language, and most importantly, a way to tell if you’re doing it right in a relatively short period of time. Comparatively few books contain this, but browsing in a bookstore will certainly find you a few. (I’ve linked to a few here in the past; “Loving What Is” and “Re-create Your Life” are two of the easiest for a beginner to master, if they pay close attention to the extra distinctions about “listening to yourself” that I’ve thrown out here on LW. )
How much would it cost? What is the chance he should expect before starting the whole endeavor that any of the available options will help? For the last question, the lottery analogy fits perfectly, no “works only for ME” excuse.
Sadly, if you limit yourself to books only, this might well be true. Live trainings and coaching are substantially more likely to make a difference, because the feedback loop can be closed.
I have had more than one student report that after live work with me, they were able to go back and understand all the things in self-help books that they were never able to apply before, because now they knew what those books were actually talking about, once they had experiential reference points. (It’s unfortunately a lot easier to recognize whether a guru is “for real” once you are one, than before.)
My original goal for the book I am currently writing was to create a kind of Rosetta Stone for self-help material, but I have concluded that all I can really do is make such a Rosetta Stone for the sort of person who already would’ve found my approach enlightening—or more precisely, I can write a book that will get past the kind of filters that would keep a lot of those people from learning from the sources I learned things from. But the very fact that I do it that way will be a filter for a different group of people!
And this, by the way, is why we won’t see a scientifically-validated model of these things any time soon: learning them really requires a feedback loop of some kind, and most books don’t include enough of one to work with EVERYBODY, only for the set of people whose perceptual filters initially match those used by the writer. (Of course, even if there was such a feedback loop, it’s not prestigious to test practical ideas that somebody else came up with, versus impractical new ones.)
In the first draft of my book, I listed all sorts of ways to get a certain popular visualization technique wrong, that had bedeviled me and some of my students in the past. My newer students read it… and promptly found NEW ways to get it wrong, that I had to give them live feedback to fix.
I’ll add those ways of getting it wrong to the second draft, but I’m now far less confident that it is possible to eliminate ALL the ways that somebody can misinterpret a discussion of how to observe or manipulate their internal experience.
(And if I actually included ALL the ways I know of to get popular techniques or self-help ideas wrong, it would be much longer than the instructions of how to get them right… thereby making an unusable and unmarketable book. Which is probably why most self-help books only give a handful of misinterpretations and hope for the best. It probably doesn’t hurt that there are also financial rewards for selling some of your readers on live programs, but I honestly would like there to be a book that doesn’t need that option… I’ve just given up on my current book being that book.)
By far the best way to learn is with someone who can tell from your external behavior whether you’re doing it wrong, being a kind of human biofeedback system. The way I learned was definitely the hard way.
However, for the kind of successful person that I was talking about, these caveats don’t apply. A person with the attitude I was referring to, will find something useful in virtually anything they read, and promptly apply it. These are also the people who need self-help least, but that was actually part of my original point.
What I probably wasn’t clear enough on, was that it’s this attitude that determines the person’s success in LIFE, not their success in finding good self-help books! We are now way off of that particular reservation.
I haven’t read the above yet, I’ll do it later; but I want to make a general observation for now: everybody would be better off if your replies were shorter. You are already talking past many of the people here, so you should focus on communicating clearly, which may mean fast back-and-forth understanding checks, not on communicating lots of stuff, all of which doesn’t do any good.
My initial question was an introduction to the rest, which ask whether the method of looking at everything is going to pay off. I don’t ask for details about the content, since the worth of looking at these details is exactly what I’m asking about. I split the following question into its own thread:
They would probably be FAR better off picking ONE book and sticking to it with absolute Zen-master determination, especially if they choose a book that offers sensory based language, and most importantly, a way to tell if you’re doing it right in a relatively short period of time.
Now you are talking past my question again. The conversation started where you asserted that it’s possible to test all of the available methods on yourself, since there are so few genuinely different ones. In response you recommend sticking to one method. Fine. What are the answers to my questions for a single randomly selected method (among a number of surface-filteredavailable options)?
How long would it take for a new-commer to walk through every available option? How much would it cost? What is the chance he should expect before starting the whole endeavor that any of the available options will help?
My available samples say: Years, thousands, and slim. Of course, people for whom these things are not the case, will be considerably less likely to be my customer, so it’s a severely biased sample. (Which also means that it’s possible my techniques work best on people who try lots of self-help and fail, but that seems more like an advantage than a disadvantage to me.)
However, I have noticed that highly-successful people also own large self-help libraries, but they are not disappointed in them, because they always find at least ONE thing of use to them in EVERY book.
My original point, which you still seem to be ignoring, is that I am not and have never been advocating that a self-help seeker engage in a random walk of self-help books. I am saying that people who succeed in life have the attitude that they can find at least one useful thing in every circumstance they encounter, if they apply themselves to looking for it, and applying it.
Cultivating that attitude is what I actually recommended, as you will see if you return to the beginning of the thread.
How long would it take for a new-commer to walk through every available option? How much would it cost? What is the chance he should expect before starting the whole endeavor that any of the available options will help?
My available samples say: Years, thousands, and slim.
[...]
My original point, which you still seem to be ignoring, is that I am not and have never been advocating that a self-help seeker engage in a random walk of self-help books. I am saying that people who succeed in life have the attitude that they can find at least one useful thing in every circumstance they encounter, if they apply themselves to looking for it, and applying it. Cultivating that attitude is what I actually recommended, as you will see if you return to the beginning of the thread.
My question, however, was about the worth of studying the theories of which you speak, and in particular of interpreting your long comments that try to communicate them. Thank you for answering it.
Sadly, if you limit yourself to books only, this might well be true.
What might well be true? The connotation of my question that implies that your field is worthless? I was specifically asking how much it’s worth, only the conclusion that you may draw, as an expert, not the reflections leading to naught.
The rest of your comment also talks past the questions. You note that you receive student feedback that could answer my questions, talk about your book implying that it’ll answer my questions, talk about how the still completely unknown to me efficiency of your methods improves from personal tutoring.
What might well be true? The connotation of my question that implies that your field is worthless?
Yes. I’m a rather outspoken critic of the field, and not just for marketing reasons.
The problem isn’t the industry, it’s that developing “kicking” skills requires practice, and for practice to work you have to have feedback, even if that feedback is you yourself checking your performance against some model. Most self-help material doesn’t even teach explicitly making these checks, let alone giving substantive criteria for telling whether you’ve done something correctly or not. People are left to blindly stumble on the right method, if they happen to hear a metaphor that works for them or read in someone’s story about doing it wrong, how they’re doing it wrong.
The entire field—at least in books—is like teaching people to ride bicycles without giving them any bicycles to practice on. Common practice in workshops isn’t a hell of a lot better, but your odds are a lot better of stumbling on a workshop where you can get coached or walked through something. Even there, testability, repeatability, and trainability are not the focus.
So yes, the entire self-help field might as well be a lottery right now, if you have no information on where to start. Many of my students, like me, own literally hundreds of self-help books, from which they got little or no help until they “got it” from something I wrote or said or did with them.
As for me, I just got lucky enough to get an insight from computer programming that opened my eyes to what was going on, that gave me my first “rosetta stone” for the field.
Unreliable for getting true explanations. Self-experimentation is generally too poorly controlled to give unconfounded data about what really caused a result. (Also, typically sample size is too small to justify generalizability.)
Unreliable for what purpose? I would think that for any individual’s purpose, self-experimentation is the ONLY standard that counts… it’s of no value to me if a medicine is statistically proven to work 99% of the time, if it doesn’t work for ME.
The way I’d put it for this stuff is that experiments help communicate why someone would try a technique, they help people distinguish signal from noise, because there are a ton of people out there saying X works for me.
If you think that’s the case, you didn’t read the whole Wikipedia page on that, or the cite I gave to a 2001 paper that independently re-creates a portion of NLP’s model of emotional physiology. I’ve seen more than one other peer-reviewed paper in the past that’s recreated some portion of “NLP, Volume I”, as in, a new experimental result that supports a portion of the NLP model.
Hell, hyperbolic discounting using the visual representation system was explained by NLP submodalities research two decades ago, for crying out loud. And the somatic marker hypothesis is at the very core of NLP. Affective asynchrony? See discussions of “incongruence” and “anchor collapsing” in NLP vI, which demonstrate and explain the existence of duality of affect.
IOW, none of the real research validation of NLP has the letters “N-L-P” on it .
Unreliable for what purpose? I would think that for any individual’s purpose, self-experimentation is the ONLY standard that counts… it’s of no value to me if a medicine is statistically proven to work 99% of the time, if it doesn’t work for ME.
This sounds like being uninterested in the chances of winning a lottery, since the only thing that matters is whether the lottery will be won by ME, and it costs only a buck to try (perform a self-experiment).
And yet, this sort of thinking produces people who get better results in life, generally. Successful people know they benefit from learning to do one more useful thing than the other guy, so it doesn’t matter if they try fifty things and 49 of them don’t work, whether those fifty things are in the same book or different books, because the payoff of something that works is (generally speaking) forever.
Success in learning, IOW, is a black-swan strategy: mostly you lose, and occasionally you win big. But I don’t see anybody arguing that black swan strategies are mathematically equivalent to playing the lottery.
IMO, the rational strategy is to try things that might work better, knowing that they might fail, yet trying to your utmost to take them seriously and make them work. Hell, I even read “Dianetics” once, or tried to. I got a third of the way through that huge tome before I concluded that it was just a giant hypnotic induction via boredom. (Things I read later about Scientology’s use of the book seem to actually support this hypothesis.)
This became infeasible with the invention of printing press. There is too much stuff out there, for any given person to learn. Or to ever see all the titles of the stuff that exists. Or the names of the fields for which it’s written. There is too much science, and even more nonsense. You can’t just tell “read everything”. It’s physically impossible.
P.S. See this disclaimer, on second thought I connotationally disagree with this comment.
What happened to “Shut up and do the impossible”? ;-)
More seriously, what difference does it make? The winning attitude is not that you have to read everything, it’s that if you find one useful thing every now and then that improves your status quo, you already win.
Also, when it comes to self-help, you’re in luck—the number of actually different methods that exist is fairly small, but they are infinitely repeated over and over again in different books, using different language.
My personal sorting tool of choice is looking for specificity of language: techniques that are described in as much sensory-oriented, “near” language as possible, with a minimum of abstraction. I also don’t bother evaluating things that don’t make claims that would offer an improvement over anything else I’ve tried, and I have a preference for reading authors who’ve offered insightful models and useful techniques in the past.
Lately, I’ve gotten over my snobbish tendency to avoid authors who write things I know or suspect aren’t true (e.g. stupid quantum mechanics interpretations); I’ve realized that it just doesn’t have as much to do with whether they will actually have something useful to say, as I used to think it did.
PJ, is there a survey / summary / list of these methods online? Could you please link, or, if there’s no such survey, summarize the methods briefly?
90% of everything is hypnosis, NLP, or the law of attraction—and in a very significant way, they are all the same thing “under the hood”, at different degrees of modeling detail and with different preferred operating channels.
NLP has the most precise models, and the greatest emphasis on well-formedness criteria and testing. (At least, the founders had those emphases; “pop NLP” often seems to not even know what well-formedness is.) Hypnosis, OTOH, is just a trancy-form of NLP, LoA, or both.
Pretty much everything in the self-help field can be viewed as a special case, application, or “tips and hints” variation of one of those three things, but using individual authors’ terminology, metaphors, and case histories. The possible failure modes are pretty much the same across all of them, too.
There is, by the way, one author who writes about non-mystical applications of the so-called “law of attraction”: Robert Fritz. He’s the only person I’m aware of who’s brought an almost-NLP level of rigor and precision to that concept, and with absolutely no mystical connotations or bad science whatsoever. He doesn’t call it LoA; he refers to it as the “creative process”, and shows how it’s the process that artists, musicians, and even inventors and entrepreneurs normally use to create results. (i.e., a strictly mental+physical process that engages the brain’s planning systems, much like what I showed in my video, but on a larger scale.)
His books also contain the largest collection of documented failure modes (biases and broken beliefs) that interfere with this process, based on his workshops and client work. I’ve found it to be invaluable in my own practice.
(The biggest shortcoming of Fritz’s work compared to some more mystical LoA works, however, is that he doesn’t address general emotional state or “abundance mindset” issues, at least not directly.)
BTW, I think that the Law of Attraction is basically a manifestation of successful self-priming (plus the other self-conditioning phenomenon Anna Salamon posted about—can’t find the post). And yes, the pull motivation trick seems to fit here perfectly.
Viva randomness! At least it’s better than stupidity. And is about as effective as reversed stupidity. Which is not intelligence.
You should know better what you need, what’s good for you, than a random number generator. And you should work on your field of study being better than a procedure for crafting another random option for such a random choice. I wonder how long it’ll take to stumble on success if you use a hypothetical “buy a random popular book” order option on Amazon.
P.S. See this disclaimer, on second thought I connotationally disagree with this comment.
Strawman?
Guilty. It doesn’t particularly apply in this case, since the argument is that randomness is the best available option for now, because intelligence doesn’t work yet for this case. I’m overidentifying with the general negative move I’ve made on pjeby, and as a result I’ve indulged myself in a couple of wrong responses, in a comment above and to an extent in a preceding one, although both also hold a fair amount of truth, but express it with dishonest connotation.
This comment was based on an argument with a person who explicitly insisted that tossing a coin is better than deciding for yourself.
Kindly point to the specific words which you think meant that, so that I can see whether I need to be more clear, or whether you just rounded to a cliche.
Edit to add: Whoops, I just did the same thing to you. I see now that your comment was saying that you were rounding to a cached argument from a discussion with somebody else about tossing coins, not implying that that was what I said. Sorry for the confusion.
But pjeby isn’t even saying that – even reading completely random books, which AFAICT he doesn’t advocate, invokes a powerful optimization process (writers and publishers).
You always do the random thing relative to the options you are given. That doesn’t change the problem, as far as I can see, just applies it to a different situation
Point taken; still, different from my very literal interpretation of letting a random number generator decide what you need.
You can’t literally make only random actions. You can’t make random muscle movements. You may use random long-term goals, which can be analogized with being a fanatic, or middle-term goals, analogy with a crazy person, or random short-term goals, analogous to being clinically mad. In any case, whatever I could mean by random action, it’s necessarily already quite abstract, selected from few intelligent options.
You sound like someone arguing that evolution shouldn’t be able to work because it’s all “blind chance”. Learning, like evolution, is “unblind chance”: what interests me is a combination of what I encounter plus what I already know.
The more I learn, the more I learn about what is and isn’t useful, and I’ve found it useful to drop (or at least reduce the priority of) certain filters that I previously had, while tightening up other filters. That’s not really “random”, in the same way that natural selection is not “random”.
That still isn’t the same as self-experimenting with every procedure that was ever thought up and supported by a visible enough school. As an intelligent being, you should be able to do better than randomness, and well better than evolution. That’s the power of intelligence.
Still strawman? pjeby said:
See? I don’t even remember reading it.
You keep using that phrase. I do not think it means what you think it does.
The phrase makes some kind of sense to me (although not in that particular case), so in case you’re not just trying to drop a geeky reference, let me try to explain what I make of this phrase.
Assume members of alien species X have two reasoning modes A and B which account for all their thinking. In my mind, I model these “modes” as logical calculi, but I guess you could translate this to two distinct points in the “space of possible minds”.
An Xian is at any one time instance either in mode A or B, but under certain conditions the mode can flip. Except for these two reasoning modes, there is a heuristic faculty, which guides the application of specific rules in A and B. Some conclusions can be reached in mode A but not in B, and vice versa, so ideally, an Xian would master performing switches between them.
Now here’s the problem: Switching between A and B can only happen if a certain sequence of seemingly nonsensical reasoning steps is taken. Since the sequence is nonsensical, an Xian with a finely tuned heuristic for either A or B will be unlikely to encounter it in the course of normal reasoning.
Now, say that Bloob, an accomplished Xian A-thinker, finds out how to do the switch to B and thus manages to prove a theorem of high-value. Bloob will now have major problems communicating his results to his A-thinking peers. They will look at a couple of his proof steps, conclude that they are nonsensical and label him a crackpot.
Bloob might instead decide (whatever that word means in my story) to target people who are familiar with the switch from A to B. He can show them one of the proof steps, and hope that their heuristic “remembers” that they lead to something good down the road. Such a nonsensical proof step may be saying “Shut up and to the impossible”.
So, I suspect that humans do have something like those reasoning modes. They are not necessarily just two, it might not be appropriate to call all of them reasoning, but the main point is that thinking a thought might change the rules of thinking.
I think this idea is very close to the whole area of NLP, hypnosis, and some new-age ideas, e.g., Carlos Castaneda explicitly wants to “teach” you how to shift your mind-state around in the space of possible minds (which is egg-shaped incidentally). Not that any of these have ever done anything for me, but I also haven’t tried following them.
From self-experimentation (sorry), Buddhist meditation seems to be a kind of thinking that can change the rules of thinking, and I think there is some evidence that it actually changes the brain structurally.
Given the possibility of certain thoughts changing the rules of thinking, what is the rational thing to do? If there’s a good answer to this I’m grateful for a link.
Excellent comment! You have hit the nail very nearly square on the head. Allow me to make one minor adjustment to your aim, and then relate your analogy back to the fields of self-help, NLP, Zen, normal waking consciousness, etc.
See, it’s not the content of the thought that switches modes, but how you think the thought, or rather, what portion of your thoughts you pay attention to.
In suspension of disbelief—and hypnosis, suggestion, etc.-- you simply refrain from commenting on your experience in-progress, because it interferes with the perception of the experience itself. (See e.g. current studies on how explicit commenting can reduce satisfaction with decision making and accuracy of classification.)
So if “B” is experience, and “A” is commenting-about-experience, to the extent that you do both at the same time, one or the other will suffer, just like your experience of a movie will be degraded by a running commentary by audience members… unless you prefer the humor of the commentary to the experience of the movie. (But in that case, the movie still suffers relative to the commentary, you just like it better that way!)
Now, whether you refrain from commenting on something is partly determined by what you already believe. Movies that violate my understanding of say, computer technology, will be much more tempting to internally dispute or comment on, thus voiding my enjoyment and use of “B”-mode thinking. In contrast, someone who knows less about computers will not be induced to comment by the same scene, and thus not suspend their disbelief.
Self-help techniques use B-mode thinking, but the more intelligent you are, the more ways you can find to object to the “truthfulness” of thoughts that you nonetheless would find useful to have installed in your “B” system. But if you give in to the temptation to meta-comment on those thoughts, then you will not succeed in installing them in the “B” system… assuming you didn’t already throw the book down in disgust, long before even trying to!
Religion works in roughly the same way, of course: you’re discouraged from meta-commenting, so various B-mode thoughts can be installed and left running.
Of course, we all know that this is bad, but it’s not because B-mode itself is bad, it’s because religions include many poor-quality beliefs, in addition to the ones that might have some personal or social utility!
Part of the foundation of NLP, however, is a set of principles known as the “outcome frame” and “ecology”—attempts to codify quality standards for “B-mode beliefs”, based on well-formedness rules for the beliefs themselves, and standards for evaluating the likely long-term systemic effects of carrying that belief.
Most of the original NLP clique have also been very careful, when defining their techniques, to offer guidelines for what kind of beliefs to install in people, and how to avoid “junk beliefs”.
(For example, one is cautioned to prefer installing beliefs of capability rather than ability, e.g. “I can learn to do this better”, not “I am the best there is”.)
Most self-help material—including much popular work on NLP, alas—does not adhere to such standards.
My experience of Zen meditation is that it trains you to refrain from commenting on your thoughts and experiences, which is why it provides benefits for learning skills that require you to focus on experience instead of commenting. (See e.g. “The Inner Game of Tennis”.) So, AFAICT, it’s definitely related to the same “B” mode as other self-help modalities, and really just consists of practicing trying to stay in B mode, no matter what thoughts try to pull you into A mode.
In contrast, hypnosis tries to get you so relaxed that it seems like “too much work” to do any “A” mode thinking, versus just drifting along with your ongoing “B” experience.
NLP techniques, including my own, work on controlled alternation of attention between the A and B modes.
And normal consciousness for most people also alternates between A and B, but “A” dominates, and we actually spend good money (e.g. on movies and other entertainment, hobbies, etc.) so we can spend some quality time in “B”.
I’d generally agree with that, but I was recently at an excellent qi gong workshop taught by Yang Yang, who told the students to do qi gong with an attitude of “I am a master”. As far as I can tell, this has the advantage of overriding habits of thinking “I’m just a student, I’m not very good at this”. It might also override habits of thinking “I have to show how good I am”.
Note that “I am a master” is not falsifiable, unless you also have some idea of what being a master consists of. This isn’t a problem if you believe (for example) that a master is someone who is always learning and improving, and who makes mistakes.
Of course, at that point, you are right back to having a capability belief. ;-)
Okay. Another take. Is this really true? How long would it take for a new-commer to walk through every available option? How much would it cost? What is the chance he should expect before starting the whole endeavor that any of the available options will help? For the last question, the lottery analogy fits perfectly, no “works only for ME” excuse.
I’ve read dozens of self-help books and numerous websites, etc. and pjeby’s claims of repetition seem mostly true (and his point that some who have unscientific philosophies have great practical advice is definitely true in my experience).
That huge numbers of books are about the same things, in different language? Absolutely. Books that contain something genuinely new in self-help are exceedingly rare in my experience. Books that have one or two new twists or better metaphors for explaining the same things are enormously common.
Take for example, “the law of attraction”. I don’t believe it has any objective external basis: rather, it’s a matter of 1. motivation and 2. making your own luck—i.e. “chance favors the prepared mind”. However, the quality of information about its practical applications varies widely, and some of the most woo-woo crazy books—like one of the ones supposedly written by a spirit being channeled from another universe—actually have the best practical information for leveraging the psychological benefits of belief.
I’m specifically talking about the “emotional energy scale” model from the book “Ask and It Is Given”. Note that I don’t know if they invented that model or swiped it from some psych researcher… and I don’t really care. By putting that information into a useful context, they gave me more usable information than raw experimental data would have provided.
Now, if I were looking for “truth”, I’d certainly trust peer-reviewed research more than I’d trust a channeled being from beyond. But if the being from beyond offers a useful model distinction, I don’t especially care if it’s true.
Now, some people reading this are going to think because I mentioned the LoA that I believe all that quantum garbage—but I do not. I do believe, however, that self-fulfilling prophecies are useful, and the LoA literature is a great source of raw practical data in the application of self-fulfilling prophecy, as long as you ignore all their theories about why anything works, and focus on testing specific physical and mental techniques, and break down the attitudes.
For example, one fascinating commonality of themes in this literature: the idea of gratitude or abundance, giving things freely to others and it will be given unto you, and a “friendly universe”. It’s interesting that, although some of these writers are borrowing from each other, others seem to have independently stumbled on an idea or attitude that reflects this notion: that in some larger way, “everything happens for a reason” or “the world is an abundant and giving place”.
Most will also insist on the importance of adopting this mindset for achieving results, which makes me wonder: could it be that there is some hardwired machinery in our brains that is triggered by conditions of perceived “abundance”? Is it then triggered by acting as-if conditions are abundant, in the same way that smiling can trigger happiness or friendliness?
It’s certainly food for further thought, although in my current simplified model of LoA, I assume that this is more of a test condition: i.e., if someone cannot act as-if they are in abundance, then they have not successfully made whatever internal transition is required. This seems a more parsimonious model at this point, than assuming that the actions themselves are relevant.
They would probably be FAR better off picking ONE book and sticking to it with absolute Zen-master determination, especially if they choose a book that offers sensory based language, and most importantly, a way to tell if you’re doing it right in a relatively short period of time. Comparatively few books contain this, but browsing in a bookstore will certainly find you a few. (I’ve linked to a few here in the past; “Loving What Is” and “Re-create Your Life” are two of the easiest for a beginner to master, if they pay close attention to the extra distinctions about “listening to yourself” that I’ve thrown out here on LW. )
Sadly, if you limit yourself to books only, this might well be true. Live trainings and coaching are substantially more likely to make a difference, because the feedback loop can be closed.
I have had more than one student report that after live work with me, they were able to go back and understand all the things in self-help books that they were never able to apply before, because now they knew what those books were actually talking about, once they had experiential reference points. (It’s unfortunately a lot easier to recognize whether a guru is “for real” once you are one, than before.)
My original goal for the book I am currently writing was to create a kind of Rosetta Stone for self-help material, but I have concluded that all I can really do is make such a Rosetta Stone for the sort of person who already would’ve found my approach enlightening—or more precisely, I can write a book that will get past the kind of filters that would keep a lot of those people from learning from the sources I learned things from. But the very fact that I do it that way will be a filter for a different group of people!
And this, by the way, is why we won’t see a scientifically-validated model of these things any time soon: learning them really requires a feedback loop of some kind, and most books don’t include enough of one to work with EVERYBODY, only for the set of people whose perceptual filters initially match those used by the writer. (Of course, even if there was such a feedback loop, it’s not prestigious to test practical ideas that somebody else came up with, versus impractical new ones.)
In the first draft of my book, I listed all sorts of ways to get a certain popular visualization technique wrong, that had bedeviled me and some of my students in the past. My newer students read it… and promptly found NEW ways to get it wrong, that I had to give them live feedback to fix.
I’ll add those ways of getting it wrong to the second draft, but I’m now far less confident that it is possible to eliminate ALL the ways that somebody can misinterpret a discussion of how to observe or manipulate their internal experience.
(And if I actually included ALL the ways I know of to get popular techniques or self-help ideas wrong, it would be much longer than the instructions of how to get them right… thereby making an unusable and unmarketable book. Which is probably why most self-help books only give a handful of misinterpretations and hope for the best. It probably doesn’t hurt that there are also financial rewards for selling some of your readers on live programs, but I honestly would like there to be a book that doesn’t need that option… I’ve just given up on my current book being that book.)
By far the best way to learn is with someone who can tell from your external behavior whether you’re doing it wrong, being a kind of human biofeedback system. The way I learned was definitely the hard way.
However, for the kind of successful person that I was talking about, these caveats don’t apply. A person with the attitude I was referring to, will find something useful in virtually anything they read, and promptly apply it. These are also the people who need self-help least, but that was actually part of my original point.
What I probably wasn’t clear enough on, was that it’s this attitude that determines the person’s success in LIFE, not their success in finding good self-help books! We are now way off of that particular reservation.
I haven’t read the above yet, I’ll do it later; but I want to make a general observation for now: everybody would be better off if your replies were shorter. You are already talking past many of the people here, so you should focus on communicating clearly, which may mean fast back-and-forth understanding checks, not on communicating lots of stuff, all of which doesn’t do any good.
My initial question was an introduction to the rest, which ask whether the method of looking at everything is going to pay off. I don’t ask for details about the content, since the worth of looking at these details is exactly what I’m asking about. I split the following question into its own thread:
Now you are talking past my question again. The conversation started where you asserted that it’s possible to test all of the available methods on yourself, since there are so few genuinely different ones. In response you recommend sticking to one method. Fine. What are the answers to my questions for a single randomly selected method (among a number of surface-filtered available options)?
My available samples say: Years, thousands, and slim. Of course, people for whom these things are not the case, will be considerably less likely to be my customer, so it’s a severely biased sample. (Which also means that it’s possible my techniques work best on people who try lots of self-help and fail, but that seems more like an advantage than a disadvantage to me.)
However, I have noticed that highly-successful people also own large self-help libraries, but they are not disappointed in them, because they always find at least ONE thing of use to them in EVERY book.
My original point, which you still seem to be ignoring, is that I am not and have never been advocating that a self-help seeker engage in a random walk of self-help books. I am saying that people who succeed in life have the attitude that they can find at least one useful thing in every circumstance they encounter, if they apply themselves to looking for it, and applying it.
Cultivating that attitude is what I actually recommended, as you will see if you return to the beginning of the thread.
My question, however, was about the worth of studying the theories of which you speak, and in particular of interpreting your long comments that try to communicate them. Thank you for answering it.
What might well be true? The connotation of my question that implies that your field is worthless? I was specifically asking how much it’s worth, only the conclusion that you may draw, as an expert, not the reflections leading to naught.
The rest of your comment also talks past the questions. You note that you receive student feedback that could answer my questions, talk about your book implying that it’ll answer my questions, talk about how the still completely unknown to me efficiency of your methods improves from personal tutoring.
Yes. I’m a rather outspoken critic of the field, and not just for marketing reasons.
The problem isn’t the industry, it’s that developing “kicking” skills requires practice, and for practice to work you have to have feedback, even if that feedback is you yourself checking your performance against some model. Most self-help material doesn’t even teach explicitly making these checks, let alone giving substantive criteria for telling whether you’ve done something correctly or not. People are left to blindly stumble on the right method, if they happen to hear a metaphor that works for them or read in someone’s story about doing it wrong, how they’re doing it wrong.
The entire field—at least in books—is like teaching people to ride bicycles without giving them any bicycles to practice on. Common practice in workshops isn’t a hell of a lot better, but your odds are a lot better of stumbling on a workshop where you can get coached or walked through something. Even there, testability, repeatability, and trainability are not the focus.
So yes, the entire self-help field might as well be a lottery right now, if you have no information on where to start. Many of my students, like me, own literally hundreds of self-help books, from which they got little or no help until they “got it” from something I wrote or said or did with them.
As for me, I just got lucky enough to get an insight from computer programming that opened my eyes to what was going on, that gave me my first “rosetta stone” for the field.
Unreliable for getting true explanations. Self-experimentation is generally too poorly controlled to give unconfounded data about what really caused a result. (Also, typically sample size is too small to justify generalizability.)
The way I’d put it for this stuff is that experiments help communicate why someone would try a technique, they help people distinguish signal from noise, because there are a ton of people out there saying X works for me.