But the latter is, obviously, an excellent reason for the former! People mostly don’t take such claims seriously… because they know perfectly well that said claims mostly are not true.
I think that high-performing people reporting a thing works very well for them is some evidence that the thing works. I agree that these things will often not work anyways, sometimes for idiosyncratic reasons, sometimes due to the selection bias you mentioned, and so on. But I try new things because trying new things is usually cheap, and has high potential upside. Buying the materials cost $59.02 (although a more bare-bones setup could probably be assembled for ~$20.00), and I spent about 40 minutes determining whether this system seemed better. This was a cheap test for me.
I understand your claim as people (correctly) don’t try these things out because they know that the techniques probably won’t help them. But I claim that regularly trying new things is a very good idea, and that prioritizing things recommended by high-performing people is a good idea. Why would the expected value of these experiments be negative?
Notably, people could commit in this thread to trying this method for some length of time and then writing up their experience with it for LW. That would help address some of the obvious selection effect.
I think that high-performing people reporting a thing works very well for them is some evidence that the thing works. I agree that these things will often not work anyways, sometimes for idiosyncratic reasons, sometimes due to the selection bias you mentioned, and so on. But I try new things because trying new things is usually cheap, and has high potential upside. Buying the materials cost $59.02 (although a more bare-bones setup could probably be assembled for ~$20.00), and I spent about 40 minutes determining whether this system seemed better. This was a cheap test for me.
I understand your claim as people (correctly) don’t try these things out because they know that the techniques probably won’t help them. But I claim that regularly trying new things is a very good idea, and that prioritizing things recommended by high-performing people is a good idea. Why would the expected value of these experiments be negative?
Notably, people could commit in this thread to trying this method for some length of time and then writing up their experience with it for LW. That would help address some of the obvious selection effect.