One of my favorite examples is Roy Baumeister’s book Willpower which he published in 2011. He’s a professor who got two years later highest award given by the Association for Psychological Science, the William James Fellow award.
The book builds on a bunch of not-replicateable science and goes on to recommend that people should eat sugar to improve their Willpower, in a way that maps well to what Feymann describes as Cargo Cult science. We know the bad effects of sugar on the human body.
Here we have a distinguished psychologists who wrote in this decade a book that does the equivalent of recommending bloodletting. That’s not a community with high epistemic norms.
You Scott recently wrote a post where you were suprised that neuroscience as a field messes up a question such as neurogenesis. Given the track record of the community that should be no suprise as they are largely doing the thing Feymann called Cargo Cult Science. They even publish papers that constantly say that they can predict things better then theoretically possible.
Everybody tries to succeed at his life. It feels to me like “not do self-help” because it might lead you to believe wrong things is like “don’t reroute the trolley car” because rerouting makes you kill people. Taking self-help seriously will lead to expose to nontrivial effects that various self-help paradigms produce.
Is the point of the analogy you are trying to make that we should be less like Hippocrates and more like the wise ladies? That we should ignore all persuit of health?
There are a lot of things that produce interesting effects and if the only interesting effect you experienced is playing with chakra’s and you as a result recommend chakra’s, I’m not sure that expose to self-help is the main issue.
When being inside our community I don’t focus on spreading concepts because they produce interesting effects but on those self-help things like Focusing or Internal Double Crux that provide insight in addition to produce interesting effects or produce results.
Is the point of the analogy you are trying to make that we should be less like Hippocrates and more like the wise ladies? That we should ignore all persuit of health?
Is the better argument not that the wise ladies were onto something? Traditional medicines are a mixed bag, but some herbal remedies are truly effective and have since been integrated into scientific medicinal practices. Rather than inventing his own theoretical framework, Hippocrates would have been better-served by investigating the existing herbal practices and trying to identify the truly-effective from the placebo. Trial-and-error is a form of empiricism, after all—and this seems to be how cultural knowledge like herbal medicine came to be.
There’s a lot in the word “woo”.
One of my favorite examples is Roy Baumeister’s book Willpower which he published in 2011. He’s a professor who got two years later highest award given by the Association for Psychological Science, the William James Fellow award.
The book builds on a bunch of not-replicateable science and goes on to recommend that people should eat sugar to improve their Willpower, in a way that maps well to what Feymann describes as Cargo Cult science. We know the bad effects of sugar on the human body.
Here we have a distinguished psychologists who wrote in this decade a book that does the equivalent of recommending bloodletting. That’s not a community with high epistemic norms.
You Scott recently wrote a post where you were suprised that neuroscience as a field messes up a question such as neurogenesis. Given the track record of the community that should be no suprise as they are largely doing the thing Feymann called Cargo Cult Science. They even publish papers that constantly say that they can predict things better then theoretically possible.
Everybody tries to succeed at his life. It feels to me like “not do self-help” because it might lead you to believe wrong things is like “don’t reroute the trolley car” because rerouting makes you kill people. Taking self-help seriously will lead to expose to nontrivial effects that various self-help paradigms produce.
Is the point of the analogy you are trying to make that we should be less like Hippocrates and more like the wise ladies? That we should ignore all persuit of health?
There are a lot of things that produce interesting effects and if the only interesting effect you experienced is playing with chakra’s and you as a result recommend chakra’s, I’m not sure that expose to self-help is the main issue.
When being inside our community I don’t focus on spreading concepts because they produce interesting effects but on those self-help things like Focusing or Internal Double Crux that provide insight in addition to produce interesting effects or produce results.
Is the better argument not that the wise ladies were onto something? Traditional medicines are a mixed bag, but some herbal remedies are truly effective and have since been integrated into scientific medicinal practices. Rather than inventing his own theoretical framework, Hippocrates would have been better-served by investigating the existing herbal practices and trying to identify the truly-effective from the placebo. Trial-and-error is a form of empiricism, after all—and this seems to be how cultural knowledge like herbal medicine came to be.