I agree with your assessment. This is mostly a work of philosophy and not operationalized. I think knowing the pattern is mostly helpful if you’re constructing a technique that you want to share with others (or are the sort of person like me who generally only finds success with something after understanding in deep detail how it works). Knowing what the general pattern looks like helps you know if you’re forgetting anything in teaching a technique or developing a process.
For example, forgetting about safety is probably the number one thing I’ve seen cause advice in general and rationality training in particular to not work. People first and foremost need an environment in which growth is possible and without it techniques only sometimes get lucky and work despite everything.
Think how we venerate stories of people turning their lives around against the odds. Those stories are interesting in part because they are not what normally happens. Similarly, stories about people who are already effective at things learning to be more effective are not very interesting to most people in part because they are what’s expected.
What’s interesting is that in “against the odds” stories, often the turning point is when “safety” is created by the person hitting “rock bottom” and having “nothing left to lose”. This is a painful kind of safety but it sometimes works (although I think we hear about it positively mainly due to survivorship bias and it’s actually a really bad strategy). Many people, though, never find safety even in despair and instead remain stuck defending themselves without being able to apply techniques and grow.
So if you want to help people, knowing this seems important and you probably want to account for creating an environment for participants where something might work because otherwise nothing will likely work.
I agree with your assessment. This is mostly a work of philosophy and not operationalized. I think knowing the pattern is mostly helpful if you’re constructing a technique that you want to share with others (or are the sort of person like me who generally only finds success with something after understanding in deep detail how it works). Knowing what the general pattern looks like helps you know if you’re forgetting anything in teaching a technique or developing a process.
For example, forgetting about safety is probably the number one thing I’ve seen cause advice in general and rationality training in particular to not work. People first and foremost need an environment in which growth is possible and without it techniques only sometimes get lucky and work despite everything.
Think how we venerate stories of people turning their lives around against the odds. Those stories are interesting in part because they are not what normally happens. Similarly, stories about people who are already effective at things learning to be more effective are not very interesting to most people in part because they are what’s expected.
What’s interesting is that in “against the odds” stories, often the turning point is when “safety” is created by the person hitting “rock bottom” and having “nothing left to lose”. This is a painful kind of safety but it sometimes works (although I think we hear about it positively mainly due to survivorship bias and it’s actually a really bad strategy). Many people, though, never find safety even in despair and instead remain stuck defending themselves without being able to apply techniques and grow.
So if you want to help people, knowing this seems important and you probably want to account for creating an environment for participants where something might work because otherwise nothing will likely work.