I don’t know how the LessWrong community would treat people like my friend, or whether introducing her to the Sequences would help. It’s not an experiment I want to try unless I have some concrete evidence that it will help.
I don’t see much of a need for evidence before introducing someone to the sequences. I teach private test prep and will routinely refer my students to the sequences for reading practice. I sincerely believe it helps, but I’m highly confident I will never be able to obtain reliable evidence to that effect. I am quite confident, however, it does little or no harm.
So unless it’d be costly to get her to read the sequences, how could they hurt?
One obvious case would be this. If she has trouble trusting people already, learning a whole bunch of new problems about them might worsen it. On the other hand, she is a psych student, so I assume she already knows a lot of that stuff.
I don’t see much of a need for evidence before introducing someone to the sequences. I teach private test prep and will routinely refer my students to the sequences for reading practice. I sincerely believe it helps, but I’m highly confident I will never be able to obtain reliable evidence to that effect. I am quite confident, however, it does little or no harm.
So unless it’d be costly to get her to read the sequences, how could they hurt?
One obvious case would be this. If she has trouble trusting people already, learning a whole bunch of new problems about them might worsen it. On the other hand, she is a psych student, so I assume she already knows a lot of that stuff.