He’s tried, or he wouldn’t have had the material to make those posts.
I appreciate your comments, and they’re a good counterpoint to EY’s point of view. But the fact that you need to make an assumption in order to be an effective teacher, because it’s true most of the time, doesn’t mean it’s always true. You are making an expected-value calculation as a teacher, perhaps subconsciously:
If I accept that my approach doesn’t work well with some people, and work with those people to try to find an approach that works for them, I will be able to effectively coach 50 people per year (or whatever).
If I dismiss the people whom my approach doesn’t work well for as losers, and focus on the people whom my approach works well for, I’ll be able to effectively coach 500 people per year.
You are also taking EY’s claim that not every technique works well for every person, and caricaturing it as the claim that there is a 1-1 correspondence between people and techniques that work for them. He never said that.
The specific comments Eliezer has made, about people erroneously assuming that what worked for them should work for other people, were taken from real life and were, I think, also true and correct. In order to convince me that those specific examples were wrong, you would have to address those specific examples in detail and make a strong case why they were not really as he described them. I would rather see you narrow your claims to something reasonable than make these erroneous blanket denunciations, because they distract from the valuable things you have to say.
You don’t need to duke it out with EY over who’s the alpha teacher. :)
You are making an expected-value calculation as a teacher, perhaps subconsciously
No. I’m making the assumption that, until someone has actually tried something, they aren’t in a position to say whether or not it works. Once someone has actually tried something, and it doesn’t work, then I find something else for them to do. I don’t give up and say, “oh, well I guess that doesn’t work for you, then.”
When I do a one-on-one consult, I don’t charge someone until and unless they get the result we agree on as a “success” for that consultation. If I can’t get the result, I don’t get paid, and I’m out the time.
Do I make sure that the definition of “success” is reasonably in scope for what I can accomplish in one session? Sure. But I don’t perform any sort of filtering (other than that which may occur by selection or availability bias, e.g. having both motivation and funds) to determine who I work with.
You are also taking EY’s claim that not every technique works well for every person, and caricaturing it as the claim that there is a 1-1 correspondence between people and techniques that work for them. He never said that.
I didn’t say he did, or that anybody did. What I said is that people assume they are unique and special and nothing will work for them. A LOT of people believe this, because they’re under the mistaken impression that they tried 50 different things, when in fact they’ve been making the same mistakes, 50 different times, without ever being aware of the mistake.
The specific comments Eliezer has made, about people erroneously assuming that what worked for them should work for other people, were taken from real life and were, I think, also true and correct.
No argument there. However, when people assume that what worked for them will work for other people, they are actually mostly right.
What they are mistaken about is that 1) they’re actually fully communicating what they did, and that 2) other people will be able to accurately reproduce the internal steps as well as the external and easy-to-describe ones.
So I agree at the level of the result, but I disagree about the cause. At the brain hardware level, human beings are just not that different from one another. We differ more at the software, filtering, and meta-cognitive levels, which is where the details of communication and teaching trip up the transfer of effective techniques.
In order to convince me that those specific examples were wrong,
Why would I want to? My point is only that Eliezer whining about things not working and demanding proof is counterproductive to his own goals and counter to his professed values and art. This is independent of whether he gives up or not, or whose advice or example he seeks.
I would rather see you narrow your claims to something reasonable
No. I’m making the assumption that, until someone has actually tried something, they aren’t in a position to say whether or not it works.
This is a wrong assumption. The correctness of a decision to even try something directly depends on how certain you are it’ll work. Don’t play lotteries, don’t hunt bigfoot, but commute to work risking death in a traffic accident.
The correctness of a decision to even try something directly depends on how certain you are it’ll work.
...weighed against the expected cost. And for the kind of things we’re talking about here, a vast number of things can be tried at relatively small cost compared to one’s ultimate desired outcome, since the end result of a search is something you can then go on to use for the rest of your life.
Precisely. There are self-help techniques that can be tried in minutes, even in seconds. I don’t see a single reason for not allocating a fraction of one’s procrastination time to trying mind hacks or anything else that might help against akrasia.
Say, if my procrastination time is 3 hours per day, I could allocate 10% of that -- 18 minutes. How long does it take to speak a sentence “I will become a syndicated cartoonist”? 10 seconds at maximum—given 18 minutes, that’s 108 repetitions!
But what if it doesn’t work? Oh noes, I could kill 108 orcs during that time and perhaps get some green drops!
If I were to choose between throwing one cent away and buying a lottery ticket on it, I’d buy the ticket. (I don’t consider here additional expenses such as the calories I need to spend on contracting my muscles to reach the ticket stand etc. I assume that both acts—throwing away and buying the ticket—have zero additional costs, and the lottery has a non-zero chance of winning.)
The activity of trying the procrastination tricks must be shown to be at least as good as the procrastination activity, which would be a tremendous achievement, placing these tricks far above their current standing.
You are not doing the procrastination-time activity because it’s the best thing you could do, that’s the whole problem with akrasia. If you find any way of replacing procrastination activity with a better procrastination activity, you are making a step away from procrastination, towards productivity.
So, you consider trying anti-procrastination tricks instead of procrastinating an improvement. But the truth of this statement is far from obvious, and it’s outright false for at least my kind of procrastination. (I often procrastinate by educating myself, instead of getting things done.)
Yep, my example with orcs vs. tricks was a degenerate case—it breaks down if the procrastination activity has at least some usefulness, which is certainly the case with self-education as a procrastination activity.
But this whole area is a fertile ground for self-rationalization. In my own case, it seems more productive to simply deem certain procrastination activities as having zero benefit than to actually try to assess their potential benefits compared to other activities.
(BTW, my primary procrastination activity, PC games, is responsible for my knowledge of the English language, which I consider an enormous benefit. Who knew.)
Say, if my procrastination time is 3 hours per day, I could allocate 10% of that -- 18 minutes. How long does it take to speak a sentence “I will become a syndicated cartoonist”? 10 seconds at maximum—which means 108 repetitions into 18 minutes!
IAWYC, but if you want to learn to do it correctly, you’d be better off using fewer repetitions and suggesting something aimed at provoking an immediate response, such as “I’m now drawing a cartoon”… and carefully paying attention to your inner imagery and physical responses, which are the real meat of this family of techniques.
PJ, I think that discussing details of particular mindhacks is off-topic for this thread—let’s discuss them here. That was just an example. (As for myself, I use an “I want” format, I don’t repeat it anywhere near 108 times, and I do aim at immediate things.)
At the brain hardware level, human beings are just not that different from one another. We differ more at the software, filtering, and meta-cognitive levels, which is where the details of communication and teaching trip up the transfer of effective techniques.
That claim does not match the evidence that I have encountered. Consider, for example, responsiveness to hypnosis. Hypnotic responsiveness as can be measured by the stanford test is found to differ more between fraternal twins raised together than between identical twins raised apart. It also seems to be related to the size of the rostrum region of the corpus callosum.
I agree that people tend to overestimate their own uniqueness and I know this is something that I do myself. Nevertheless, there is clearly one element of human behavior and motivation that is attributable directly to the brain hardware level and I suggest that there are many more.
Hypnotic responsiveness as can be measured by the stanford test
If you mean the Hilgard scale, ask a few professional hypnotists how useful it actually is. Properly-trained hypnotists don’t use a tape-recorded monotone with identical words for every person; they adjust their pace, tone, and verbiage based on observing a person’s response in progress, to maximize the response. So unless th Stanford test is something like timing how long a master hypnotist takes to produce some specified hypnotic phenomena, it’s probably not very useful.
Professional hypnotists also know that responsiveness is a learned process (see also the concept of “fractionation”), which means it’s probably a mistake to treat it as an intrinsic variable for measuring purposes, unless you have a way to control for the amount of learning someone has done.
So, as far as this particular variable is concerned, you’re observing the wrong evidence.
Personal development is an area where science routinely barks up the wrong tree, because there’s a difference between “objective” measurement and maximizing utility. Even if it’s a fact that people differ, operating as if that fact were true leads to less utility for everyone who doesn’t already believe they’re great at something.
If you mean the Hilgard scale, ask a few professional hypnotists how useful it actually is.
I mean the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scales, the most useful being SHSS:C. Hilgard played his cards poorly and somehow failed to have the scale named after himself. I am more interested in the findings of researchers who study the clinical work of professional hypnotists than I am in the opinions of the hypnotists themselves. Like most commonly used psychological metrics, the SHSS:C is far from perfect. Nevertheless, it does manage to correlate strongly with the success of clinical outcomes, which is the best I can expect of it.
Professional hypnotists also know that responsiveness is a learned process (see also the concept of “fractionation”), which means it’s probably a mistake to treat it as an intrinsic variable for measuring purposes, unless you have a way to control for the amount of learning someone has done.
Professional scientists studying hypnosis observe that specific training can alter the hypnotic responsiveness from low to high in as much as 50% of cases. Many have expressed surprise at just how stable the baseline is over time and observe that subjects trained to respond to hypnosis revert to the baseline over time. Nevertheless, such reversion takes time and Gosgard found (in 2004) that a training effect can remain for as much as four months.
So, as far as this particular variable is concerned, you’re observing the wrong evidence.
When I began researching hypnosis I was forced to subordinate my preferred belief to what the evidence suggests. When it comes to most aspects of personality and personal psychological profile I much prefer to believe in the power of ‘nurture’ and my ability to mould my own personality profile to my desires with training. I have become convinced over time that there is a far greater heritability component than I would have liked. On the positive side, the importance of ‘natural talent’ in aquiring expert skills is one area where the genetic component tends to be overestimated most of the time. When it comes to aquiring specialised skills, consistent effortful practice makes all the difference and natural talent is almost irrelevant.
Personal development is an area where science routinely barks up the wrong tree, because there’s a difference between “objective” measurement and maximizing utility. Even if it’s a fact that people differ, operating as if that fact were true leads to less utility for everyone who doesn’t already believe they’re great at something.
There is certainly something to that! I do see the merit in ‘operating as if [something that may not necessarily be our best prediction of reality]’. It would be great if there were greater scientific efforts in investigating the most effective personal development strategies.
Professional scientists studying hypnosis observe that specific training can alter the hypnotic responsiveness from low to high in as much as 50% of cases.
Indeed. What’s particularly important if you’re after results, rather than theories, is that just because those other 50% didn’t go from low to high, doesn’t mean that there wasn’t some different form, approach, environment, or method of training that wouldn’t have produced the same result!
IOW, if the training they tested was 100% identical for each person, then the odds that the other 50% were still trainable is extremely high.
(And since most generative (as opposed to therapeutic) self-help techniques implicitly rely on the same brain functions that are used in hypnosis (monoidealistic imagination and ideomotor or ideosensory responses), this means that the same things can be made to work for everyone, provided you can train the basic skill.)
I have become convinced over time that there is a far greater heritability component than I would have liked.
Robert Fritz once wrote something about how if you’re 5′3″ you’re not going to be able to win the NBA dunking contest… and then somebody did just that. It ain’t what you’ve got, it’s what you do with what you have got.
(Disclaimer: I don’t remember the winner’s name or even if 5′3″ was the actual height.)
It’s also rare that any quality we’re born with is all bad or all good; what gives with one hand takes away with the other, and vice versa. The catch is to find the way that works for you.
Some of my students work better with images, some with sounds, others still with feelings. Some have to write things down, I like to talk things out. These are all really superficial differences, because the steps in the processes are still basically the same. Also, even though my wife is more “auditory” than I am, and doesn’t visualize as well consciously… that doesn’t mean she can’t. (Over the last few years, she’s gradually gotten better at doing processes that involve more visual elements.)
(Also, we’ve actually tried swapping around our usual modes of cognition for a day or two, which was interesting. When she took on my processing stack, we got along better, but when I took on hers, I was really stressed and depressed… but I had a lot more sympathy for some of her moods after that!)
On the positive side, the importance of ‘natural talent’ in aquiring expert skills is one area where the genetic component tends to be overestimated most of the time. When it comes to aquiring specialised skills, consistent effortful practice makes all the difference and natural talent is almost irrelevant.
Absolutely! Dweck’s fixed and growth mindsets are absolutely central to my work. I used to call them “naturally struggling” and “naturally successful”—well, I still do for marketing reasons. But Dweck showed with brilliant clarity where the mindsets come from: struggle results from believing that your ability in any area is a fixed quantity, rather than a variable one under your personal control.
If somebody wants a scientifically validated reason to believe what I’m saying in this thread, they need look no further than Dweck’s mindsets research. It offers compelling scientific verification of the idea that thinking your ability is fixed really IS “dumbass loser” thinking!
Indeed. What’s particularly important if you’re after results, rather than theories, is that just because those other 50% didn’t go from low to high, doesn’t mean that there wasn’t some different form, approach, environment, or method of training that wouldn’t have produced the same result!
Um… PJ, this is just what psychoanalysts said… and kept on saying after around a thousand studies showed that psychoanalysis had no effect statistically distinguishable from just talking to a random intelligent caring listener.
You need to read more basic rationality material, along the lines of Robyn Dawes’s “Rational Choice in an Uncertain World”. There you will find the records of many who engaged in this classic error mode and embarrassed themselves accordingly. You do not get to just flush controlled experiments down the toilet by hoping, without actually pointing to any countering studies, that someone could have done something differently that would have produced the effect you want the study to produce but that it didn’t produce.
You know how there are a lot of self-indulgent bad habits you train your clients to get rid of? This is the sort of thing that master rationalists like Robyn Dawes train people to stop doing. And you are missing a lot of the basic training here, which is why, as I keep saying, it is such a tragedy that you only began to study rationality after already forming your theories of akrasia. So either you’ll read more books on rationality and learn those basics and rethink those theories, or you’ll stay stuck.
Um… PJ, this is just what psychoanalysts said… and kept on saying after around a thousand studies showed that psychoanalysis had no effect statistically distinguishable from just talking to a random intelligent caring listener.
Rounding to the nearest cliche. I didn’t say my methods would help those other people, or that some ONE method would. I said that given a person Y there would be SOME method X. This is not at all the same thing as what you’re talking about.
You do not get to just flush controlled experiments down the toilet by hoping, without actually pointing to any countering studies, that someone could have done something differently that would have produced the effect you want the study to produce but that it didn’t produce.
What I’ve said is that if you have a standard training method that moves 50% of people from low to high on some criterion, there is an extremely high probability that the other 50% needed something different in their training. I’m puzzled how that is even remotely a controversial statement.
What I’ve said is that if you have a standard training method that moves 50% of people from low to high on some criterion, there is an extremely high probability that the other 50% needed something different in their training. I’m puzzled how that is even remotely a controversial statement.
You ever heard of something called the Pygmalion effect? Did the study control for it?
By which I mean, did they control for the beliefs of the teachers who were training these subjects, in reference to:
the trainability and potential of the subjects themselves, and
the teachability of the subject matter itself?
For example, did they tell the teacher they had a bunch of students with superb hypnotic potential who just needed some encouragement to get going, or did they tell them they were conducting a test, to see who was trainable, or if it was possible to train hypnotic ability at all?
These things make a HUGE difference to whether people actually learn.
Absolutely! Dweck’s fixed and growth mindsets are absolutely central to my work. I used to call them “naturally struggling” and “naturally successful”—well, I still do for marketing reasons. But Dweck showed with brilliant clarity where the mindsets come from: struggle results from believing that your ability in any area is a fixed quantity, rather than a variable one under your personal control.
This is one area where rational thinking is of real benefit. Because not only is a ‘growth mindset’ more effective than a ‘fixed mindset’ when it comes to learning skills it is also simply far more accurate.
While I was devouring the various therios and findings compiled in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance I kept running across one common observation. There is, it seems one predictor of expert performance in a field that has a significant heritable component. It isn’t height or IQ. Although those two are highly heritible they aren’t all that great at predicting successful acheivement of elite performance. As best as the researchers could desipher, the heritable component of success is more or less the ability to motivate oneself to deliberately practice for four hours seven days a week for about ten years.
Now, I would be surprised to see you concede the heritability of motivation and I definitely suggest it is an area in which to apply Dweck’s growth mindset at full force! You also have a whole bag of tricks and techniques that can be used to enhance just the sort of motivation required. But I wonder, have you observed that there are some people who naturally tend to be more interested in getting involved actively in personal development efforts of the kind you support? Completely aside from whether they believe in the potential usefulness, there would seem to be many who are simply less likely to care enough to take extreme personal development seriously.
But I wonder, have you observed that there are some people who naturally tend to be more interested in getting involved actively in personal development efforts of the kind you support?
Yes and no. What I’ve observed is that most everybody wants something out of life, and if they’re not getting it, then sooner or later their path leads to them trying to develop themselves, or causing themselves to accidentally get some personal development as a side effect of whatever their real goal is.
The people who set out for personal development for its own sake—whether because they think being better is awesome or because they hate who they currently are—are indeed a minority.
A not-insignificant-subset of my clientele are entrepreneurs and creative types who come to me because they’re putting off starting their business, writing their book, or doing some other important-to-them project. And a significant number of them cease to be my customers the moment they’ve got the immediate problem taken care of.
So, it’s not that people aren’t generally motivated to improve themselves, so much as they’re not motivated to make general improvements; they are after specific improvements that are often highly context-specific.
If somebody wants a scientifically validated reason to believe what I’m saying in this thread, they need look no further than Dweck’s mindsets research. It offers compelling scientific verification of the idea that thinking your ability is fixed really IS “dumbass loser” thinking!
I would like to affirm the distinction between the overall mindset you wish to encourage and the specific claims that you use while doing so. For example I agree with your claims in this (immediate parent) post and also your the gist of your personal development philosophy while I reject the previous assertion that differences between individuals are predominantly software rather than hardware.
(And yes, 50% was presented as a significant finding in favour of training from the baseline.)
I reject the previous assertion that differences between individuals are predominantly software rather than hardware.
I think we may agree more than you think. I agree that individuals are different in terms of whatever dial settings they may have when they show up at my door. I disagree that those initial dial settings are welded in place and not changeable.
“Hardware” and “software” are squishy terms when it comes to brains that can not only learn, but literally grow. And ISTM that most homeostatic systems in the body can be trained to have a different “setting” than they come from the factory with.
The gist of your top-level comment here is that your techniques work for everyone; and if they don’t work for someone, it’s that person’s fault.
Here’s the problem: when someone argues that some techniques might not work for some people, their objective is not merely to achieve epistemic accuracy.
Instead, the real point of arguing such a thing is a form of self-handicapping. “Bruce” is saying, “not everything works for everyone… therefore, what you have might not work for me… therefore, I don’t have to risk trying and failing.”
In other words, the point of saying that not every technique works for everyone is to apply the Fallacy of Grey: not everything works for everybody, therefore all techniques are alike, therefore you cannot compare my performance to anyone else, because maybe your technique just won’t work for me. Therefore, I am safe from your judgment.
This is a fully general argument against trying ANY technique, for ANY purpose. It has ZERO to do with who came up with the technique or who’s suggesting it; it’s just a Litany Against Fear… of failure.
As a rationalist and empiricist, I want to admit the possibility that I could be wrong. However, as an instrumentalist, instructor, and helper-of-people, I’m going to say that, if you allow your logic to excuse your losing, you fail logic, you fail rationality, and you fail life.
So no, I won’t be “reasonable”, because that would be a failure of rationality. I do not claim that any technique X will always work for all persons; I merely claim that, given a person Y, there is always some technique X that will produce a behavior change.
The point is not to argue that a particular value of X may not work with a particular value of Y, the point is to find X.
(And the search space for X, seen from the “inside view”, is about two orders of magnitude smaller than it appears to be from the “outside view”.)
Instead, the real point of arguing such a thing is a form of self-handicapping. “Bruce” is saying, “not everything works for everyone… therefore, what you have might not work for me… therefore, I don’t have to risk trying and failing.”
I’m pretty surprised to see you make this type of argument. Are you really so sure that you have that precise of an understanding of the motives behind everyone who has brought this up? You seem oblivious to the predictable consequences of acting so unreasonably confident in your own theories. Your style alone provokes skepticism, however unwarranted or irrational it may be. Seeing you write this entire line of criticism off as “they’re just Brucing” makes me wonder just how much your brand of “instrumental” rationality interferes with your perception of reality.
Here’s the problem: when someone argues that some techniques might not work for some people, their objective is not merely to achieve epistemic accuracy. Instead, the real point of arguing such a thing is a form of self-handicapping.
Because of course it is impossible a priori that any technique works for one person but not another. Furthermore, it is impossible for anyone to arrive at this conclusion by an honest mistake. They all have impure motives; furthermore they all have the same particular impure motive; furthermore P. J. Eby knows this by virtue of his vast case experience, in which he has encountered many people making this assertion, and deduced the same impure motive every time.
To quote Karl Popper:
The Freudian analysts emphasized that their theories were constantly verified by their “clinical observations.” As for Adler, I was much impressed by a personal experience. Once, in 1919, I reported to him a case which to me did not seem particularly Adlerian, but which he found no difficulty in analyzing in terms of his theory of inferiority feelings, Although he had not even seen the child. Slightly shocked, I asked him how he could be so sure. “Because of my thousandfold experience,” he replied; whereupon I could not help saying: “And with this new case, I suppose, your experience has become thousand-and-one-fold.”
I’ll say it again. PJ, you need to learn the basics of rationality—in this you are an apprentice and you are making apprentice mistakes. You will either accept this or learn the basics, or not. That’s what you would tell a client, I expect, if they were making mistakes this basic according to your understanding of akrasia.
Heh, that Adler anecdote reminds me of a guy I know who tends to believe in conspiracy theories, and who was backing up his belief that the US government is behind 9-11 by saying how evil the US government tends to be. Of course, 9-11 will most likely serve as future evidence of how evil the US government is.
(Not that I can tell whether that’s what’s going on here)
Are you really so sure that you have that precise of an understanding of the motives behind everyone who has brought this up?
What makes you think I’m writing to the motives of specific people? If I were, I’d have named names (as I named Eliezer).
In the post you were quoting, I was speaking in the abstract, about a particular fallacy, not attributing that fallacy to any particular persons.
So if you don’t think what I said applies to you, why are you inquiring about it?
(Note: reviewing the comment in question, I see that I might not have adequately qualified “someone … who argues”—I meant, someone who argues insistently, not someone who merely “argues” in the sense of, “puts forth reasoning”. I can see how that might have been confusing.)
You seem oblivious to the predictable consequences of acting so unreasonably confident in your own theories.
No, I’m well aware of those consequences. The natural consequence of confidently stating ANY opinion is to have some people agree and some disagree, with increased emotional response by both groups, compared to a less-confident statement. Happens here all the time. Doesn’t have anything to do with the content, just the confidence.
Seeing you write this entire line of criticism off as “they’re just Brucing” makes me wonder just how much your brand of “instrumental” rationality interferes with your perception of reality.
I wrote what I wrote because some of the people here who are Brucing via “epistemic” arguments will see themselves in my words, and maybe learn something.
But if I water down my words to avoid offense to those who are not Brucing (or who are, but don’t want to think about it) I lessen the clarity of my communication to precisely the group of people I can help by saying something in the first place.
But if I water down my words to avoid offense to those who are not Brucing (or who are, but don’t want to think about it) I lessen the clarity of my communication to precisely the group of people I can help by saying something in the first place.
Perhaps the reverse. By limiting your claims to the important ones, those that are actually factual, you reduce the distraction. You can be assured that ‘Bruce’ will take blatant fallacies or false claims as an excuse to ignore you. Perhaps they may respond better to a more consistently rational approach.
You can be assured that ‘Bruce’ will take blatant fallacies or false claims as an excuse to ignore you
And if there aren’t any, he’ll be sure to invent them. ;-)
Perhaps they may respond better to a more consistently rational approach.
Hehehehe. Sure, because subconscious minds are so very rational. Right.
Conscious minds are reasonable, and occasionally rational… but they aren’t, as a general rule, in charge of anything important in a person’s behavior. (Although they do love to take credit for everything, anyway.)
And if there aren’t any, he’ll be sure to invent them. ;-)
No reason to make his job easier.
Hehehehe. Sure, because subconscious minds are so very rational. Right.
No, but personally, mine is definitely sufficiently capable of noticing minor logical flaws to use them to irrationally dismiss uncomfortable arguments. This may be rare, but it happens.
Actually, my point was that I hadn’t made any. Many of the objections that people are making are about things I never actually said.
For example, some people insist on arguing with the ideas that:
teaching ability varies, and
teachers’ beliefs make a difference to the success of their students.
And somehow they’re twisting these very scientifically supported ideas into me stating some sort of fallacy… and conveniently ignoring the part where I said that “If you’re more interested in results than theory, then...”
Of course if you do standardized teaching and standardized testing you’ll get varying results from different people. But if you want to maximize the utility that students will get from their training, you’ll want to vary how you teach them, instead, according to what produces the best result for that individual.
That doesn’t mean that you need to teach them different things, it’s that you’ll need to take a different route to teach them the same thing.
A learning disability is not the same thing as a performance disability, and my essential claim here is that differences in applicability of anti-akrasia and other behavior change techniques are more readily explained as differences in learning ability and predispositions, than in differences in applicability of the specific techniques.
I say this because I used to think that different things worked for different people (after all, so many didn’t work for me!), and then I discovered that the problem is that people (like me) think they’re following steps that they actually aren’t following, and they don’t notice the discrepancy because the discrepancies are “off-map” for them.
That is, their map of the territory doesn’t include one or more of the critical distinctions that make a technique work, like the difference between consciously thinking something, versus observing automatic responses, or the difference between their feelings and their thoughts about their feelings. If you miss one of these distinctions, a technique will fail, but it’s not the technique that’s broken, any more than a bicycle is broken if you haven’t learned to stay on it yet.
People vary in their ability to learn these distinctions; some people get it right away, some need help. Some need lots of help. As I get better at verbalizing and pointing out these distinctions, I get (a little) better at getting people who have difficulties to learn them faster. (And as I got better at grasping the distinctions, I also became able to make more and more things work for me that never worked before.)
The really silly thing about all this is that, from my POV, the people who insist that there is neither any theory nor universally applicable techniques, are basically acting like theists: insisting I treat their irrational and demonstrably-false beliefs as worthy of serious consideration. It reminds me of Perry Marshall arguing that because we don’t know where DNA comes from, we have to “admit” that maybe God did it.
That is, “Some techniques have not worked for me” is taken as evidence supporting a hypothesis of “it’s not me, it’s the techniques”. However, by itself, this is equally valid as supporting evidence for, “the technique is fine, you just didn’t learn how to do it right.” When you add independent evidence that other people claim the same technique didn’t work for them, but then can be taught to make it work for them, then it begins to be more supportive of alternative hypotheses.
And yet, this doesn’t seem to make anybody update. Instead, I am being “irrationally confident” for not giving enough weight to the “it’s not me, it’s the technique” theory… when I have plenty of evidence (personal and customers) that is not at all consistent with that theory, and they only have evidence that is equally applicable to BOTH theories.
Not everyone making that argument is necessarily Brucing, in the sense of directly seeking failure. Some are just mistaken. However, the net effect of the belief is the same: the person stops before they learn, like a kid who’s convinced he or she is just not cut out for bicycle riding.
(P.S. It’s important to understand this is not about me or “my” techniques—most of which I didn’t invent, anyway! As I’ve said several times, there are TONS of things out there that work… if you have the necessary distinctions in your map. And most things that work share the same critical distinctions! I used to believe that my hand-picked set of techniques was special, but now I know that it was always more about the teachability of the techniques I picked, and my insistence on using testing as a path to teaching. If you diligently apply these principles, virtually ANY technique can be made to work. It’s got nothing to do with ME.)
He’s tried, or he wouldn’t have had the material to make those posts.
I appreciate your comments, and they’re a good counterpoint to EY’s point of view. But the fact that you need to make an assumption in order to be an effective teacher, because it’s true most of the time, doesn’t mean it’s always true. You are making an expected-value calculation as a teacher, perhaps subconsciously:
If I accept that my approach doesn’t work well with some people, and work with those people to try to find an approach that works for them, I will be able to effectively coach 50 people per year (or whatever).
If I dismiss the people whom my approach doesn’t work well for as losers, and focus on the people whom my approach works well for, I’ll be able to effectively coach 500 people per year.
You are also taking EY’s claim that not every technique works well for every person, and caricaturing it as the claim that there is a 1-1 correspondence between people and techniques that work for them. He never said that.
The specific comments Eliezer has made, about people erroneously assuming that what worked for them should work for other people, were taken from real life and were, I think, also true and correct. In order to convince me that those specific examples were wrong, you would have to address those specific examples in detail and make a strong case why they were not really as he described them. I would rather see you narrow your claims to something reasonable than make these erroneous blanket denunciations, because they distract from the valuable things you have to say.
You don’t need to duke it out with EY over who’s the alpha teacher. :)
No. I’m making the assumption that, until someone has actually tried something, they aren’t in a position to say whether or not it works. Once someone has actually tried something, and it doesn’t work, then I find something else for them to do. I don’t give up and say, “oh, well I guess that doesn’t work for you, then.”
When I do a one-on-one consult, I don’t charge someone until and unless they get the result we agree on as a “success” for that consultation. If I can’t get the result, I don’t get paid, and I’m out the time.
Do I make sure that the definition of “success” is reasonably in scope for what I can accomplish in one session? Sure. But I don’t perform any sort of filtering (other than that which may occur by selection or availability bias, e.g. having both motivation and funds) to determine who I work with.
I didn’t say he did, or that anybody did. What I said is that people assume they are unique and special and nothing will work for them. A LOT of people believe this, because they’re under the mistaken impression that they tried 50 different things, when in fact they’ve been making the same mistakes, 50 different times, without ever being aware of the mistake.
No argument there. However, when people assume that what worked for them will work for other people, they are actually mostly right.
What they are mistaken about is that 1) they’re actually fully communicating what they did, and that 2) other people will be able to accurately reproduce the internal steps as well as the external and easy-to-describe ones.
So I agree at the level of the result, but I disagree about the cause. At the brain hardware level, human beings are just not that different from one another. We differ more at the software, filtering, and meta-cognitive levels, which is where the details of communication and teaching trip up the transfer of effective techniques.
Why would I want to? My point is only that Eliezer whining about things not working and demanding proof is counterproductive to his own goals and counter to his professed values and art. This is independent of whether he gives up or not, or whose advice or example he seeks.
What claims do you mean?
This is a wrong assumption. The correctness of a decision to even try something directly depends on how certain you are it’ll work. Don’t play lotteries, don’t hunt bigfoot, but commute to work risking death in a traffic accident.
...weighed against the expected cost. And for the kind of things we’re talking about here, a vast number of things can be tried at relatively small cost compared to one’s ultimate desired outcome, since the end result of a search is something you can then go on to use for the rest of your life.
Precisely. There are self-help techniques that can be tried in minutes, even in seconds. I don’t see a single reason for not allocating a fraction of one’s procrastination time to trying mind hacks or anything else that might help against akrasia.
Say, if my procrastination time is 3 hours per day, I could allocate 10% of that -- 18 minutes. How long does it take to speak a sentence “I will become a syndicated cartoonist”? 10 seconds at maximum—given 18 minutes, that’s 108 repetitions!
But what if it doesn’t work? Oh noes, I could kill 108 orcs during that time and perhaps get some green drops!
Vladimir, it doesn’t matter that a lottery ticket costs only 1 cent. Doesn’t matter at all. It only matters that you don’t expect to win by buying it.
Or maybe you do expect to win from a deal by investing 1 cent, or $10000, in which case by all means do so.
If I were to choose between throwing one cent away and buying a lottery ticket on it, I’d buy the ticket. (I don’t consider here additional expenses such as the calories I need to spend on contracting my muscles to reach the ticket stand etc. I assume that both acts—throwing away and buying the ticket—have zero additional costs, and the lottery has a non-zero chance of winning.)
The activity of trying the procrastination tricks must be shown to be at least as good as the procrastination activity, which would be a tremendous achievement, placing these tricks far above their current standing.
You are not doing the procrastination-time activity because it’s the best thing you could do, that’s the whole problem with akrasia. If you find any way of replacing procrastination activity with a better procrastination activity, you are making a step away from procrastination, towards productivity.
So, you consider trying anti-procrastination tricks instead of procrastinating an improvement. But the truth of this statement is far from obvious, and it’s outright false for at least my kind of procrastination. (I often procrastinate by educating myself, instead of getting things done.)
Yep, my example with orcs vs. tricks was a degenerate case—it breaks down if the procrastination activity has at least some usefulness, which is certainly the case with self-education as a procrastination activity.
But this whole area is a fertile ground for self-rationalization. In my own case, it seems more productive to simply deem certain procrastination activities as having zero benefit than to actually try to assess their potential benefits compared to other activities.
(BTW, my primary procrastination activity, PC games, is responsible for my knowledge of the English language, which I consider an enormous benefit. Who knew.)
IAWYC, but if you want to learn to do it correctly, you’d be better off using fewer repetitions and suggesting something aimed at provoking an immediate response, such as “I’m now drawing a cartoon”… and carefully paying attention to your inner imagery and physical responses, which are the real meat of this family of techniques.
PJ, I think that discussing details of particular mindhacks is off-topic for this thread—let’s discuss them here. That was just an example. (As for myself, I use an “I want” format, I don’t repeat it anywhere near 108 times, and I do aim at immediate things.)
That claim does not match the evidence that I have encountered. Consider, for example, responsiveness to hypnosis. Hypnotic responsiveness as can be measured by the stanford test is found to differ more between fraternal twins raised together than between identical twins raised apart. It also seems to be related to the size of the rostrum region of the corpus callosum.
I agree that people tend to overestimate their own uniqueness and I know this is something that I do myself. Nevertheless, there is clearly one element of human behavior and motivation that is attributable directly to the brain hardware level and I suggest that there are many more.
If you mean the Hilgard scale, ask a few professional hypnotists how useful it actually is. Properly-trained hypnotists don’t use a tape-recorded monotone with identical words for every person; they adjust their pace, tone, and verbiage based on observing a person’s response in progress, to maximize the response. So unless th Stanford test is something like timing how long a master hypnotist takes to produce some specified hypnotic phenomena, it’s probably not very useful.
Professional hypnotists also know that responsiveness is a learned process (see also the concept of “fractionation”), which means it’s probably a mistake to treat it as an intrinsic variable for measuring purposes, unless you have a way to control for the amount of learning someone has done.
So, as far as this particular variable is concerned, you’re observing the wrong evidence.
Personal development is an area where science routinely barks up the wrong tree, because there’s a difference between “objective” measurement and maximizing utility. Even if it’s a fact that people differ, operating as if that fact were true leads to less utility for everyone who doesn’t already believe they’re great at something.
I mean the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scales, the most useful being SHSS:C. Hilgard played his cards poorly and somehow failed to have the scale named after himself. I am more interested in the findings of researchers who study the clinical work of professional hypnotists than I am in the opinions of the hypnotists themselves. Like most commonly used psychological metrics, the SHSS:C is far from perfect. Nevertheless, it does manage to correlate strongly with the success of clinical outcomes, which is the best I can expect of it.
Professional scientists studying hypnosis observe that specific training can alter the hypnotic responsiveness from low to high in as much as 50% of cases. Many have expressed surprise at just how stable the baseline is over time and observe that subjects trained to respond to hypnosis revert to the baseline over time. Nevertheless, such reversion takes time and Gosgard found (in 2004) that a training effect can remain for as much as four months.
When I began researching hypnosis I was forced to subordinate my preferred belief to what the evidence suggests. When it comes to most aspects of personality and personal psychological profile I much prefer to believe in the power of ‘nurture’ and my ability to mould my own personality profile to my desires with training. I have become convinced over time that there is a far greater heritability component than I would have liked. On the positive side, the importance of ‘natural talent’ in aquiring expert skills is one area where the genetic component tends to be overestimated most of the time. When it comes to aquiring specialised skills, consistent effortful practice makes all the difference and natural talent is almost irrelevant.
There is certainly something to that! I do see the merit in ‘operating as if [something that may not necessarily be our best prediction of reality]’. It would be great if there were greater scientific efforts in investigating the most effective personal development strategies.
Indeed. What’s particularly important if you’re after results, rather than theories, is that just because those other 50% didn’t go from low to high, doesn’t mean that there wasn’t some different form, approach, environment, or method of training that wouldn’t have produced the same result!
IOW, if the training they tested was 100% identical for each person, then the odds that the other 50% were still trainable is extremely high.
(And since most generative (as opposed to therapeutic) self-help techniques implicitly rely on the same brain functions that are used in hypnosis (monoidealistic imagination and ideomotor or ideosensory responses), this means that the same things can be made to work for everyone, provided you can train the basic skill.)
Robert Fritz once wrote something about how if you’re 5′3″ you’re not going to be able to win the NBA dunking contest… and then somebody did just that. It ain’t what you’ve got, it’s what you do with what you have got.
(Disclaimer: I don’t remember the winner’s name or even if 5′3″ was the actual height.)
It’s also rare that any quality we’re born with is all bad or all good; what gives with one hand takes away with the other, and vice versa. The catch is to find the way that works for you.
Some of my students work better with images, some with sounds, others still with feelings. Some have to write things down, I like to talk things out. These are all really superficial differences, because the steps in the processes are still basically the same. Also, even though my wife is more “auditory” than I am, and doesn’t visualize as well consciously… that doesn’t mean she can’t. (Over the last few years, she’s gradually gotten better at doing processes that involve more visual elements.)
(Also, we’ve actually tried swapping around our usual modes of cognition for a day or two, which was interesting. When she took on my processing stack, we got along better, but when I took on hers, I was really stressed and depressed… but I had a lot more sympathy for some of her moods after that!)
Absolutely! Dweck’s fixed and growth mindsets are absolutely central to my work. I used to call them “naturally struggling” and “naturally successful”—well, I still do for marketing reasons. But Dweck showed with brilliant clarity where the mindsets come from: struggle results from believing that your ability in any area is a fixed quantity, rather than a variable one under your personal control.
If somebody wants a scientifically validated reason to believe what I’m saying in this thread, they need look no further than Dweck’s mindsets research. It offers compelling scientific verification of the idea that thinking your ability is fixed really IS “dumbass loser” thinking!
Um… PJ, this is just what psychoanalysts said… and kept on saying after around a thousand studies showed that psychoanalysis had no effect statistically distinguishable from just talking to a random intelligent caring listener.
You need to read more basic rationality material, along the lines of Robyn Dawes’s “Rational Choice in an Uncertain World”. There you will find the records of many who engaged in this classic error mode and embarrassed themselves accordingly. You do not get to just flush controlled experiments down the toilet by hoping, without actually pointing to any countering studies, that someone could have done something differently that would have produced the effect you want the study to produce but that it didn’t produce.
You know how there are a lot of self-indulgent bad habits you train your clients to get rid of? This is the sort of thing that master rationalists like Robyn Dawes train people to stop doing. And you are missing a lot of the basic training here, which is why, as I keep saying, it is such a tragedy that you only began to study rationality after already forming your theories of akrasia. So either you’ll read more books on rationality and learn those basics and rethink those theories, or you’ll stay stuck.
Rounding to the nearest cliche. I didn’t say my methods would help those other people, or that some ONE method would. I said that given a person Y there would be SOME method X. This is not at all the same thing as what you’re talking about.
What I’ve said is that if you have a standard training method that moves 50% of people from low to high on some criterion, there is an extremely high probability that the other 50% needed something different in their training. I’m puzzled how that is even remotely a controversial statement.
It is a conclusion that just doesn’t follow.
You ever heard of something called the Pygmalion effect? Did the study control for it?
By which I mean, did they control for the beliefs of the teachers who were training these subjects, in reference to:
the trainability and potential of the subjects themselves, and
the teachability of the subject matter itself?
For example, did they tell the teacher they had a bunch of students with superb hypnotic potential who just needed some encouragement to get going, or did they tell them they were conducting a test, to see who was trainable, or if it was possible to train hypnotic ability at all?
These things make a HUGE difference to whether people actually learn.
This is one area where rational thinking is of real benefit. Because not only is a ‘growth mindset’ more effective than a ‘fixed mindset’ when it comes to learning skills it is also simply far more accurate.
While I was devouring the various therios and findings compiled in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance I kept running across one common observation. There is, it seems one predictor of expert performance in a field that has a significant heritable component. It isn’t height or IQ. Although those two are highly heritible they aren’t all that great at predicting successful acheivement of elite performance. As best as the researchers could desipher, the heritable component of success is more or less the ability to motivate oneself to deliberately practice for four hours seven days a week for about ten years.
Now, I would be surprised to see you concede the heritability of motivation and I definitely suggest it is an area in which to apply Dweck’s growth mindset at full force! You also have a whole bag of tricks and techniques that can be used to enhance just the sort of motivation required. But I wonder, have you observed that there are some people who naturally tend to be more interested in getting involved actively in personal development efforts of the kind you support? Completely aside from whether they believe in the potential usefulness, there would seem to be many who are simply less likely to care enough to take extreme personal development seriously.
Yes and no. What I’ve observed is that most everybody wants something out of life, and if they’re not getting it, then sooner or later their path leads to them trying to develop themselves, or causing themselves to accidentally get some personal development as a side effect of whatever their real goal is.
The people who set out for personal development for its own sake—whether because they think being better is awesome or because they hate who they currently are—are indeed a minority.
A not-insignificant-subset of my clientele are entrepreneurs and creative types who come to me because they’re putting off starting their business, writing their book, or doing some other important-to-them project. And a significant number of them cease to be my customers the moment they’ve got the immediate problem taken care of.
So, it’s not that people aren’t generally motivated to improve themselves, so much as they’re not motivated to make general improvements; they are after specific improvements that are often highly context-specific.
I would like to affirm the distinction between the overall mindset you wish to encourage and the specific claims that you use while doing so. For example I agree with your claims in this (immediate parent) post and also your the gist of your personal development philosophy while I reject the previous assertion that differences between individuals are predominantly software rather than hardware.
(And yes, 50% was presented as a significant finding in favour of training from the baseline.)
I think we may agree more than you think. I agree that individuals are different in terms of whatever dial settings they may have when they show up at my door. I disagree that those initial dial settings are welded in place and not changeable.
“Hardware” and “software” are squishy terms when it comes to brains that can not only learn, but literally grow. And ISTM that most homeostatic systems in the body can be trained to have a different “setting” than they come from the factory with.
The gist of your top-level comment here is that your techniques work for everyone; and if they don’t work for someone, it’s that person’s fault.
Here’s the problem: when someone argues that some techniques might not work for some people, their objective is not merely to achieve epistemic accuracy.
Instead, the real point of arguing such a thing is a form of self-handicapping. “Bruce” is saying, “not everything works for everyone… therefore, what you have might not work for me… therefore, I don’t have to risk trying and failing.”
In other words, the point of saying that not every technique works for everyone is to apply the Fallacy of Grey: not everything works for everybody, therefore all techniques are alike, therefore you cannot compare my performance to anyone else, because maybe your technique just won’t work for me. Therefore, I am safe from your judgment.
This is a fully general argument against trying ANY technique, for ANY purpose. It has ZERO to do with who came up with the technique or who’s suggesting it; it’s just a Litany Against Fear… of failure.
As a rationalist and empiricist, I want to admit the possibility that I could be wrong. However, as an instrumentalist, instructor, and helper-of-people, I’m going to say that, if you allow your logic to excuse your losing, you fail logic, you fail rationality, and you fail life.
So no, I won’t be “reasonable”, because that would be a failure of rationality. I do not claim that any technique X will always work for all persons; I merely claim that, given a person Y, there is always some technique X that will produce a behavior change.
The point is not to argue that a particular value of X may not work with a particular value of Y, the point is to find X.
(And the search space for X, seen from the “inside view”, is about two orders of magnitude smaller than it appears to be from the “outside view”.)
I’m pretty surprised to see you make this type of argument. Are you really so sure that you have that precise of an understanding of the motives behind everyone who has brought this up? You seem oblivious to the predictable consequences of acting so unreasonably confident in your own theories. Your style alone provokes skepticism, however unwarranted or irrational it may be. Seeing you write this entire line of criticism off as “they’re just Brucing” makes me wonder just how much your brand of “instrumental” rationality interferes with your perception of reality.
Seconded.
Because of course it is impossible a priori that any technique works for one person but not another. Furthermore, it is impossible for anyone to arrive at this conclusion by an honest mistake. They all have impure motives; furthermore they all have the same particular impure motive; furthermore P. J. Eby knows this by virtue of his vast case experience, in which he has encountered many people making this assertion, and deduced the same impure motive every time.
To quote Karl Popper:
I’ll say it again. PJ, you need to learn the basics of rationality—in this you are an apprentice and you are making apprentice mistakes. You will either accept this or learn the basics, or not. That’s what you would tell a client, I expect, if they were making mistakes this basic according to your understanding of akrasia.
Heh, that Adler anecdote reminds me of a guy I know who tends to believe in conspiracy theories, and who was backing up his belief that the US government is behind 9-11 by saying how evil the US government tends to be. Of course, 9-11 will most likely serve as future evidence of how evil the US government is.
(Not that I can tell whether that’s what’s going on here)
What makes you think I’m writing to the motives of specific people? If I were, I’d have named names (as I named Eliezer).
In the post you were quoting, I was speaking in the abstract, about a particular fallacy, not attributing that fallacy to any particular persons.
So if you don’t think what I said applies to you, why are you inquiring about it?
(Note: reviewing the comment in question, I see that I might not have adequately qualified “someone … who argues”—I meant, someone who argues insistently, not someone who merely “argues” in the sense of, “puts forth reasoning”. I can see how that might have been confusing.)
No, I’m well aware of those consequences. The natural consequence of confidently stating ANY opinion is to have some people agree and some disagree, with increased emotional response by both groups, compared to a less-confident statement. Happens here all the time. Doesn’t have anything to do with the content, just the confidence.
I wrote what I wrote because some of the people here who are Brucing via “epistemic” arguments will see themselves in my words, and maybe learn something.
But if I water down my words to avoid offense to those who are not Brucing (or who are, but don’t want to think about it) I lessen the clarity of my communication to precisely the group of people I can help by saying something in the first place.
Perhaps the reverse. By limiting your claims to the important ones, those that are actually factual, you reduce the distraction. You can be assured that ‘Bruce’ will take blatant fallacies or false claims as an excuse to ignore you. Perhaps they may respond better to a more consistently rational approach.
And if there aren’t any, he’ll be sure to invent them. ;-)
Hehehehe. Sure, because subconscious minds are so very rational. Right.
Conscious minds are reasonable, and occasionally rational… but they aren’t, as a general rule, in charge of anything important in a person’s behavior. (Although they do love to take credit for everything, anyway.)
No reason to make his job easier.
No, but personally, mine is definitely sufficiently capable of noticing minor logical flaws to use them to irrationally dismiss uncomfortable arguments. This may be rare, but it happens.
Actually, my point was that I hadn’t made any. Many of the objections that people are making are about things I never actually said.
For example, some people insist on arguing with the ideas that:
teaching ability varies, and
teachers’ beliefs make a difference to the success of their students.
And somehow they’re twisting these very scientifically supported ideas into me stating some sort of fallacy… and conveniently ignoring the part where I said that “If you’re more interested in results than theory, then...”
Of course if you do standardized teaching and standardized testing you’ll get varying results from different people. But if you want to maximize the utility that students will get from their training, you’ll want to vary how you teach them, instead, according to what produces the best result for that individual.
That doesn’t mean that you need to teach them different things, it’s that you’ll need to take a different route to teach them the same thing.
A learning disability is not the same thing as a performance disability, and my essential claim here is that differences in applicability of anti-akrasia and other behavior change techniques are more readily explained as differences in learning ability and predispositions, than in differences in applicability of the specific techniques.
I say this because I used to think that different things worked for different people (after all, so many didn’t work for me!), and then I discovered that the problem is that people (like me) think they’re following steps that they actually aren’t following, and they don’t notice the discrepancy because the discrepancies are “off-map” for them.
That is, their map of the territory doesn’t include one or more of the critical distinctions that make a technique work, like the difference between consciously thinking something, versus observing automatic responses, or the difference between their feelings and their thoughts about their feelings. If you miss one of these distinctions, a technique will fail, but it’s not the technique that’s broken, any more than a bicycle is broken if you haven’t learned to stay on it yet.
People vary in their ability to learn these distinctions; some people get it right away, some need help. Some need lots of help. As I get better at verbalizing and pointing out these distinctions, I get (a little) better at getting people who have difficulties to learn them faster. (And as I got better at grasping the distinctions, I also became able to make more and more things work for me that never worked before.)
The really silly thing about all this is that, from my POV, the people who insist that there is neither any theory nor universally applicable techniques, are basically acting like theists: insisting I treat their irrational and demonstrably-false beliefs as worthy of serious consideration. It reminds me of Perry Marshall arguing that because we don’t know where DNA comes from, we have to “admit” that maybe God did it.
That is, “Some techniques have not worked for me” is taken as evidence supporting a hypothesis of “it’s not me, it’s the techniques”. However, by itself, this is equally valid as supporting evidence for, “the technique is fine, you just didn’t learn how to do it right.” When you add independent evidence that other people claim the same technique didn’t work for them, but then can be taught to make it work for them, then it begins to be more supportive of alternative hypotheses.
And yet, this doesn’t seem to make anybody update. Instead, I am being “irrationally confident” for not giving enough weight to the “it’s not me, it’s the technique” theory… when I have plenty of evidence (personal and customers) that is not at all consistent with that theory, and they only have evidence that is equally applicable to BOTH theories.
Not everyone making that argument is necessarily Brucing, in the sense of directly seeking failure. Some are just mistaken. However, the net effect of the belief is the same: the person stops before they learn, like a kid who’s convinced he or she is just not cut out for bicycle riding.
(P.S. It’s important to understand this is not about me or “my” techniques—most of which I didn’t invent, anyway! As I’ve said several times, there are TONS of things out there that work… if you have the necessary distinctions in your map. And most things that work share the same critical distinctions! I used to believe that my hand-picked set of techniques was special, but now I know that it was always more about the teachability of the techniques I picked, and my insistence on using testing as a path to teaching. If you diligently apply these principles, virtually ANY technique can be made to work. It’s got nothing to do with ME.)