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.)
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.)