There’s nothing wrong with the conclusion, except we don’t know if it’s right :-) Unlike many of your other posts, this one isn’t based on published research. It’s more like garden variety self-help, or as Paul Buchheit put it, “Limited Life Experience + Overgeneralization = Advice”. All self-help authors can claim their advice is good because it works for them and some self-selected others.
Yeah, that’s about right. I usually just downvote such “life advice” posts, but now some counter in my mind reached a critical value and I decided to speak out.
I gotta admit that he has a point. I don’t know that published studies should be the only way of producing rationalist self-help; I think the way is open for sound DIY empirical studies (but hasty generalization is an inductive fallacy). But look at it this way—you can imagine a lot of really bad advice being given front page status, and the problem is that there is no threshold, no point at which enough is enough.
I think your post is interesting as an abduction instead, and should probably be in the discussion pages. This should be a way of describing your experiences, and indicating what possible explanations and hypotheses could explain those experiences. By no means should we discount our experiences, that would be anti-empirical. The problem is unsound generalization of those experiences.
That said, I find your post valuable as abductive material, and the discussion it resulted in was stimulating.
There’s nothing wrong with the conclusion, except we don’t know if it’s right :-) Unlike many of your other posts, this one isn’t based on published research. It’s more like garden variety self-help, or as Paul Buchheit put it, “Limited Life Experience + Overgeneralization = Advice”. All self-help authors can claim their advice is good because it works for them and some self-selected others.
I’m confused. It looks to me like you’ve just dismissed every life advice post on Less Wrong except for five posts that I wrote. Is that right?
Yeah, that’s about right. I usually just downvote such “life advice” posts, but now some counter in my mind reached a critical value and I decided to speak out.
I gotta admit that he has a point. I don’t know that published studies should be the only way of producing rationalist self-help; I think the way is open for sound DIY empirical studies (but hasty generalization is an inductive fallacy). But look at it this way—you can imagine a lot of really bad advice being given front page status, and the problem is that there is no threshold, no point at which enough is enough.
I think your post is interesting as an abduction instead, and should probably be in the discussion pages. This should be a way of describing your experiences, and indicating what possible explanations and hypotheses could explain those experiences. By no means should we discount our experiences, that would be anti-empirical. The problem is unsound generalization of those experiences.
That said, I find your post valuable as abductive material, and the discussion it resulted in was stimulating.