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Morendil comments on More art, less stink: Taking the PU out of PUA - Less Wrong
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Actually, the proportion of "actually stupid" to "just sounds stupid" is very, very low. The problem is that what you might call "action skills" and "satisfaction skills" do not operate using the same parts of the brain that "intelligent" (i.e. analytical) people are accustomed to using.
So, if you evaluate a statement using the machinery you're most accustomed to thinking with, the sayings sound stupid, even when they're not also phrased in new-agey or pseudoscientific ways.
I've found that most of my advances in personal development came after I realized that my intellectual bullshit-detectors were filtering out everything that was useful in the self-help field, simply because it wasn't true.
IOW, if you ignore the truthiness of a piece of advice, and simply attempt to adopt the state of mind and mental/physical behaviors given, you will very often find that the stupidest, most nonsensical theories are shielding you from some incredibly useful practical advice.
I was once told "Believe in yourself" -- yes, in those words -- by a person I respect.
Knowing him, I know he must mean something genuine by it: there's some kind of behavior that he figured out how to do that he thinks would help me. But how the hell do you "believe in yourself"? That phrase is opaque to me.
That's sort of what I'm getting at. It's not that I'm a condescending asshole who always thinks advice-givers are stupid. In fact, I know this particular guy is very bright. It's just that you'd need to phrase it some other way before I'd understand "Oh! That's what he means! I'll just do that now!"
I take it to mean something like "The time for a lucid appraisal of your own abilities is prior to action, not in the middle of it. Once you find yourself engaged in real-time application of some skill or other, act as if your mastery of that skill isn't at issue at all, rather than let yourself be distracted by assessments of the likelihood of failure, because they are likely to be self-fulfilling prophecies."
You can see why people prefer the short version.
Yes -- I agree strongly with this analysis.