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NancyLebovitz comments on Scientific Self-Help: The State of Our Knowledge - Less Wrong
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A thought I've had about choosing self-help books:
Judging a self-help book by its average rating or reviews on sites like Amazon will probably be misleading. I'd suspect that they are frequently skewed toward higher ratings because of a reviewer self-selection bias: the sorts of people who need self-help books are often the people who will blame themselves for failing to benefit from a book, but will give the book credit (and glowing reviews) if they do get any benefit, which is often chance and/or temporary.
(If PJ Eby's hypothesis of "naturally struggling"/"naturally motivated" mindsets is correct, then those would be the naturally struggling people, while the naturally motivated people can benefit to some degree from almost any self-help book, which may contribute further to them getting more praise than they've earned.)
I check amazon reviews for whether the reviewer says they actually got any useful changes from the book. This is very rare compared to people who recommend self-help books for other reasons like being pleasant to read.
Has that check helped you?
Whether someone learns advanced piano from a book must be at least as much down to whether they know intermediate piano up to the level the book starts at, as to whether the book is a good guide to advanced piano.
But those divisions of ability and knowledge are even less agreed on in self-help, so matching up where you "are" with a book is less easy, and whether someone else matched with any given book might not be of any real help at all.
This does raise the rather embarrassing question of how many of my self-help books I've actually gotten some good out of, and it's something I need to evaluate.
However, the review filter I'm using isn't exactly for identifying which books to look into. It's for eliminating otherwise promising books unless they look very good, and I'm not sure that I've bought any books that no one has reported good results from.