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erratio comments on What comes before rationality - Less Wrong
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Anecdotally, most people reading the Sequences will be neither harmed nor helped in the short term, for the same reason that your friend can clinically list off her problems (and probably their most successful interventions) without feeling able to change her reactions - there's a huge leap from absorbing knowledge to working out how to apply it. In the longer term, being exposed to a large volume of persuasive writing about how to own your beliefs and attitudes is helpful (in that it will help people make the shift away from a fixed mindset, which is absolutely essential for real progress), but I have no idea how much.
Personally, I do feel like I've gained benefit from my time here, but I'd be hard-pressed to point to any specific article or technique that caused the change, other than the general atmosphere of challenging one's beliefs.
This is the story of the last year of my life. Most of the major paradigm shifts in my life I can attribute to either my own ingenuity or schooling, but this site (in a very short time span) has resulted in two shifts by itself.
I agree that this is really important.
Many of the more useful recent changes in my life were the result of the idea that I can look at what's going wrong, and actually do something to try and change it (and see if that works, and keep trying and refining) more than any particular single piece of advice.
There was also some impact from different thinking habits (dissolving the question, avoiding generalizing from one example, thinking of goals and then solutions, etc.) which have definitely been widely helpful in my life, but rather than delivering a few large chunks of utility, they gave a bunch of really small ones.