I am alarmed and dismayed that no-one has raised the issue of privacy in this thread. Swimmer963, just from glancing through your comments, you're [rot13'd description of Swimmer963 deleted].

I didn't whizz through those to be creepy (actually I was impressed at how you seem to be consistently sensible), but if you're going to share incredibly personal details about "a friend" who was raped, we need to know if this information has been posted with her consent. The above is very easily enough to personally identify you.

On whether or not this will be important or not: [blanked].

EDIT: Deleted precis of Swimmer963's situation; it had served its purpose. EDIT: Deleted some personal information.

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.

Professional MDMA psychotherapy seems to work really well for these kinds of things, though it is quite hard to come by in legal form. Just taking MDMA and then having an intimate/therapeutic conversation with a close friend might work just as well.

Really. MDMA is way more effective than anything else for this kind of thing.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100719082927.htm http://www.maps.org/research/mdma/

(Should be about 10 years before MDMA makes it through the FDA approval process)

A much less effective recommendation is compassion/lovingkindness meditation.

I deleted this post. I will write another post later about why I deleted it.

I have personally had some significant issues getting myself to deal with problems in a constructive way--I was diagnosed with depression several months ago.

I put off seeking treatment, and especially medication, for essentially irrational reasons.

More recently I have started taking Lexapro, and I am MUCH happier. A large part of being able to make that decision came from Less Wrong--the ideas of "happiness set points," beating procrastination, and the idea that using technology to help improve myself is natural and necessary, helped me close th... (read more)

I'm not clear on the goal of your post -- it doesn't seem to make a statement or ask a specific question, either -- but if you are asking for practical advice for your friend, I would highly recommend the book "Recovering From Co-Dependency: It's Never Too Late To Have A Happy Childhood," by Weiss and Weiss. I've personally found it to be an invaluable resource, and IME it's just the thing for an analytical person interested in psychology to get an initial grip on actually doing something about their issues.

The book is written primarily as a bri... (read more)

In my own life, the thing that seems to help most is paying attention to what I'm doing.

Not so much in terms of analyzing patterns, though there's nothing wrong with that, but in terms of attending to the individual events and being aware of how I am reacting and what I am reacting to, and doing so insofar as possible without imposing my expectations or my judgments on what I perceive.

Mostly, what seems to be going on is that when I don't really pay attention, my brain happily fills in the resulting gaps in my awareness with all kinds of cached/default a... (read more)

Some of the even more drastic failures are described in the book The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog, by Bruce D. Perry and Maia Szalavitz.

There's no way I'm reading that book. Knowing about and thinking about the bizarre ways people abuse children is the worst thing about reality for me. It's why I don't read online local news anymore -- the media thinks such stuff is fascinating but I guess they don't expect people to actually think about what the story is about? But still these sad little stories (sometimes only 8 words long) make their way into whatever I'm reading and ruin my day.

Does anyone else share my sensitivity? Does anyone have any advice?

I don’t know how the LessWrong community would treat people like my friend, or whether introducing her to the Sequences would help. It’s not an experiment I want to try unless I have some concrete evidence that it will help.

I don't see much of a need for evidence before introducing someone to the sequences. I teach private test prep and will routinely refer my students to the sequences for reading practice. I sincerely believe it helps, but I'm highly confident I will never be able to obtain reliable evidence to that effect. I am quite confident, however, it does little or no harm.

So unless it'd be costly to get her to read the sequences, how could they hurt?

Every boyfriend is narcissistic or has borderline personality disorder.

This could be a result of privileging the hypothesis, considering these possibilities without enough evidence to properly suggest them, possibly because studying psychology makes them salient. An approach to getting this point across might be to show her An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem, and really work through the examples of interpreting medical tests. Then apply that concept to diagnosing narcissism. Find out how frequent it is in the population, and how likely a narciss... (read more)

Still. A lot of things are hard. A lot of things are hard but possible. So far, I have zero examples of people who have used the methods of rationality, as separate from just knowledge, to help with the problems they have that most people don’t have...

LW has helped me articulate my intuitions and given me more confidence in them. These intuitions are usually about why an argument is wrong.

It's about how not to be stupid, how not to fail in certain ways. I don't have examples of things it has helped me do because it is never a necessary or sufficient con... (read more)