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cousin_it comments on Build Small Skills in the Right Order - Less Wrong
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I really liked your report of the scientology class. The conclusions, not so much. Many LW posts (including some of mine, too ashamed to link here) follow this pattern of giving a wonderful convincing anecdote and then a big flimsy over-generalization on top. Perhaps we could institute a norm that posting anecdotes without making conclusions from them is okay. I took some boxing lessons, still cannot fight but no longer fear physical confrontations, and that's all. I learned to draw using a book by Betty Edwards, it was easy and fun, and that's all.
I agree that this trend is annoying and should be addressed. There is a tendency here to use personal anecdotes as an excuse to dish out overly-general (and usually obvious) life advice, and we should know better.
Personally, I find Luke's conclusions in this particular article to be good ones (whether they stemmed naturally from the anecdote or not). But then, this is sort of trivial given that the title employs the term "right order", which is tough to argue against ("No no, do it wrong!").
I have to disagree though with the notion that posting anecdotes to this blog for their own sake is a good idea. While there has been a strong focus on instrumental rationality in the past few months, I think it's important to ensure LessWrong does remain a blog about rationality, and not general self-help. Anecdotes that can't be related back to a meta-level skill are still valuable, but might be better suited to the discussion section or collected as comments somewhere.
Agreed.
No argument with your main point, but I'll point out tangentially that another possible argument against the "right order" can be "actually, the order in which you tackle skills doesn't actually matter that much." So it's not entirely vacuous.
I wouldn't want to prohibit people from speculating based on their experiences and background knowledge. As long as no one misprepresents themselves as an expert on the topic and their flimsy over-generalizations as established scientific knowledge, almost no harm is done. And the little harm that comes from potentially wasting your time reading things you're not interested in could be adressed by more systematic inclusion of summaries in long articles.
Of course if you estimate the harmful effect of one such article on one individual, it won't amount to very much! But the proliferation of such articles can turn LW into yet another vague self-help site, in fact from the list of posts it looks like it's already been happening for awhile, and I don't want that to happen.
I concede that the front page shouldn't be overrun with vague self-helpy stuff. But I read your original comment as a request to not allow that kind of content on LessWrong at all and I think that would be going too far.
This all hinges on the estimated worth of sharing speculative self-help advice. I think there are insights to be shared that can't simply be found by reading research literature and the potential benefit of gaining such insights outweights the additional cost of mentally filtering unwanted content. I also think that on LessWrong such content will be less vague and of higher quality than on dedicated self-help sites so I'd prefer to keep it, though perhaps relegated to the discussion section.
original comment:
how its read:
I find this transition very curious and see it often. Is there a term for this kind of reactive twist of reasoning?
I don't know of a term for the thing you're describing, but the inverse thing -- where someone who thinks "Anecdotes with conclusions should not be allowed" ends up saying "Perhaps we could institute a norm that posting anecdotes without making conclusions from them is okay" is sometimes called "indirection" or "hedging." (Or, in some circles, "being polite.")
They are, of course, related: my knowledge of the existence of indirection in the world makes it more likely that I will interpret "Perhaps we could institute a norm that posting anecdotes without making conclusions from them is okay" as an expression of the thought "Anecdotes with conclusions should not be allowed" (as well as a wide range of other thoughts).
Perhaps the inverse of indirection should be called "dereferencing"?
What's wrong with the conclusion? The conclusion is to build small skills in the right order. If it's not useful to you, fine. Lots of other people found it quite useful, and have told me so already.
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.
I think any sort of anti-anecdote norm is a very clearly bad idea. Anecdotes are great. Less Wrong is already challenging at best to post on.