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lukeprog comments on Build Small Skills in the Right Order - Less Wrong
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Comments (213)
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.
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.