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Spurlock 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.
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.