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Vladimir_Nesov comments on Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great - Less Wrong
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One problem with interfacing formal/mathematical rationality with any "art that works", whether it's self-help or dating, is that when people are involved, there are feed-forward and feed-back effects, similar to Newcomb's problem, in a sense. What you predict will happen makes a difference to the outcome.
One of the recent paradigm shifts that's been happening in the last few years in the "seduction community" is the realization that using routines and patterns leads to state-dependence: that is, to a guy's self-esteem depending on the reactions of the women he's talked to on a given night. This has led to the rise of the "natural" movement: copying the beliefs and mindsets of guys who are naturally good with women, rather than the external behaviors of guys who are good with women.
Now, I'm not actually involved in the community; I'm quite happily married. However, I pay attention to developments in that field because it has huge overlap with the self-help field, and I've gotten many insights about how status perception can influence your behavior -- even when there's nobody else in the room but yourself.
I wandered off point a little there, so let me try and bring it back. The OB/LW approach to rationality -- at least as I've seen it -- is extremely "outside view"-oriented when it comes to people. There's lots of writing about how people do this or that, rather than looking at what happens with one individual person, on the inside.
Whereas the "arts that work" are extremely focused on an inside view, and actually learning them requires a dedication to action over theory, and taking that action whether you "believe" in the theory or not. In an art that works, the true function of a theory is to provide a convincing REASON for you to take the action that has been shown to work. The "truth" of that theory is irrelevant, so long as it provides motivation and a usable model for the purposes of that art.
When I read self-help books in the past, I used to ignore things if I didn't agree with their theories or saw holes in them. Now, I simply TRY what they say to do, and stick with it until I get a result. Only then do I evaluate. Anything else is idiotic, if your goal is to learn... and win.
Is that compatible with the OB/LW picture? The top-down culture here appears to be one of using science and math -- not real-world performance or self-experimentation.
Trying to interpret this charitably, I'll suggest a restatement: what you call a "theory" is actually an algorithm that describes the actions that are known to achieve the required results. In the normal use of the words, theory is an epistemic tool, leading you to come to know the truth, and a reason for doing something is explanation of why this something achieves the goals. Terminologically mixing opaque heuristic with reason and knowledge is a bad idea, in the quotation above the word "reason", for example, connotes more with rationalization than with anything else.
No, I'm using the term "theory" in the sense of "explanation" and "as opposed to practice". The theory of a self-help school is the explanation(s) it provides that motivate people to carry out whatever procedures that school uses, by providing a model that helps them make sense of what their problems are, and what the appropriate methods for fixing them would be.
I don't see any incompatibility between those concepts; per DeBono (Six Thinking Hats, lateral thinking, etc.) a theory is a "proto-truth" rather than an "absolute truth". Something that we treat as if it were true, until something better is found.
Ideally, a school of self-help should update its theories as evidence changes. Generally, when I adopt a technique, I provisionally adopt whatever theory was given by the person who created the technique, unless I already have evidence that the theory is false, or have a simpler explanation based on my existing knowledge.
Then, as I get more experience with a technique, I usually find evidence that makes me update my theory for why/how that technique works. (For example, I found that I could discard the "parts" metaphor of Core Transformation and still get it to work, ergo falsifying a portion of its original theoretical model.)
Also, I sometimes read about a study that shows a mechanism of mind that could plausibly explain some aspect of a technique, for example. Recently, for example, I read some papers about "affective asynchrony", and saw that it not only experimentally validated some of what I've been doing, but that it provided a clearer theoretical model for certain parts of it. (Clearer in the sense of providing a more motivating rationale, and not just because I can point to the papers and say, "see, science!")
Similar thing for "reconsolidation" -- it provides a clear explanation for something that I knew was required for certain techniques to work (experiential access to a relevant concrete memory), but had no "theoretical" justification for. (I just taught this requirement without any explanation except "that's how these techniques work".)
There seems to be a background attitude on LW though, that this sort of gradual approximation is somehow wrong, because I didn't wait for a "true" theory in a peer-reviewed article before doing anything.
In practice, however, if I waited for the theory to be true instead of useful, I would never have been able to gather enough experience to make good theories in the first place.