saturn comments on Beware of Other-Optimizing - Less Wrong

79 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 April 2009 01:58AM

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Comment author: saturn 10 April 2009 09:00:15AM 10 points [-]

(By the way, "different things work on different people" is bullshit when it comes to the brain. "My brain works differently from other people's" is not a valid extenuating circumstance: I don't accept it as an excuse from my clients, any more than Jeffreyssai would.)

Maybe so, but the particular bits of advice needed to produce a desired change are certainly different for different people. Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I can tell, you haven't systematized this to any extent further than using your own intuition to pick something out of a bag of tricks you've collected. Now, the entire field of psychology currently works this way, and I've personally found some of your tricks useful. But if you want to be taken more seriously, I believe you should stop simply dispensing advice and start posting about ways we can speed up our search through advice-space.