Something here feels off: I'd call the parent a pretty strong claim, effectively "I can cure akrasia (sorta) in the majority of people who ask". I would have expected someone to have tested this, and reported their results; if positive, I would have expected this to be the sort of thing I would have noticed much sooner than a year and two months later. (In fact, around the time this was posted, I had started reading LessWrong and I'd received an email entitled "Jim's hypnotherapy" that I ignored for some months).
Basically, my first reaction to this was "Why ain't ya rich?"
Having said that, I want to build up the courage to PM you for a test, if you're still doing so; if you're half as powerful as you claim, then of course I want to benefit from that. ;p
(I've been reading your blog and wound up finding this because I typed "hypnotism" into the LW search box.)
effectively "I can cure akrasia (sorta) in the majority of people who ask".
I wouldn't quite say that. I meant "yes, akrasia is fixable in this way". Less "I'm a wizard!" and more "Yes, there's a solution, it looks like that, so have fun solving the puzzle"
To make a personal claim of competence, I'd have to add some qualifiers. Maybe something like "I expect to be able to cure akrasia (sorta) in the majority of people that commit to solving it with me", which is a much stricter criteria than "asks&qu...
I'm not sure if this is precisely the correct forum for this, but if there is a better place, I don't know what it would be. At any rate...
I'm a student a Catholic university, and there are (as one might surmise) quite a lot of Catholics here, along with assorted other theists (yes, even some in the biology faculty). For this reason, I find myself acquiring more and more devoutly Catholic friends, and some of them I have grown quite close to. But the God issue keeps coming up for one reason or another, which is a source of tension. And yet as I grow closer to these people, it becomes clearer and clearer that each theist has a certain personal sequence of Dark Arts-ish levers in eir head, the flipping (or un-flipping) of which would snap em out of faith.
So the question is this: in what situations (if any) is it ethical to push such buttons? We often say, here, that that which can be destroyed by the truth should be, but these are people who have built their lives around faith, people for whom the Church is their social support group. If it were possible to disillusion the whole world all at once, that'd be one thing - but in this case my options are limited to changing the minds of only the specific individuals I have spent time getting to know, and the direct result would be their alienation from the entire community in which they've been raised.
And yet it is the truth.
I'm conflicted. LessWrong, what is your opinion?