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Douglas_Knight comments on Fix it and tell us what you did - Less Wrong
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Comments (35)
Asking for good bias-correction is an absurd standard of evidence. You don't ask that of most information you use. Moreover, I bet you're very biased on when you think to apply this standard.
It's not entirely clear what pjeby means. If it's just self-experimentation, it's basically a single anecdote and not terribly useful. But I assume that he's talking about his clients, still a biased sample, but as good as it's going to get.
The supreme irony of this train of thought is that my original suggestion was for people to apply good evidentiary standards to their self-experiments. So we are now debating whether I have a good standard of evidence for recommending the use of good standards of evidence. ;-)
Sort of. I noticed that if I didn't define what I was testing before I tested it, it was easy to end up thinking I'd changed when I hadn't. And I tend to notice that when my clients aren't moving forward in their personal change efforts, it's usually because they're straying off-process, most commonly in not defining what they are changing and sticking to that definition until they produce a result. (As opposed to deciding midstream that "something else" is the problem.)
"not terribly useful" was wrong. It should have been something more like "not generalizable to other people." We certainly agreed with your standard of evidence, but there's a big gap between a failure mode likely enough to be worth adding steps to fix and an "extremely high risk."
This post makes it sounds like there's a lot of room for confirmation bias, but that doesn't bother me so much; in particular, it is a lot better than if it's just you.