Vladimir_Golovin comments on Practical Advice Backed By Deep Theories - Less Wrong

42 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 April 2009 06:52PM

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Comment author: pjeby 26 April 2009 09:54:28PM 2 points [-]

There is too much stuff out there, for any given person to learn. Or to ever see all the titles of the stuff that exists. Or the names of the fields for which it's written. There is too much science, and even more nonsense. You can't just tell "read everything". It's physically impossible.

What happened to "Shut up and do the impossible"? ;-)

More seriously, what difference does it make? The winning attitude is not that you have to read everything, it's that if you find one useful thing every now and then that improves your status quo, you already win.

Also, when it comes to self-help, you're in luck -- the number of actually different methods that exist is fairly small, but they are infinitely repeated over and over again in different books, using different language.

My personal sorting tool of choice is looking for specificity of language: techniques that are described in as much sensory-oriented, "near" language as possible, with a minimum of abstraction. I also don't bother evaluating things that don't make claims that would offer an improvement over anything else I've tried, and I have a preference for reading authors who've offered insightful models and useful techniques in the past.

Lately, I've gotten over my snobbish tendency to avoid authors who write things I know or suspect aren't true (e.g. stupid quantum mechanics interpretations); I've realized that it just doesn't have as much to do with whether they will actually have something useful to say, as I used to think it did.

Comment author: Vladimir_Golovin 27 April 2009 09:17:10AM 2 points [-]

the number of actually different methods that exist is fairly small, but they are infinitely repeated over and over again in different books, using different language.

PJ, is there a survey / summary / list of these methods online? Could you please link, or, if there's no such survey, summarize the methods briefly?

Comment author: pjeby 27 April 2009 05:56:59PM *  1 point [-]

summarize the methods briefly?

90% of everything is hypnosis, NLP, or the law of attraction -- and in a very significant way, they are all the same thing "under the hood", at different degrees of modeling detail and with different preferred operating channels.

NLP has the most precise models, and the greatest emphasis on well-formedness criteria and testing. (At least, the founders had those emphases; "pop NLP" often seems to not even know what well-formedness is.) Hypnosis, OTOH, is just a trancy-form of NLP, LoA, or both.

Pretty much everything in the self-help field can be viewed as a special case, application, or "tips and hints" variation of one of those three things, but using individual authors' terminology, metaphors, and case histories. The possible failure modes are pretty much the same across all of them, too.

There is, by the way, one author who writes about non-mystical applications of the so-called "law of attraction": Robert Fritz. He's the only person I'm aware of who's brought an almost-NLP level of rigor and precision to that concept, and with absolutely no mystical connotations or bad science whatsoever. He doesn't call it LoA; he refers to it as the "creative process", and shows how it's the process that artists, musicians, and even inventors and entrepreneurs normally use to create results. (i.e., a strictly mental+physical process that engages the brain's planning systems, much like what I showed in my video, but on a larger scale.)

His books also contain the largest collection of documented failure modes (biases and broken beliefs) that interfere with this process, based on his workshops and client work. I've found it to be invaluable in my own practice.

(The biggest shortcoming of Fritz's work compared to some more mystical LoA works, however, is that he doesn't address general emotional state or "abundance mindset" issues, at least not directly.)

Comment author: Vladimir_Golovin 28 April 2009 06:23:12AM 0 points [-]

non-mystical applications of the so-called "law of attraction"

BTW, I think that the Law of Attraction is basically a manifestation of successful self-priming (plus the other self-conditioning phenomenon Anna Salamon posted about - can't find the post). And yes, the pull motivation trick seems to fit here perfectly.