Just to check, you agree that to be useful any model of the brain has to correspond to how the brain actually works?
No, it only has to produce the same predictions that a "corresponding" model would, within the area of useful application.
Note, for example, that the original model of electricity is backwards -- Benjamin Franklin thought the electrons flowed from the "positive" end of a battery, but we found out later it was the other way 'round.
Nonetheless, this mistake did not keep electricity from working!
Now, let's compare to the LoA people, who claim that there is a mystical law of the universe that causes nice thoughts to attract nice things. This notion is clearly false... and yet some people are able to produce results that make it seem true.
So, while I would prefer to have a "true" model that explains the results (and I think I have a more-parsimonious model that does), this does not stop anyone from making use of the "false" model to produce a result, as long as they don't allow their knowledge of its falsity to interfere with them using it.
See also dating advice, i.e., "pickup" -- some schools of pickup have models of human behavior which may be false, yet still produce results. Others have refined those models to be more parsimonious, and produced improved results.
Yet all the models produce results for some people -- most likely the people who devote their efforts to application first, critique second... rather than the other way around.
but at this high level of compression, accurate models are mostly indistinguishable from bullshit at first glance.
A model can actually BE bullshit and still produce valuable results! It's not that the model is too compressed, it's that it includes excessive description.
For example, the LoA is bullshit because it's just a made-up explanation for a real phenomenon. If all the LoA people said was, "look, we found that if we take this attitude and think certain thoughts in a certain way, we experience increased perception of ways to exploit circumstances to meet our goals, and increased motivation to act on these opportunities", then that would be a compressed model!
NLP is such a model over a slightly different sphere, in that it says, "when we act as if this set of ideas (the presuppositions) are true, we are able to obtain thus-and-such results." It is more parsimonious than the LoA and pickup people, in that it explicitly disclaims being a direct description of "reality".
In particular, NLP explicitly says that the state of mind of the person doing things must be taken into account: if you are not willing to commit to acting as-if the presuppositions are true, you will not necessarily obtain the same results. (However, this does not mean you need to believe the presuppositions are true, any more than the actor playing Hamlet on stage needs to believe his father has been murdered!)
Now, I personally do believe that portions of the NLP model, and most of mine, do in fact reflect reality in some way. But I don't care much whether this is actually the case, or that it has any bearing on whether the model is useful. It's clearly useful to me and lots of other people, so it would be irrational for me to worry about whether it's also "true".
However, in the event that science discovers that NLP or I have the terminals labeled backwards, I'll happily update, as I've already happily updated whenever any little bit of experimental data offers a better explanation for one of my puzzling edge cases, or a better evolutionary hypothesis for why something works in a certain way, etc.
But I don't make these updates for the sake of truth, they're for the sake of useful.
A more convincing evolutionary explanation is useful for my writing, as it gives a better reason for suspending disbelief. Better explanations of certain brain processes (e.g. the memory reconsolidation hypothesis, affective asynchrony, near/farl, the somatic marker hypothesis, etc.) are also useful for refining procedural instructions and my explanations for why you have to do something in a particular way for it to work. (e.g., memory reconsolidation studies explain why you need to access a memory to change it -- a practical truth I discovered for myself in 2006.)
In a sense, these are less updates to the real model (do X to get Y), and more updates to the story or explanation that surrounds the model. The real model is that "if I act as if these things or something like them are true, and perform these other steps, then these other results reliably occur".
And that model can't be updated by somebody else's experiment. All they can possibly change is the explanation for how I got the results to occur.
Meanwhile, if you're looking for "the truth", we don't have the "real" model of what lies under NLP or hypnosis or LoA or my work, and I expect we won't have it for at least another decade or two. Reconsolidation has been under study for about a decade now, I believe, likewise the roots of affective asynchrony and the SMH. A few of these are still in the "promising hypothesis, but still needs more support" stage.
But the things they're trying to describe already exist, whether we have the words yet to describe them or not. And if you have something more important to protect than "truth", you probably can't afford to wait another decade or two for the research, any more than you'd wait that long for a reverse engineered circuit diagram before you tried turning on your TV.
If all the LoA people said was, "look, we found that if we take this attitude and think certain thoughts in a certain way, we experience increased perception of ways to exploit circumstances to meet our goals, and increased motivation to act on these opportunities", then that would be a compressed model!
By the way, the technique given in my thoughts-into-action video is based on extracting precisely the above notion, and reproducing the effect on a small scale, with a short timeframe, and without resorting to mysticism or "quantum physics...
Once upon a time, Seth Roberts took a European vacation and found that he started losing weight while drinking unfamiliar-tasting caloric fruit juices.
Now suppose Roberts had not known, and never did know, anything about metabolic set points or flavor-calorie associations—all this high-falutin' scientific experimental research that had been done on rats and occasionally humans.
He would have posted to his blog, "Gosh, everyone! You should try these amazing fruit juices that are making me lose weight!" And that would have been the end of it. Some people would have tried it, it would have worked temporarily for some of them (until the flavor-calorie association kicked in) and there never would have been a Shangri-La Diet per se.
The existing Shangri-La Diet is visibly incomplete—for some people, like me, it doesn't seem to work, and there is no apparent reason for this or any logic permitting it. But the reason why as many people have benefited as they have—the reason why there was more than just one more blog post describing a trick that seemed to work for one person and didn't work for anyone else—is that Roberts knew the experimental science that let him interpret what he was seeing, in terms of deep factors that actually did exist.
One of the pieces of advice on OB/LW that was frequently cited as the most important thing learned, was the idea of "the bottom line"—that once a conclusion is written in your mind, it is already true or already false, already wise or already stupid, and no amount of later argument can change that except by changing the conclusion. And this ties directly into another oft-cited most important thing, which is the idea of "engines of cognition", minds as mapping engines that require evidence as fuel.
If I had merely written one more blog post that said, "You know, you really should be more open to changing your mind—it's pretty important—and oh yes, you should pay attention to the evidence too." And this would not have been as useful. Not just because it was less persuasive, but because the actual operations would have been much less clear without the explicit theory backing it up. What constitutes evidence, for example? Is it anything that seems like a forceful argument? Having an explicit probability theory and an explicit causal account of what makes reasoning effective, makes a large difference in the forcefulness and implementational details of the old advice to "Keep an open mind and pay attention to the evidence."
It is also important to realize that causal theories are much more likely to be true when they are picked up from a science textbook than when invented on the fly—it is very easy to invent cognitive structures that look like causal theories but are not even anticipation-controlling, let alone true.
This is the signature style I want to convey from all those posts that entangled cognitive science experiments and probability theory and epistemology with the practical advice—that practical advice actually becomes practically more powerful if you go out and read up on cognitive science experiments, or probability theory, or even materialist epistemology, and realize what you're seeing. This is the brand that can distinguish LW from ten thousand other blogs purporting to offer advice.
I could tell you, "You know, how much you're satisfied with your food probably depends more on the quality of the food than on how much of it you eat." And you would read it and forget about it, and the impulse to finish off a whole plate would still feel just as strong. But if I tell you about scope insensitivity, and duration neglect and the Peak/End rule, you are suddenly aware in a very concrete way, looking at your plate, that you will form almost exactly the same retrospective memory whether your portion size is large or small; you now possess a deep theory about the rules governing your memory, and you know that this is what the rules say. (You also know to save the dessert for last.)
I want to hear how I can overcome akrasia—how I can have more willpower, or get more done with less mental pain. But there are ten thousand people purporting to give advice on this, and for the most part, it is on the level of that alternate Seth Roberts who just tells people about the amazing effects of drinking fruit juice. Or actually, somewhat worse than that—it's people trying to describe internal mental levers that they pulled, for which there are no standard words, and which they do not actually know how to point to. See also the illusion of transparency, inferential distance, and double illusion of transparency. (Notice how "You overestimate how much you're explaining and your listeners overestimate how much they're hearing" becomes much more forceful as advice, after I back it up with a cognitive science experiment and some evolutionary psychology?)
I think that the advice I need is from someone who reads up on a whole lot of experimental psychology dealing with willpower, mental conflicts, ego depletion, preference reversals, hyperbolic discounting, the breakdown of the self, picoeconomics, etcetera, and who, in the process of overcoming their own akrasia, manages to understand what they did in truly general terms—thanks to experiments that give them a vocabulary of cognitive phenomena that actually exist, as opposed to phenomena they just made up. And moreover, someone who can explain what they did to someone else, thanks again to the experimental and theoretical vocabulary that lets them point to replicable experiments that ground the ideas in very concrete results, or mathematically clear ideas.
Note the grade of increasing difficulty in citing:
If you don't know who to trust, or you don't trust yourself, you should concentrate on experimental results to start with, move on to thinking in terms of causal theories that are widely used within a science, and dip your toes into math and epistemology with extreme caution.
But practical advice really, really does become a lot more powerful when it's backed up by concrete experimental results, causal accounts that are actually true, and math validly interpreted.