One might get the opposite impression, but in fact I am too. One reason why I keep whingeing at Philip is that his style of presentation makes it very difficult to tell where he is on the charlatan-to-expert spectrum, and that wouldn't bother me if I didn't think there was at least a chance that he's near the expert end.

Well, I am genuinely appreciative of your attempts to explain, whether they are getting through or not.

Actually, I should be thanking you and the other people I've been replying to, because I just realized what pure gold I ended up with. I didn't actually realize I had an implicit synthesis of the entire self-help field on my hands; in fact, I never consciously synthesized it before. And when I was telling my wife about it this evening, the ramifications of what should be possible under this simplified model hit me like a ton of bricks.

And it was the questions that Vladimir Nesov, gjm, Vladimir Golovin and others asked -- about the techniques, the model, the self-help field in general, the similarities -- combined with sprocket's post about "A/B" thinking that primed me with the right context to put it all together in a tightly integrated way. The refined model makes everything make a whole lot more sense to me -- failures and successes alike. (For example, I now have an idea of why certain "affirmation" techniques are likely to work better than others, for some poeple.)

As soon as I get some rest, I have some things I want to try. Because if this more-unified model is indeed "less wrong" than my previous one, I just "levelled up" in my art. Frackin' awesome! I think my massive investment of time here is actually going to pay off.

But whether it enables me to do anything new or not, this revision is still a big step forward in simplified communication regarding what I already do. So either way...

Thank you, LWers, I couldn't have done it without you!