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pjeby comments on Bad reasons for a rationalist to lose - Less Wrong
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Indeed. What's particularly important if you're after results, rather than theories, is that just because those other 50% didn't go from low to high, doesn't mean that there wasn't some different form, approach, environment, or method of training that wouldn't have produced the same result!
IOW, if the training they tested was 100% identical for each person, then the odds that the other 50% were still trainable is extremely high.
(And since most generative (as opposed to therapeutic) self-help techniques implicitly rely on the same brain functions that are used in hypnosis (monoidealistic imagination and ideomotor or ideosensory responses), this means that the same things can be made to work for everyone, provided you can train the basic skill.)
Robert Fritz once wrote something about how if you're 5'3" you're not going to be able to win the NBA dunking contest... and then somebody did just that. It ain't what you've got, it's what you do with what you have got.
(Disclaimer: I don't remember the winner's name or even if 5'3" was the actual height.)
It's also rare that any quality we're born with is all bad or all good; what gives with one hand takes away with the other, and vice versa. The catch is to find the way that works for you.
Some of my students work better with images, some with sounds, others still with feelings. Some have to write things down, I like to talk things out. These are all really superficial differences, because the steps in the processes are still basically the same. Also, even though my wife is more "auditory" than I am, and doesn't visualize as well consciously... that doesn't mean she can't. (Over the last few years, she's gradually gotten better at doing processes that involve more visual elements.)
(Also, we've actually tried swapping around our usual modes of cognition for a day or two, which was interesting. When she took on my processing stack, we got along better, but when I took on hers, I was really stressed and depressed... but I had a lot more sympathy for some of her moods after that!)
Absolutely! Dweck's fixed and growth mindsets are absolutely central to my work. I used to call them "naturally struggling" and "naturally successful" -- well, I still do for marketing reasons. But Dweck showed with brilliant clarity where the mindsets come from: struggle results from believing that your ability in any area is a fixed quantity, rather than a variable one under your personal control.
If somebody wants a scientifically validated reason to believe what I'm saying in this thread, they need look no further than Dweck's mindsets research. It offers compelling scientific verification of the idea that thinking your ability is fixed really IS "dumbass loser" thinking!
Um... PJ, this is just what psychoanalysts said... and kept on saying after around a thousand studies showed that psychoanalysis had no effect statistically distinguishable from just talking to a random intelligent caring listener.
You need to read more basic rationality material, along the lines of Robyn Dawes's "Rational Choice in an Uncertain World". There you will find the records of many who engaged in this classic error mode and embarrassed themselves accordingly. You do not get to just flush controlled experiments down the toilet by hoping, without actually pointing to any countering studies, that someone could have done something differently that would have produced the effect you want the study to produce but that it didn't produce.
You know how there are a lot of self-indulgent bad habits you train your clients to get rid of? This is the sort of thing that master rationalists like Robyn Dawes train people to stop doing. And you are missing a lot of the basic training here, which is why, as I keep saying, it is such a tragedy that you only began to study rationality after already forming your theories of akrasia. So either you'll read more books on rationality and learn those basics and rethink those theories, or you'll stay stuck.
Rounding to the nearest cliche. I didn't say my methods would help those other people, or that some ONE method would. I said that given a person Y there would be SOME method X. This is not at all the same thing as what you're talking about.
What I've said is that if you have a standard training method that moves 50% of people from low to high on some criterion, there is an extremely high probability that the other 50% needed something different in their training. I'm puzzled how that is even remotely a controversial statement.
You ever heard of something called the Pygmalion effect? Did the study control for it?
By which I mean, did they control for the beliefs of the teachers who were training these subjects, in reference to:
the trainability and potential of the subjects themselves, and
the teachability of the subject matter itself?
For example, did they tell the teacher they had a bunch of students with superb hypnotic potential who just needed some encouragement to get going, or did they tell them they were conducting a test, to see who was trainable, or if it was possible to train hypnotic ability at all?
These things make a HUGE difference to whether people actually learn.
Yes and no. What I've observed is that most everybody wants something out of life, and if they're not getting it, then sooner or later their path leads to them trying to develop themselves, or causing themselves to accidentally get some personal development as a side effect of whatever their real goal is.
The people who set out for personal development for its own sake -- whether because they think being better is awesome or because they hate who they currently are -- are indeed a minority.
A not-insignificant-subset of my clientele are entrepreneurs and creative types who come to me because they're putting off starting their business, writing their book, or doing some other important-to-them project. And a significant number of them cease to be my customers the moment they've got the immediate problem taken care of.
So, it's not that people aren't generally motivated to improve themselves, so much as they're not motivated to make general improvements; they are after specific improvements that are often highly context-specific.
I think we may agree more than you think. I agree that individuals are different in terms of whatever dial settings they may have when they show up at my door. I disagree that those initial dial settings are welded in place and not changeable.
"Hardware" and "software" are squishy terms when it comes to brains that can not only learn, but literally grow. And ISTM that most homeostatic systems in the body can be trained to have a different "setting" than they come from the factory with.