pjeby comments on Bad reasons for a rationalist to lose - Less Wrong

30 Post author: matt 18 May 2009 10:57PM

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Comment author: pjeby 20 May 2009 04:58:04PM 1 point [-]

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.

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.

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.

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.

Comment deleted 21 May 2009 01:03:06AM [-]
Comment author: pjeby 21 May 2009 02:37:47AM *  1 point [-]

It is a conclusion that just doesn't follow.

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.