eridu comments on A Less Mysterious Mindfulness Exercise - Less Wrong

24 Post author: Gabriel 18 September 2012 11:33PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 20 September 2012 01:01:29PM 0 points [-]

All of this led to a big decrease in social anxiety, increased confidence and self-esteem, less pointless worrying, less anger, more empathy and all around improvement in my life.

How did you operationalize and quantify all of these things?

I procrastinate less and manage to walk through my ugh fields without flinching much more often.

How did you quantify this?

For a site that's ostensibly about overcoming bias, pro-self-help reportbacks on less wrong pretty frequently ignore any sort of quantitative analysis in favor of "I did this thing I read in this book, and noticed drastic improvement in all aspects of my life." You are quite capable of lying to yourself to justify the cost and effort of buying and reading several books, and are probably doing so to some extent. Do you have any hard (numerical) evidence that this is not the case?

Consider also that it's easier to change your perception of your (say) productivity than it is to change your actual productivity, and that there's significant market incentive for these sort of materials to produce that (faster and easier) change than a real change.