pragmatist comments on Open thread, July 16-22, 2013 - Less Wrong

13 Post author: David_Gerard 15 July 2013 08:13PM

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Comment author: pragmatist 23 July 2013 06:11:29PM *  2 points [-]

Athol's advice is useful, he does excellent work advising couples with very poor marriages.

Is there evidence that he is more successful at this than the typical "Blue Pill" marriage counselor/relationship expert? Even better would be evidence that he is more successful than the top tier of Blue Pill experts. I realize these are hard things to measure, and I don't expect to see scientific studies, but I'm wondering what you're basing your claim of his excellence on. Is it just testimonials? Personal experience?

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 24 July 2013 09:35:19AM 2 points [-]

I guess nobody measured Athol's counselling scientifically; we only have self-reports of people who say it helped them (on his web page), which is an obvious selection effect.

Maybe someone measured Blue Pill counselling. I would be curious about the results. For starters, whether it is better or worse than no counselling. (I don't have any data on this, not even the positive self-reports, but that's mostly a fact about my ignorance.)