"Epiphany addiction"

cousin_it

LW doesn't seem to have a discussion of the article Epiphany Addiction, by Chris at succeedsocially. First paragraph:

"Epiphany Addiction" is an informal little term I came up with to describe a process that I've observed happen to people who try to work on their personal issues. How it works is that someone will be trying to solve a problem they have, say a lack of confidence around other people. Somehow they'll come across a piece of advice or a motivational snippet that will make them have an epiphany or a profound realization. This often happens when people are reading self-help materials and they come across something that stands out to them. People can also come up with epiphanies themselves if they're doing a lot of writing and reflecting in an attempt to try and analyze their problems.

I like that article because it describes a dangerous failure mode of smart people. One example was the self-help blog of Phillip Eby (pjeby), where each new post seemed to bring new amazing insights, and after a while you became jaded. An even better, though controversial, example could be Eliezer's Sequences, if you view them as a series of epiphanies about AI research that didn't lead to much tangible progress. (Please don't make that statement the sole focus of discussion!)

The underlying problem seems to be that people get a rush of power from neat-sounding realizations, and mistake that feeling for actual power. I don't know any good remedy for that, but being aware of the problem could help.

LW doesn't seem to have a discussion of the article Epiphany Addiction, by Chris at succeedsocially. First paragraph:

"Epiphany Addiction" is an informal little term I came up with to describe a process that I've observed happen to people who try to work on their personal issues. How it works is that someone will be trying to solve a problem they have, say a lack of confidence around other people. Somehow they'll come across a piece of advice or a motivational snippet that will make them have an epiphany or a profound realization. This often happens when people are reading self-help materials and they come across something that stands out to them. People can also come up with epiphanies themselves if they're doing a lot of writing and reflecting in an attempt to try and analyze their problems.

Think of it as superstimulus to the cool-idea sensor.

Thought exercise: could all the LW/CFAR-favoured model of epistemic rationality be ineffective, even though it sounds really good and make sense? What would the world look like in this case? What would you expect if LW rationality didn't actually work, except to convince its fans that it did work? (For a value of "work" that is defined before examining the results.)

1magfrump14y

I would expect the following things to have failed: * Good community norms (this is a difficult problem that LW has solved admirably) * Using advice from LW to improve my social skills (this is actually sort of a subpoint of "if someone else does it better, LW points you to them") * Promotion of thinking about pet issues (this one failed by less than the others--the sequences pretty much cleaned out the god-hating but I'm constantly annoyed at people who don't have good epistemology) there's plenty more that is substantially less tangible, and YMMV, but those first two points have created a large amount of value for me personally.

43CarlShulman14y

Effective at what? I agree with Yvain that: [...] Hard work, intelligence, social skill, attractiveness, risk-taking, need for sleep, height, and enormous amounts of noise go into life success as measured by something like income or occupational status. So unless there were a ludicrously large effect size of hanging around Less Wrong, differences in life success between readers and nonreaders would be overwhelmingly driven by selection effects. Now, in fact those selection effects put the LW population well above average (lots of college students, academics, software engineers, etc) but don't speak much to positive effects of their reading habits. To get a good picture of that you would need a randomized experiment, or at least a 'natural experiment.' CFAR is going to tack some outcomes on the attendees of its minicamps, after using randomized admission among applicants above a certain cutoff. Due to the limited sample size, I think this only has enough power to detect insanely massive intervention effects, i.e. a boost of a large fraction of a standard deviation from a few days at a workshop. So I think it won't show positive effects there. It does seem plausible to me, however, that there will be positive effects on narrow measures closer to the intervention, e.g. performance on some measures of cognitive bias from the psychology literature. In the same way, a scheduling system like Getting Things Done will probably not have visibly significant effects on career outcomes within a year on a small sample size, but would be more likely to do so on a measure like "projects delivered on time" or "average time-to-response for emails." For someone interested in personal success, a more relevant standard would be whether n hours spent studying or practicing 'rationality exercises' would increase income or other success measures more than taking an extra programming class at Udacity, or working out at the gym, or reading up about financial planning and investment. Her

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