"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.

It's hard to define "results" here, though, isn't it?

Example: I once encountered someone who just "knew" that the raises they were getting were proof that their religion was true. They were less successful, then they prayed for years like they were taught, then they were more successful. Results, right?

But when you look at the census data: between accumulation of human capital and just-plain inflation, the median retiree has seen their income go up by an order of magnitude over their life time. Getting raise after raise and watching your salary go up ten-fold was the default life experience, not proof of divine intervention.

So to see "results" you can't always just compare "before" vs. "after". Even if you see results of your epiphanies, does that mean the epiphanies get the credit, or might you have seen the same improvement from the same amount of life experience, epiphany-free? Or even if the epiphanies did help: which ones? If you're seeking out epiphanies, odds are you're not just testing out one new idea at a time then waiting to rigorously analyze the independent results of each.

To reuse my example: even though income increase was a lousy metric, on other evidence I would actually say that their religion was providing many adherents with "actual power", on net: buying the whole package wasn't nearly as beneficial as picking out the value from the dross would have been, but it was better than the also-mixed-bag of beliefs that most competing religions and secular ideologies offered.

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