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DeVliegendeHollander comments on "Spiritual" techniques that actually work thread - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (68)
What's the point in speaking about techniques that are difficult to explain and where it's therefore unlikely that the LW audience understands what the technique is about?
:-DDD I mean, where it is easy to explain how to do it, the hard part is to explain why it works rationally / scientifically.
I love these misunderstandings on LW, really do, they inspire me to write more clearer, for more literal minds who do not try to read between the lines.
In my experience most of the interesting things are not easily explainable.
Take "move up" and "move down" while walking. A year ago at the Berlin Bachata Congress a teacher danced and switched from moving down to moving up. He asked what he did differently. No one of the audience besides me saw the difference. When I told him what he was doing, he said that I was the first person to get it (he teaches the class at different dancing congresses before) and I probably took the class before.
Yet only around 9 months later I finally think I got what move up means. That means I got it in a way that allows me to move my body in a more healthy way to the extend that a person who simply watched me moving around a week before that event would notice a difference.
In Alexander technique movement directions are also an important concept. An Alexander teacher writes a blog where he also says that understanding what moving up means took him years. For me I took three years of being in a somatic discipline albeit not professionally.
Learning new phenomenological primitives is hard.
Yes, it's possible to explain a self-hypnosis 101 induction where one walks down a staircase without new primitives but to me that's not where it get's interesting.
I tried to read between the lines on this one; I really did. It still came out... somewhat insulting-sounding. Was that intentional? Or am I just being an idiot here?
Not really, but that should be a way less important consideration than whether it is true. I see it more as a curious, interesting phenomenon that helps me improve my writing by pushing it to be more accurate. Okay, sometimes frustrating, for my comments to be interpreted on the basis of what I say and not what I mean, but not too annoying. It also teaches me I am probably not Aspie, just an introverted/shy neurotypical, because if I was Aspie I would be similarly literal-minded.
The problem here isn't about literal-mindedness but different experiences with the subject matter. I do have experiences where it makes no sense to talk about them on LW because I have no way to break the inferential gap.
Of course when I'm assuming that you obviously don't have those experiences and don't really know what you are talking about, then it's easy to read the intention "hard part is to explain why it works rationally / scientifically".
On LW it's my default to treat the people I'm speaking with as if they wouldn't be ignorant.
Which is nicely respectful but I feel like my knowledge is being overestimated on LW. I get the impression that I am supposed to know already that neuro-linguistic programming, for example, doesn't work. It's hard to keep up with the latest results in every field. NLP for staters was taught me 7 years ago during a postgraduate course involving software consulting techniques. So I was surprised when I was told not only it is bunk but apparently everybody save me already knows it is bunk.