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jimmy comments on Open thread, Nov. 02 - Nov. 08, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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YES!
Personally, I wouldn't take Bandler very seriously because of the whole "narcissistic liar" thing and the fact that the one intervention of his I saw was thoroughly lacking in displayed skill (and noteworthy result), but yes, you should look at the experts, not at the undergrads handed a manual designed by the researcher who isn't an expert himself. It's much better to study "effectiveness of this expert", not "effectiveness of this technique". I'd just rather see someone like Steve Andreas studied.
I know from personal experience that even people with good intentions will strawman the shit out of you if you talk about this kind of thing because there's so much behind it that they just aren't gonna get. Ironically enough, Milton Erickson, the guy who Bandler modeled NLP after, allegedly had this exact complaint about NLP ("Bandler and Grinder think they have me in a nut shell, but all they have is a nutshell." )
A while ago I would have agreed, today I'm not sure whether that would go somewhere. I think you need researchers with both scientific skills and which actual abilities.
Part of the reason why I respect Danis Bois so much is that after he was successful at teaching bodywork he went and worked through the proper academic way because he found the spiritual community to dogmatic. He got a real PHD and then a professorship.
For hypnosis it likely would have to be similar. Someone who went deep into it. Who lives in the mental world of hypnosis and does 90%+ of his day to day communication in that mode but who then feels bad about the unscientific attitude of his community. A person who then starts a scientific career might really bring the field forward.
Yeah, I see the distinction you're getting at and completely agree. I was referring more to showing "hey, this can't be nonsense since somehow this guy actually gets results even though I have no idea what he's doing", which is an important step on its own, even if it's not scientific evidence behind individual teachable things.
Look at the state of pyschology today. They tried to replicate 100 findings. A third checked out. A third nearly checked out and another third didn't check out at all.
If you are a psychologists at the moment and get embarrased as a result, you want to move in a direction where more results replicate. Studying highly performing people like Steve Andreas could very well not help with that goal.
Right.
To me, that looks like a slightly different angle on the same thing. If you want to nail down some things so you can say "hey look, we know some things", then studying high performing people wouldn't be the way to go. If, on the other hand, you're pretty okay with saying "hey look, of course we don't know anything, that's why we're still in exploration mode, but look at all this cool shit we're sifting through!", then it starts to look a lot more appealing.
It certainly doesn't surprise me that this kind of research isn't being done, and I can empathize with that embarrassment and wanting to have something nailed down to show the nay sayers. I also find it rather unfortunate. It strikes me as eating the marshmallow. Personally, I'd rather fast for a few days then drag back a moose.
That, actually, depends on whether this cool shit is a stable pattern or just transient noise. Looking at cool-shit noise is fine as an aesthetic experience, but I wouldn't call it science (or "exploration mode" either).
And, of course, there is the issue of intellectual honesty: saying "we found this weird thing that looks curious" is different from saying "we have conclusively demonstrated a statistically significant at the 0.0X level result".
I suspect you'll go off chasing butterflies and will never get anywhere, if we're getting into hunter-gatherer metaphors.
That's a terrible aesthetic experience. Your sense of aesthetics is supposed to do something
That's a very reasonable thing to suspect. It's a less reasonable thing to take as given, especially considering the size of the prize and the ease of asking a hunter "ever killed anything?".
LOL. Besides the whole going-meta-on-aesthetics thing, wouldn't that depend on how cool the shit it?
The hunter will proudly show you his collection of butterflies, all nicely pinned and displayed in proper boxes. Proper boxes are very important, dontcha know?
I have a feeling we have different images in mind. You have a vision of intrepid explorers deep in the jungle, too busy collecting specimens and fighting off piranhas and anacondas to suitably process all they see -- the solid scientific work can wait until they return to the lab and can properly sort and classify all they brought back.
I see a medieval guild of piece workers, producing things. Some things are OK, some not really, but you must produce the pieces, otherwise you'll starve and never make it from apprentice to the master. It would be, of course, very nice to craft a masterpiece, but if you can't a steady flow of adequate (as determined by your peers who are not exactly unbiased judges) pieces will be sufficient and the more the better.
The point is that how "cool" something is is supposed to track the potential value there. In practice it doesn't always (carbon fiber decals are a thing), but that just means they're doing it wrong.
I'd find that very strange, but could happen. And if so, you can confirm your suspicion that they weren't getting anything interesting done. Still seems worth asking to me.
It seems like you see me as implicitly asking "why do you guys keep making pieces instead of going on an adventure!?!?!" and answering with "you see epic adventure, but what they see is the necessity of making their pieces. If they didn't have to get their pieces made, and if there actually was epic adventure to have, of course they'd do that instead. It's that they don't agree with you".
I agree. That's why they do what they do - 'twas never a mystery to me. I see room for that and epic and lucrative anaconda fighting adventures. Or for fools chasing that fantasy and running off into the jungle to starve. Or all three and more.
I have a couple points here even before getting into what happens when you quit and seek adventure.
1) "you must produce the pieces". Really? You sure sure? What number do you put on that confidence? How you think you know?
Often people get caught up running from what seems like a "must" only for it to turn out to be not mission critical. Literal hunger makes for a perfect example. When people fast for a few days for the first time, it often really changes the way they think about the hunger signal. It's no longer "You must eat" and instead becomes more of just a suggestion.
2) "I'm not convinced adventuring is worth it". Of course not. You haven't done your research.
And from your mindset - if you really must produce the pieces, then you didn't need to. If I offer you a chance of a million dollars or a sure $500, but the mob is gonna kill you if you don't pay off your $500 debt, there's little point in asking what the chance is if you already know it isn't "all but guaranteed".
However, even if it's only a 15% chance, you're losing out on an expected $149,500. If there's any chance that 1) not producing the pieces isn't an immediate game ender or 2) it's not completely impossible to sell your chance for much more than $500, then you should probably at least ask what your chance of winning the million is before settling for $500.
So what I see is not "and adventure that is sure to pay off in excess and yeah it might be uncomfortable, but it's not like there's any real downside so don't be stupid", but rather "these people aren't being careful to consider their confidence levels when it's crucial, and so they are going to end up stuck as pieceworkers even if there's a way to have much much more"
Nope. How useful something is is supposed to track the potential value. If I were to go meta, I'd say that "cool" implies a particular kind of signaling to a specific social sub-group. There isn't much "potential value" other than the value of the signal itself.
Still nope. Most people don't want to go on a real adventure -- it's too risky, dangerous, uncomfortable. Most people -- by far -- prefer the predictable job of producing the pieces so that they can pay the mortgage on their suburban McMansion. In the case of academia, going for broke usually results in your being broke (and tenure-less) while a steady production of published papers gives you quite good chances of remaining in academia. Maybe not in the Ivies, but surely there is a college in South Dakota that wants you as a professor :-/
If you want tenure, yes. If you don't want tenure, you can do whatever you want.
Sure. The answer is a shrug and if you want a verbalization, it will go along the lines of "Nobody knows".
There is no way for all of them to "have much much more". Whether you think the trade-off is acceptable depends, among other things, on your risk tolerance, but in any case the mode -- the most likely outcome -- is still of you losing.
Science itself is about the search for finding knowledge and not about sifting through cool shit. I also consider it okay that our society has academic psychologists who attempt to build reliable knowledge.
I think it's worthwhile to have different communities of people persuing different strategies of knowledge generation.
I don't disagree with any of the statements you made, and none of them are required to be false for my point to be valid.
I'm kinda getting the impression that you aren't being very careful or charitable in your reading of my comments. Is that impression wrong?
I don't think the point of a post is to show how another person is wrong or to only say things where who I'm talking about is likely to disagree.