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MattG comments on Link: The Cook and the Chef: Musk's Secret Sauce - Wait But Why - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (31)
The whole thing reads like a fairly standard (but very disorganized) self-help tract trying to exhort people into being more agenty and strategic. Some of it maps directly onto LW self-help posts, even, like 'people are not automatically strategic' and existing techniques like COZE.
Since, for better or worse, most self-help material doesn't wind up helping or harming even when someone actually tries to use them, I don't think that this particular self-help tract will be any different - anyone trying to use the ideas and aspire to be a chef rather than a cook will wind up probably in the same place as they would before. People aren't going to either become billionaires or homeless just because they read something online; if writing could reliably have that sort of impact, we would live in a very different and much more interesting world than we do...
I agree with OP that most people do have sub-optimal levels of agentiness and planning and have really wacky evaluations of risk (consider anything to do with children, or terrorism), so if it did do anything, it would probably be helpful on net.
Small nitpick: I think the reason self-help has little effect is that most people don't apply it, not that they apply it and nothing happens.
But why do they not apply it? Either way, the self-help material doesn't wind up helping or harming.
Perhaps it is because most people are not nearly as free as they experience themselves to be. They think that they can learn, that they can know, that they can act, but in reality they mostly struggle with anything larger than choosing from a restaurant menu. They struggle even with no-brainers like not living as a couch potato. Why do we even have a short code for "couch potato"?
To elaborate on MattG's "doing shit differently is hard" hypothesis: implementing most kinds of self-help advice requires permanently adopting new habits, and implementing habit change is hard. We know from habit formation studies that in order to establish a new habit, you need to associate the habit with consistent rewards and triggers, so that each time that you encounter the trigger you carry out the habit, and you should also receive a reward on a fair number of the occasions that you carry out the habit. Furthermore habits can easily fall apart if the triggers aren't robust and flexible enough.
On top of this you have Scott Alexander's "Life Hack Paradox", where those self-help habits that aren't hard become saturated, and simply become the cost of doing business (E.G Goal setting, Caffeine)
Preliminary hypothesis: Doing shit differently is hard.
"Hard" is just a dormitive principle here. If we observe many people attempting a thing and few succeeding, we call it hard because that is what the word means. It is not an explanation of why most fail, only an observation that they do.
Sort of - the other reasons beside it being hard would be that it's ineffective as Gwern supposed, or that it's unpleasant, or that it's low payoff, or that the current behavior is very pleasant or very high payoff.
All these could effect how hard the effort is, but they could also effect the decision without changing how hard it is to change.
More generally, I assume that LWers are already familiar with things like, willpower depletion, status quo bias, and habit formation that make staying the same easier than changing
I think a sizeable portion of people do things like daily affirmations. But even for applied self help there are often effects but the effect are neither that the person ends up as a billionaires or homeless.