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Lumifer comments on Marketing Rationality - Less Wrong Discussion
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Do you believe that the "one weird trick to effortlessly lose fat" articles promote healthy eating and are likely to lead people to approach nutrition scientifically?
Beware of other-modeling!
Average Lumifer is most definitely not a good model of average person. Does "one weird trick" promotes improvement? I don't know, but I do know that your gut reaction is not a good model for the answer.
Oh, boy, am I not :-D
I do know some "more average" people, though, and they don't seem to be that easily taken by cheap tricks, at least after the first dozen times :-/ And as OrphanWilde pointed out, the aim of clickbait is not to convince you of anything, it is solely to generate the ad impressions.
I would surprised if "one weird trick" diets promoted any improvement, in part because most any diet requires some willpower and the willingness to stick with it for a while -- and the weird tricks are firmly aimed at people who have, on a good day, the attention span of a goldfish...
Yes, if the "one weird trick" is a science-based approach, such as "be intentional about your diet and follow scientific guidelines," and leads people to other science-based strategies. Here's how I did it in this article. Do you think the first "weird trick" will not result in people having greater mental strength?
If you think that the Shangri-La diet "promotes healthy eating" and is scientifically-based, what's wrong with promoting it as 'one weird trick to effortlessly lose fat'? It has the latter as an express goal, and is certainly, erm, weird enough.
What's wrong is that you are reinforcing the "grab the shiniest thing which promises you the most" mentality and as soon as the Stuff-Your-Face-With-Cookies diet promises you losing fat TWICE AS FAST!!eleven! the Shangri-La diet will get defenestrated as not good enough.
See, the difference is that the Shangri-La diet has some scientific backing, which the Stuff-Your-Face-With-Cookies diet conspicuously lacks. So, the former will win in any real contest, at least among people who are sufficiently rationally-minded[1]. Except that it won't, if you can't promote your message effectively. This is where your initial pitch matters.
[1] (People who aren't rationally-minded won't care about 'rationality', of course, so there's little hope for them anyway.)
I do believe that it works, but "scientific backing"? Did I miss some new study on the Shangri-La diet, or what are you talking about?
People often use "scientific backing" to mean "this extrapolates reasonably from evidence" rather than "this has been tested directly."
If you use the word scientific that way I think you lose a quite valuable word. I consider NLP to be extrapolated from evidence. I even have seen it tested directly a variety of times. At the same time I don't consider it to be scientific in the popular usage of 'scientific'.
For discussion on LW I think Keith Stanovich criteria's for science are good:
Agreed, good definition of science-backed.