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Vaniver comments on Marketing Rationality - Less Wrong Discussion
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This strikes me as a weird statement, because 7 Habits is wildly successful and seems very solid. What about it bothers you?
(My impression is that "a word to the wise is sufficient," and so most clever people find it aggravating when someone expounds on simple principles for hundreds of pages, because of the implication that they didn't get it the first time around. Or they assume it's less principled than it is.)
I picked 7 Habits because it's pretty clearly rationality in my eyes, but is distinctly not LW style Rationality. Perhaps I should have picked something worse to make my point more clear.
I suspect the point will be clearer if stated without examples? I think you're pointing towards something like "most self-help does not materially improve the lives of most self-help readers," which seems fairly ambiguous to me. Most self-help, if measured by titles, is probably terrible simply by Sturgeon's Law. But is most self-help, as measured by sales? I haven't looked at sales figures, but I imagine it's not that unlikely that half of all self-help books actually consumed are the ones that are genuinely helpful.
It also seems to me that the information content of useful self-help is about pointing to places where applying effort will improve outcomes. (Every one of the 7 Habits is effortful!) Part of scientific self-help is getting an accurate handle on how much improvement in outcomes comes from expenditure of effort for various techniques / determining narrowly specialized versions.
But if someone doesn't actually expend the effort, the knowledge of how they could have doesn't lead to any improvements in outcomes. Which is why the other arm of self-help is all about motivation / the emotional content.
It's not clear to me that LW-style rationality improves on the informational or emotional content of self-help for most of the populace. (I think it's better at the emotional content mostly for people in the LW-sphere.) Most of the content of LW-style rationality is philosophical, which is very indirectly related to self-help.
Another complication is that Sturgeon's Law applies as much to the readers. The dropout rate on free MOOCs is astronomical. (Gated link, may not be accessible to all.) "When the first Mooc came out, 100,000 people signed up but “not even half went to the first lecture, let alone completed all the lectures.” "Only 4-5 per cent of the people who sign up for a course at Coursera ,,, get to the end."
Picking up a self-help book is as easy as signing up for a MOOC. How many buyers read even the first chapter, let alone get to the end, and do all the work on the way?
Agreed; that's where I was going with my paragraph 3 but decided to emphasize it less.
"genuinely helpful" is a complicated term. A lot of books bring people to shift their attention to different priorities and get better at one thing while sacrificing other things.
New Agey literature about being in the moment has advantages but it can also hold people back from more long-term thinking.