How did you like the workshop? I've read A.J. Jacobs' article about Radical Honesty and skimmed Brad Blanton's book and wondered if it was worth going deeper in. Did you change any behavior from that or the Conscious Intimacy workshop?
I was at three 3-hour workshops and they were all worthwhile. The first one under the title above was a year ago and led by Juro Glo. Juro is quite young as far as trainers go but is living the radical honesty paradigma all the time. From reading material I had the impression that radical honesty was about being mean but Jura happened to be one of the sweetest people I know, which was interesting. She thought the workshop didn't go as planned (and said so, because of honesty) but everyone had a really great time.
Jura than became Taber Shadburne assistant a...
Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/applicable-advice/
Part 2: http://bearlamp.com.au/addendum-to-applicable-advice/
Part 2 on lesswrong: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/nuf/addendum_to_applicable_advice/
Einstein said, "If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions."
The Feynman Algorithm:
Write down the problem.
Think real hard.
Write down the solution.
There is a lot of advice out there on the internet. Any topic you can consider; there is probably advice about. The trouble with advice is that it can be just as often wrong as it is right. Often when people write advice; they are writing about what has worked for them in a very specific set of circumstances. I'm going to be lazy and use an easy example several times here - weight loss, but the overarching concept applies to any type of advice.
Generic: "eat less and exercise more" (obvious example is obvious)
Dieting as a problem is a big and complicated one. But the advice is probably effective to someone. Take any person who is looking to lose weight and this advice is probably applicable. Does this make it good advice? Heck no! It's atrocious. If that's all the dieting advice we needed we wouldn't invent diets like Atkins, Grapefruit, 2&5, low carb and more.
So what does, "starve for two days a week", have to it that "eat less and exercise more" doesn't? Why does the damn advice exist?
Advice like, "eat less and exercise more", is likely to work on someone in the situation of:
1. Eating too much
and
2. not exercising enough.
and
3. having those behaviours for no reason
and
4. having the willpower and desire to change those behaviours
and
5. never do them again.
and
6. the introspection to identify the problem as that, and start now.
With this understanding of the advice, you can say that this advice applies to some situations and not others. Hence the concept of "applicable advice".
Given that the advice, "eat less and exercise more" exists, if you take the time to understand why it exists and how it works; you can better take advantage of what it offers.
Understand that if this advice worked for someone there was a way that it worked for that someone. And considering if there is a way to make it work for someone, you can maybe find a way to make it work for you too.
How not to use Applicable advice
When you consider that some advice will be able to be adapted, and some will not, you will sometimes end up in a failure mode of using an understanding of why advice worked to explain away the possibility of it working for you.
Example: "you need to speak your mind more often". Is advice. If I decide that this advice is targeted at introverted people who like to be confident before they share what they have to say, but who often say nothing at all because of this lack of confidence. I then assume that if I am not an introverted person then this advice is not applicable to me and should be ignored.
This is the wrong way to apply applicable advice. First; the model of "why this advice worked", could be wrong. Second, this way of applying applicable advice is looking at the scientific process wrong.
Briefly the scientific method:
Compared to the failure mode:
How to use applicable advice
Use the scientific method*. As above:
Method:
*yes I realise this is a greatly simplified form of the scientific method.
Map and territory
Our observable difference - in how you should and should not be using applicable advice - comes from an understanding of what you are trying to change. The map is what we carry around in our head to explain how the world works. The territory is the real world. Just by believing the sky is green I can't change the sky. But if I believed the sky is green, I could change my belief to be more in line with reality.
If you assume the advice you encounter is applicable to someone, AKA the advice suited their map and how it applied to their territory to successfully be useful. Then when you compare your territory and their territory - they do not match. Instead of concluding that your territory is immune - that the advice does not apply, you can try to modify your own map to make the advice work for your territory.
Questions:
Epistemic status: trying not to do it wrong.
Meta: I have been trying to write this for months and months. Owing to my new writing processes, I am seeing a lot more success. Writing this out has only taken 2 hours today, but that doesn't count the 5 hours I had put into earlier versions that I nearly entirely deleted. It also doesn't count that passive time of thinking about how to explain this over the months and months that I have had this idea floating around in my head. Including explaining it at a local Dojo and having a few conversations about it. For this reason I would put the total time spent on this post at 22 hours.