First, if the person trying to tell you about their Amazing! New! Method! doesn’t provide enough sufficiently strong evidence to at least rationally convince you that you should look further into the matter, it’s almost certainly a scam. It’s the same as someone trying to convince you that they’ve discovered/built a potent new energy source. The people who discovered radioactivity behaved very differently than people peddling perpetual motion usually do.
Second, the bit about “But most of the advice rings so false as to not even seem worth considering. ” is dangerous. If you always go along with your intuition, you’ll never discover the counterevidence that permits you to counter the flaws in your intuition. No rationalist ever considers something not worth considering. Everything is worth consideration. Not all things are worth further consideration—and in order to check yourself for error, every once in a while, even the things you discard after thinking about should be further examined.
First, if the person trying to tell you about their Amazing! New! Method! doesn’t provide enough sufficiently strong evidence to at least rationally convince you that you should look further into the matter, it’s almost certainly a scam.
One problem where the Arts that Work are concerned is that one’s evidence standards need to allow for things where the standard double-blind and statistical methods simply aren’t going to work.
For example, hypnotism was initially considered pseudoscience—and it’s still considered “fringe” today. Its inventor had a totally wrong theory for how it worked—and to this day, nobody has a convincing theory of how it DOES work. At one point, it was tested, as Richard Bandler put it, “with a tape-recorded second-rate induction in a horrible voice”, played to hundreds of people in order to establish a “susceptibility scale”.
However, for all practical purposes, everybody can be hypnotized by some method or another. Modern hypnotists also know that real-time feedback to how somebody’s responding is pretty darn important to the process.
Meanwhile, marketing is perhaps the only one of the Dark Arts that’s reasonably susceptible to statistical testing, but the statistics can’t really test your theories, only specific applications in context. The masters of direct marketing invariably agree, however, that what makes marketing work is understanding what your audience already thinks and believes… and they do that on groups only because they can’t do it on an individual level. (When you do it to an individual, it’s called Sales instead!)
On the whole today, psychology equals alchemy. There are various schools that are trying to get to chemistry. NLP and CBT have gotten pretty far, but still have a long way to go.
Frankly, NLP and CBT are basically the same—or more precisely, CBT is an application of principles discovered at the dawn of NLP and then largely abandoned by the NLPers in favor of things that are more direct and work faster .
But those faster things are harder to study, for precisely the same reason that hypnotizability was hard to study: they depend on real-time adaptation by a skilled—and congruent practitioner in order to demonstrate statistically-significant success. A hypnotist, NLP practitioner, or pick-up artist who can’t believe in what they’re doing will not successfully influence very many human beings. (Just like sales people and marketers.)
That means that even if people follow your advice to look for counterevidence, they won’t necessarily succeed in persisting long enough to learn how to do the Thing That Works, let alone get any results from it. And there will never be any true “double-blind” testing of the Dark Arts, because if you aren’t using an experienced practitioner of that art, you can’t be said to be testing it.
“On the whole today, psychology equals alchemy. There are various schools that are trying to get to chemistry. NLP and CBT have gotten pretty far, but still have a long way to go.”
You’re preaching to the choir, friend—my degree is in Cognitive Psychology.
The science of psychology is to the pseudo-scientific medical discipline of the same name as a fledgling bird trapped beneath a hippo is to the hippo.
Two points:
First, if the person trying to tell you about their Amazing! New! Method! doesn’t provide enough sufficiently strong evidence to at least rationally convince you that you should look further into the matter, it’s almost certainly a scam. It’s the same as someone trying to convince you that they’ve discovered/built a potent new energy source. The people who discovered radioactivity behaved very differently than people peddling perpetual motion usually do.
Second, the bit about “But most of the advice rings so false as to not even seem worth considering. ” is dangerous. If you always go along with your intuition, you’ll never discover the counterevidence that permits you to counter the flaws in your intuition. No rationalist ever considers something not worth considering. Everything is worth consideration. Not all things are worth further consideration—and in order to check yourself for error, every once in a while, even the things you discard after thinking about should be further examined.
One problem where the Arts that Work are concerned is that one’s evidence standards need to allow for things where the standard double-blind and statistical methods simply aren’t going to work.
For example, hypnotism was initially considered pseudoscience—and it’s still considered “fringe” today. Its inventor had a totally wrong theory for how it worked—and to this day, nobody has a convincing theory of how it DOES work. At one point, it was tested, as Richard Bandler put it, “with a tape-recorded second-rate induction in a horrible voice”, played to hundreds of people in order to establish a “susceptibility scale”.
However, for all practical purposes, everybody can be hypnotized by some method or another. Modern hypnotists also know that real-time feedback to how somebody’s responding is pretty darn important to the process.
Meanwhile, marketing is perhaps the only one of the Dark Arts that’s reasonably susceptible to statistical testing, but the statistics can’t really test your theories, only specific applications in context. The masters of direct marketing invariably agree, however, that what makes marketing work is understanding what your audience already thinks and believes… and they do that on groups only because they can’t do it on an individual level. (When you do it to an individual, it’s called Sales instead!)
On the whole today, psychology equals alchemy. There are various schools that are trying to get to chemistry. NLP and CBT have gotten pretty far, but still have a long way to go.
Frankly, NLP and CBT are basically the same—or more precisely, CBT is an application of principles discovered at the dawn of NLP and then largely abandoned by the NLPers in favor of things that are more direct and work faster .
But those faster things are harder to study, for precisely the same reason that hypnotizability was hard to study: they depend on real-time adaptation by a skilled—and congruent practitioner in order to demonstrate statistically-significant success. A hypnotist, NLP practitioner, or pick-up artist who can’t believe in what they’re doing will not successfully influence very many human beings. (Just like sales people and marketers.)
That means that even if people follow your advice to look for counterevidence, they won’t necessarily succeed in persisting long enough to learn how to do the Thing That Works, let alone get any results from it. And there will never be any true “double-blind” testing of the Dark Arts, because if you aren’t using an experienced practitioner of that art, you can’t be said to be testing it.
“On the whole today, psychology equals alchemy. There are various schools that are trying to get to chemistry. NLP and CBT have gotten pretty far, but still have a long way to go.”
You’re preaching to the choir, friend—my degree is in Cognitive Psychology.
The science of psychology is to the pseudo-scientific medical discipline of the same name as a fledgling bird trapped beneath a hippo is to the hippo.