Note 1: all the top-level skills have very, very strong effects. If you learn them, you will have no trace of doubt about whether they work, and about whether they have really improved your life.
Are we to understand from this that the author of this document learned the skills, was consequently certain that the skills worked and improved their life, and then… committed suicide?
It seems clear that an epistemic error was made somewhere in that progression.
Sure, but, like, people can discover things like “exercise is good for you” or “eating healthy is good for you”, and nonetheless have unrelated problems that cause them to commit suicide (they can even end up committing suicide due eating-disorder-related reasons), so, sure an error happened somewhere, but that’s not very strong evidence that the error is related to having discovered and got excited about exercise being good for you and eating healthy being good for you.
(Tuning your cognitive strategies paid off for me immediately, in a straightforward way that made sense)
I think there’s a thing where people with a lot of mental problems tend to get very enthusiastic about various therapy-type techniques and genuinely get a lot of benefit out of them. But then they still have massive problems because their original problems were so humongous to begin with, even if they improve a lot they’re still worse on mental health than the median person. (This has historically also described me, even though I have also been getting better over the long term.)
Even if they are genuinely making steady progress, that progress might not be fast enough to ensure that an unexpected shock or a set of adverse consequences won’t bring them down.
That website says:
Are we to understand from this that the author of this document learned the skills, was consequently certain that the skills worked and improved their life, and then… committed suicide?
It seems clear that an epistemic error was made somewhere in that progression.
Sure, but, like, people can discover things like “exercise is good for you” or “eating healthy is good for you”, and nonetheless have unrelated problems that cause them to commit suicide (they can even end up committing suicide due eating-disorder-related reasons), so, sure an error happened somewhere, but that’s not very strong evidence that the error is related to having discovered and got excited about exercise being good for you and eating healthy being good for you.
(Tuning your cognitive strategies paid off for me immediately, in a straightforward way that made sense)
I think there’s a thing where people with a lot of mental problems tend to get very enthusiastic about various therapy-type techniques and genuinely get a lot of benefit out of them. But then they still have massive problems because their original problems were so humongous to begin with, even if they improve a lot they’re still worse on mental health than the median person. (This has historically also described me, even though I have also been getting better over the long term.)
Even if they are genuinely making steady progress, that progress might not be fast enough to ensure that an unexpected shock or a set of adverse consequences won’t bring them down.
Local Validity as a Key to Sanity and Civilization is related.