In the course of you teaching me the double crux technique, we attempt to find a crux for a belief of mine. Suppose that there is no such crux. However, in our mutual eagerness to apply this cool new technique—which you (a person with high social status in my social circle, and possessed of some degree of personal charisma) are presenting to me, as a useful and proven thing, which lots of other high-status people use—we confabulate some “crux” for my belief. This “faux crux” is not really a crux, but with some self-deception I can come to believe it to be such. You declare success for the technique; I am impressed and satisfied. You file this under “we found a crux this time, as in 60–90% of other times”.
Do you think that this scenario is plausible? Implausible?
Plausible. But I (at least attempted to) account for this prior to giving the number.
Like, the number I give matches my own sense, introspecting on my own beliefs, including doing sensible double-checks and cross-checks with other very different tools such as Focusing or Murphyjitsu and including e.g. later receiving the data and sometimes discovering that I was wrong and have not updated in the way I thought I would.
I think you might be thinking that the “a surprising amount of the time” claim is heavily biased toward “immediate feedback from people who just tried to learn it, in a context where they are probably prone to various motivated cognitions,” and while it’s not zero biased in that way, it’s based on lots of feedback from not-that-context.
Consider this hypothetical scenario:
In the course of you teaching me the double crux technique, we attempt to find a crux for a belief of mine. Suppose that there is no such crux. However, in our mutual eagerness to apply this cool new technique—which you (a person with high social status in my social circle, and possessed of some degree of personal charisma) are presenting to me, as a useful and proven thing, which lots of other high-status people use—we confabulate some “crux” for my belief. This “faux crux” is not really a crux, but with some self-deception I can come to believe it to be such. You declare success for the technique; I am impressed and satisfied. You file this under “we found a crux this time, as in 60–90% of other times”.
Do you think that this scenario is plausible? Implausible?
Plausible. But I (at least attempted to) account for this prior to giving the number.
Like, the number I give matches my own sense, introspecting on my own beliefs, including doing sensible double-checks and cross-checks with other very different tools such as Focusing or Murphyjitsu and including e.g. later receiving the data and sometimes discovering that I was wrong and have not updated in the way I thought I would.
I think you might be thinking that the “a surprising amount of the time” claim is heavily biased toward “immediate feedback from people who just tried to learn it, in a context where they are probably prone to various motivated cognitions,” and while it’s not zero biased in that way, it’s based on lots of feedback from not-that-context.