And if there aren’t any, he’ll be sure to invent them. ;-)
No reason to make his job easier.
Hehehehe. Sure, because subconscious minds are so very rational. Right.
No, but personally, mine is definitely sufficiently capable of noticing minor logical flaws to use them to irrationally dismiss uncomfortable arguments. This may be rare, but it happens.
Actually, my point was that I hadn’t made any. Many of the objections that people are making are about things I never actually said.
For example, some people insist on arguing with the ideas that:
teaching ability varies, and
teachers’ beliefs make a difference to the success of their students.
And somehow they’re twisting these very scientifically supported ideas into me stating some sort of fallacy… and conveniently ignoring the part where I said that “If you’re more interested in results than theory, then...”
Of course if you do standardized teaching and standardized testing you’ll get varying results from different people. But if you want to maximize the utility that students will get from their training, you’ll want to vary how you teach them, instead, according to what produces the best result for that individual.
That doesn’t mean that you need to teach them different things, it’s that you’ll need to take a different route to teach them the same thing.
A learning disability is not the same thing as a performance disability, and my essential claim here is that differences in applicability of anti-akrasia and other behavior change techniques are more readily explained as differences in learning ability and predispositions, than in differences in applicability of the specific techniques.
I say this because I used to think that different things worked for different people (after all, so many didn’t work for me!), and then I discovered that the problem is that people (like me) think they’re following steps that they actually aren’t following, and they don’t notice the discrepancy because the discrepancies are “off-map” for them.
That is, their map of the territory doesn’t include one or more of the critical distinctions that make a technique work, like the difference between consciously thinking something, versus observing automatic responses, or the difference between their feelings and their thoughts about their feelings. If you miss one of these distinctions, a technique will fail, but it’s not the technique that’s broken, any more than a bicycle is broken if you haven’t learned to stay on it yet.
People vary in their ability to learn these distinctions; some people get it right away, some need help. Some need lots of help. As I get better at verbalizing and pointing out these distinctions, I get (a little) better at getting people who have difficulties to learn them faster. (And as I got better at grasping the distinctions, I also became able to make more and more things work for me that never worked before.)
The really silly thing about all this is that, from my POV, the people who insist that there is neither any theory nor universally applicable techniques, are basically acting like theists: insisting I treat their irrational and demonstrably-false beliefs as worthy of serious consideration. It reminds me of Perry Marshall arguing that because we don’t know where DNA comes from, we have to “admit” that maybe God did it.
That is, “Some techniques have not worked for me” is taken as evidence supporting a hypothesis of “it’s not me, it’s the techniques”. However, by itself, this is equally valid as supporting evidence for, “the technique is fine, you just didn’t learn how to do it right.” When you add independent evidence that other people claim the same technique didn’t work for them, but then can be taught to make it work for them, then it begins to be more supportive of alternative hypotheses.
And yet, this doesn’t seem to make anybody update. Instead, I am being “irrationally confident” for not giving enough weight to the “it’s not me, it’s the technique” theory… when I have plenty of evidence (personal and customers) that is not at all consistent with that theory, and they only have evidence that is equally applicable to BOTH theories.
Not everyone making that argument is necessarily Brucing, in the sense of directly seeking failure. Some are just mistaken. However, the net effect of the belief is the same: the person stops before they learn, like a kid who’s convinced he or she is just not cut out for bicycle riding.
(P.S. It’s important to understand this is not about me or “my” techniques—most of which I didn’t invent, anyway! As I’ve said several times, there are TONS of things out there that work… if you have the necessary distinctions in your map. And most things that work share the same critical distinctions! I used to believe that my hand-picked set of techniques was special, but now I know that it was always more about the teachability of the techniques I picked, and my insistence on using testing as a path to teaching. If you diligently apply these principles, virtually ANY technique can be made to work. It’s got nothing to do with ME.)
No reason to make his job easier.
No, but personally, mine is definitely sufficiently capable of noticing minor logical flaws to use them to irrationally dismiss uncomfortable arguments. This may be rare, but it happens.
Actually, my point was that I hadn’t made any. Many of the objections that people are making are about things I never actually said.
For example, some people insist on arguing with the ideas that:
teaching ability varies, and
teachers’ beliefs make a difference to the success of their students.
And somehow they’re twisting these very scientifically supported ideas into me stating some sort of fallacy… and conveniently ignoring the part where I said that “If you’re more interested in results than theory, then...”
Of course if you do standardized teaching and standardized testing you’ll get varying results from different people. But if you want to maximize the utility that students will get from their training, you’ll want to vary how you teach them, instead, according to what produces the best result for that individual.
That doesn’t mean that you need to teach them different things, it’s that you’ll need to take a different route to teach them the same thing.
A learning disability is not the same thing as a performance disability, and my essential claim here is that differences in applicability of anti-akrasia and other behavior change techniques are more readily explained as differences in learning ability and predispositions, than in differences in applicability of the specific techniques.
I say this because I used to think that different things worked for different people (after all, so many didn’t work for me!), and then I discovered that the problem is that people (like me) think they’re following steps that they actually aren’t following, and they don’t notice the discrepancy because the discrepancies are “off-map” for them.
That is, their map of the territory doesn’t include one or more of the critical distinctions that make a technique work, like the difference between consciously thinking something, versus observing automatic responses, or the difference between their feelings and their thoughts about their feelings. If you miss one of these distinctions, a technique will fail, but it’s not the technique that’s broken, any more than a bicycle is broken if you haven’t learned to stay on it yet.
People vary in their ability to learn these distinctions; some people get it right away, some need help. Some need lots of help. As I get better at verbalizing and pointing out these distinctions, I get (a little) better at getting people who have difficulties to learn them faster. (And as I got better at grasping the distinctions, I also became able to make more and more things work for me that never worked before.)
The really silly thing about all this is that, from my POV, the people who insist that there is neither any theory nor universally applicable techniques, are basically acting like theists: insisting I treat their irrational and demonstrably-false beliefs as worthy of serious consideration. It reminds me of Perry Marshall arguing that because we don’t know where DNA comes from, we have to “admit” that maybe God did it.
That is, “Some techniques have not worked for me” is taken as evidence supporting a hypothesis of “it’s not me, it’s the techniques”. However, by itself, this is equally valid as supporting evidence for, “the technique is fine, you just didn’t learn how to do it right.” When you add independent evidence that other people claim the same technique didn’t work for them, but then can be taught to make it work for them, then it begins to be more supportive of alternative hypotheses.
And yet, this doesn’t seem to make anybody update. Instead, I am being “irrationally confident” for not giving enough weight to the “it’s not me, it’s the technique” theory… when I have plenty of evidence (personal and customers) that is not at all consistent with that theory, and they only have evidence that is equally applicable to BOTH theories.
Not everyone making that argument is necessarily Brucing, in the sense of directly seeking failure. Some are just mistaken. However, the net effect of the belief is the same: the person stops before they learn, like a kid who’s convinced he or she is just not cut out for bicycle riding.
(P.S. It’s important to understand this is not about me or “my” techniques—most of which I didn’t invent, anyway! As I’ve said several times, there are TONS of things out there that work… if you have the necessary distinctions in your map. And most things that work share the same critical distinctions! I used to believe that my hand-picked set of techniques was special, but now I know that it was always more about the teachability of the techniques I picked, and my insistence on using testing as a path to teaching. If you diligently apply these principles, virtually ANY technique can be made to work. It’s got nothing to do with ME.)