At the brain hardware level, human beings are just not that different from one another. We differ more at the software, filtering, and meta-cognitive levels, which is where the details of communication and teaching trip up the transfer of effective techniques.
That claim does not match the evidence that I have encountered. Consider, for example, responsiveness to hypnosis. Hypnotic responsiveness as can be measured by the stanford test is found to differ more between fraternal twins raised together than between identical twins raised apart. It also seems to be related to the size of the rostrum region of the corpus callosum.
I agree that people tend to overestimate their own uniqueness and I know this is something that I do myself. Nevertheless, there is clearly one element of human behavior and motivation that is attributable directly to the brain hardware level and I suggest that there are many more.
Hypnotic responsiveness as can be measured by the stanford test
If you mean the Hilgard scale, ask a few professional hypnotists how useful it actually is. Properly-trained hypnotists don’t use a tape-recorded monotone with identical words for every person; they adjust their pace, tone, and verbiage based on observing a person’s response in progress, to maximize the response. So unless th Stanford test is something like timing how long a master hypnotist takes to produce some specified hypnotic phenomena, it’s probably not very useful.
Professional hypnotists also know that responsiveness is a learned process (see also the concept of “fractionation”), which means it’s probably a mistake to treat it as an intrinsic variable for measuring purposes, unless you have a way to control for the amount of learning someone has done.
So, as far as this particular variable is concerned, you’re observing the wrong evidence.
Personal development is an area where science routinely barks up the wrong tree, because there’s a difference between “objective” measurement and maximizing utility. Even if it’s a fact that people differ, operating as if that fact were true leads to less utility for everyone who doesn’t already believe they’re great at something.
If you mean the Hilgard scale, ask a few professional hypnotists how useful it actually is.
I mean the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scales, the most useful being SHSS:C. Hilgard played his cards poorly and somehow failed to have the scale named after himself. I am more interested in the findings of researchers who study the clinical work of professional hypnotists than I am in the opinions of the hypnotists themselves. Like most commonly used psychological metrics, the SHSS:C is far from perfect. Nevertheless, it does manage to correlate strongly with the success of clinical outcomes, which is the best I can expect of it.
Professional hypnotists also know that responsiveness is a learned process (see also the concept of “fractionation”), which means it’s probably a mistake to treat it as an intrinsic variable for measuring purposes, unless you have a way to control for the amount of learning someone has done.
Professional scientists studying hypnosis observe that specific training can alter the hypnotic responsiveness from low to high in as much as 50% of cases. Many have expressed surprise at just how stable the baseline is over time and observe that subjects trained to respond to hypnosis revert to the baseline over time. Nevertheless, such reversion takes time and Gosgard found (in 2004) that a training effect can remain for as much as four months.
So, as far as this particular variable is concerned, you’re observing the wrong evidence.
When I began researching hypnosis I was forced to subordinate my preferred belief to what the evidence suggests. When it comes to most aspects of personality and personal psychological profile I much prefer to believe in the power of ‘nurture’ and my ability to mould my own personality profile to my desires with training. I have become convinced over time that there is a far greater heritability component than I would have liked. On the positive side, the importance of ‘natural talent’ in aquiring expert skills is one area where the genetic component tends to be overestimated most of the time. When it comes to aquiring specialised skills, consistent effortful practice makes all the difference and natural talent is almost irrelevant.
Personal development is an area where science routinely barks up the wrong tree, because there’s a difference between “objective” measurement and maximizing utility. Even if it’s a fact that people differ, operating as if that fact were true leads to less utility for everyone who doesn’t already believe they’re great at something.
There is certainly something to that! I do see the merit in ‘operating as if [something that may not necessarily be our best prediction of reality]’. It would be great if there were greater scientific efforts in investigating the most effective personal development strategies.
Professional scientists studying hypnosis observe that specific training can alter the hypnotic responsiveness from low to high in as much as 50% of cases.
Indeed. What’s particularly important if you’re after results, rather than theories, is that just because those other 50% didn’t go from low to high, doesn’t mean that there wasn’t some different form, approach, environment, or method of training that wouldn’t have produced the same result!
IOW, if the training they tested was 100% identical for each person, then the odds that the other 50% were still trainable is extremely high.
(And since most generative (as opposed to therapeutic) self-help techniques implicitly rely on the same brain functions that are used in hypnosis (monoidealistic imagination and ideomotor or ideosensory responses), this means that the same things can be made to work for everyone, provided you can train the basic skill.)
I have become convinced over time that there is a far greater heritability component than I would have liked.
Robert Fritz once wrote something about how if you’re 5′3″ you’re not going to be able to win the NBA dunking contest… and then somebody did just that. It ain’t what you’ve got, it’s what you do with what you have got.
(Disclaimer: I don’t remember the winner’s name or even if 5′3″ was the actual height.)
It’s also rare that any quality we’re born with is all bad or all good; what gives with one hand takes away with the other, and vice versa. The catch is to find the way that works for you.
Some of my students work better with images, some with sounds, others still with feelings. Some have to write things down, I like to talk things out. These are all really superficial differences, because the steps in the processes are still basically the same. Also, even though my wife is more “auditory” than I am, and doesn’t visualize as well consciously… that doesn’t mean she can’t. (Over the last few years, she’s gradually gotten better at doing processes that involve more visual elements.)
(Also, we’ve actually tried swapping around our usual modes of cognition for a day or two, which was interesting. When she took on my processing stack, we got along better, but when I took on hers, I was really stressed and depressed… but I had a lot more sympathy for some of her moods after that!)
On the positive side, the importance of ‘natural talent’ in aquiring expert skills is one area where the genetic component tends to be overestimated most of the time. When it comes to aquiring specialised skills, consistent effortful practice makes all the difference and natural talent is almost irrelevant.
Absolutely! Dweck’s fixed and growth mindsets are absolutely central to my work. I used to call them “naturally struggling” and “naturally successful”—well, I still do for marketing reasons. But Dweck showed with brilliant clarity where the mindsets come from: struggle results from believing that your ability in any area is a fixed quantity, rather than a variable one under your personal control.
If somebody wants a scientifically validated reason to believe what I’m saying in this thread, they need look no further than Dweck’s mindsets research. It offers compelling scientific verification of the idea that thinking your ability is fixed really IS “dumbass loser” thinking!
Indeed. What’s particularly important if you’re after results, rather than theories, is that just because those other 50% didn’t go from low to high, doesn’t mean that there wasn’t some different form, approach, environment, or method of training that wouldn’t have produced the same result!
Um… PJ, this is just what psychoanalysts said… and kept on saying after around a thousand studies showed that psychoanalysis had no effect statistically distinguishable from just talking to a random intelligent caring listener.
You need to read more basic rationality material, along the lines of Robyn Dawes’s “Rational Choice in an Uncertain World”. There you will find the records of many who engaged in this classic error mode and embarrassed themselves accordingly. You do not get to just flush controlled experiments down the toilet by hoping, without actually pointing to any countering studies, that someone could have done something differently that would have produced the effect you want the study to produce but that it didn’t produce.
You know how there are a lot of self-indulgent bad habits you train your clients to get rid of? This is the sort of thing that master rationalists like Robyn Dawes train people to stop doing. And you are missing a lot of the basic training here, which is why, as I keep saying, it is such a tragedy that you only began to study rationality after already forming your theories of akrasia. So either you’ll read more books on rationality and learn those basics and rethink those theories, or you’ll stay stuck.
Um… PJ, this is just what psychoanalysts said… and kept on saying after around a thousand studies showed that psychoanalysis had no effect statistically distinguishable from just talking to a random intelligent caring listener.
Rounding to the nearest cliche. I didn’t say my methods would help those other people, or that some ONE method would. I said that given a person Y there would be SOME method X. This is not at all the same thing as what you’re talking about.
You do not get to just flush controlled experiments down the toilet by hoping, without actually pointing to any countering studies, that someone could have done something differently that would have produced the effect you want the study to produce but that it didn’t produce.
What I’ve said is that if you have a standard training method that moves 50% of people from low to high on some criterion, there is an extremely high probability that the other 50% needed something different in their training. I’m puzzled how that is even remotely a controversial statement.
What I’ve said is that if you have a standard training method that moves 50% of people from low to high on some criterion, there is an extremely high probability that the other 50% needed something different in their training. I’m puzzled how that is even remotely a controversial statement.
You ever heard of something called the Pygmalion effect? Did the study control for it?
By which I mean, did they control for the beliefs of the teachers who were training these subjects, in reference to:
the trainability and potential of the subjects themselves, and
the teachability of the subject matter itself?
For example, did they tell the teacher they had a bunch of students with superb hypnotic potential who just needed some encouragement to get going, or did they tell them they were conducting a test, to see who was trainable, or if it was possible to train hypnotic ability at all?
These things make a HUGE difference to whether people actually learn.
Absolutely! Dweck’s fixed and growth mindsets are absolutely central to my work. I used to call them “naturally struggling” and “naturally successful”—well, I still do for marketing reasons. But Dweck showed with brilliant clarity where the mindsets come from: struggle results from believing that your ability in any area is a fixed quantity, rather than a variable one under your personal control.
This is one area where rational thinking is of real benefit. Because not only is a ‘growth mindset’ more effective than a ‘fixed mindset’ when it comes to learning skills it is also simply far more accurate.
While I was devouring the various therios and findings compiled in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance I kept running across one common observation. There is, it seems one predictor of expert performance in a field that has a significant heritable component. It isn’t height or IQ. Although those two are highly heritible they aren’t all that great at predicting successful acheivement of elite performance. As best as the researchers could desipher, the heritable component of success is more or less the ability to motivate oneself to deliberately practice for four hours seven days a week for about ten years.
Now, I would be surprised to see you concede the heritability of motivation and I definitely suggest it is an area in which to apply Dweck’s growth mindset at full force! You also have a whole bag of tricks and techniques that can be used to enhance just the sort of motivation required. But I wonder, have you observed that there are some people who naturally tend to be more interested in getting involved actively in personal development efforts of the kind you support? Completely aside from whether they believe in the potential usefulness, there would seem to be many who are simply less likely to care enough to take extreme personal development seriously.
But I wonder, have you observed that there are some people who naturally tend to be more interested in getting involved actively in personal development efforts of the kind you support?
Yes and no. What I’ve observed is that most everybody wants something out of life, and if they’re not getting it, then sooner or later their path leads to them trying to develop themselves, or causing themselves to accidentally get some personal development as a side effect of whatever their real goal is.
The people who set out for personal development for its own sake—whether because they think being better is awesome or because they hate who they currently are—are indeed a minority.
A not-insignificant-subset of my clientele are entrepreneurs and creative types who come to me because they’re putting off starting their business, writing their book, or doing some other important-to-them project. And a significant number of them cease to be my customers the moment they’ve got the immediate problem taken care of.
So, it’s not that people aren’t generally motivated to improve themselves, so much as they’re not motivated to make general improvements; they are after specific improvements that are often highly context-specific.
If somebody wants a scientifically validated reason to believe what I’m saying in this thread, they need look no further than Dweck’s mindsets research. It offers compelling scientific verification of the idea that thinking your ability is fixed really IS “dumbass loser” thinking!
I would like to affirm the distinction between the overall mindset you wish to encourage and the specific claims that you use while doing so. For example I agree with your claims in this (immediate parent) post and also your the gist of your personal development philosophy while I reject the previous assertion that differences between individuals are predominantly software rather than hardware.
(And yes, 50% was presented as a significant finding in favour of training from the baseline.)
I reject the previous assertion that differences between individuals are predominantly software rather than hardware.
I think we may agree more than you think. I agree that individuals are different in terms of whatever dial settings they may have when they show up at my door. I disagree that those initial dial settings are welded in place and not changeable.
“Hardware” and “software” are squishy terms when it comes to brains that can not only learn, but literally grow. And ISTM that most homeostatic systems in the body can be trained to have a different “setting” than they come from the factory with.
That claim does not match the evidence that I have encountered. Consider, for example, responsiveness to hypnosis. Hypnotic responsiveness as can be measured by the stanford test is found to differ more between fraternal twins raised together than between identical twins raised apart. It also seems to be related to the size of the rostrum region of the corpus callosum.
I agree that people tend to overestimate their own uniqueness and I know this is something that I do myself. Nevertheless, there is clearly one element of human behavior and motivation that is attributable directly to the brain hardware level and I suggest that there are many more.
If you mean the Hilgard scale, ask a few professional hypnotists how useful it actually is. Properly-trained hypnotists don’t use a tape-recorded monotone with identical words for every person; they adjust their pace, tone, and verbiage based on observing a person’s response in progress, to maximize the response. So unless th Stanford test is something like timing how long a master hypnotist takes to produce some specified hypnotic phenomena, it’s probably not very useful.
Professional hypnotists also know that responsiveness is a learned process (see also the concept of “fractionation”), which means it’s probably a mistake to treat it as an intrinsic variable for measuring purposes, unless you have a way to control for the amount of learning someone has done.
So, as far as this particular variable is concerned, you’re observing the wrong evidence.
Personal development is an area where science routinely barks up the wrong tree, because there’s a difference between “objective” measurement and maximizing utility. Even if it’s a fact that people differ, operating as if that fact were true leads to less utility for everyone who doesn’t already believe they’re great at something.
I mean the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scales, the most useful being SHSS:C. Hilgard played his cards poorly and somehow failed to have the scale named after himself. I am more interested in the findings of researchers who study the clinical work of professional hypnotists than I am in the opinions of the hypnotists themselves. Like most commonly used psychological metrics, the SHSS:C is far from perfect. Nevertheless, it does manage to correlate strongly with the success of clinical outcomes, which is the best I can expect of it.
Professional scientists studying hypnosis observe that specific training can alter the hypnotic responsiveness from low to high in as much as 50% of cases. Many have expressed surprise at just how stable the baseline is over time and observe that subjects trained to respond to hypnosis revert to the baseline over time. Nevertheless, such reversion takes time and Gosgard found (in 2004) that a training effect can remain for as much as four months.
When I began researching hypnosis I was forced to subordinate my preferred belief to what the evidence suggests. When it comes to most aspects of personality and personal psychological profile I much prefer to believe in the power of ‘nurture’ and my ability to mould my own personality profile to my desires with training. I have become convinced over time that there is a far greater heritability component than I would have liked. On the positive side, the importance of ‘natural talent’ in aquiring expert skills is one area where the genetic component tends to be overestimated most of the time. When it comes to aquiring specialised skills, consistent effortful practice makes all the difference and natural talent is almost irrelevant.
There is certainly something to that! I do see the merit in ‘operating as if [something that may not necessarily be our best prediction of reality]’. It would be great if there were greater scientific efforts in investigating the most effective personal development strategies.
Indeed. What’s particularly important if you’re after results, rather than theories, is that just because those other 50% didn’t go from low to high, doesn’t mean that there wasn’t some different form, approach, environment, or method of training that wouldn’t have produced the same result!
IOW, if the training they tested was 100% identical for each person, then the odds that the other 50% were still trainable is extremely high.
(And since most generative (as opposed to therapeutic) self-help techniques implicitly rely on the same brain functions that are used in hypnosis (monoidealistic imagination and ideomotor or ideosensory responses), this means that the same things can be made to work for everyone, provided you can train the basic skill.)
Robert Fritz once wrote something about how if you’re 5′3″ you’re not going to be able to win the NBA dunking contest… and then somebody did just that. It ain’t what you’ve got, it’s what you do with what you have got.
(Disclaimer: I don’t remember the winner’s name or even if 5′3″ was the actual height.)
It’s also rare that any quality we’re born with is all bad or all good; what gives with one hand takes away with the other, and vice versa. The catch is to find the way that works for you.
Some of my students work better with images, some with sounds, others still with feelings. Some have to write things down, I like to talk things out. These are all really superficial differences, because the steps in the processes are still basically the same. Also, even though my wife is more “auditory” than I am, and doesn’t visualize as well consciously… that doesn’t mean she can’t. (Over the last few years, she’s gradually gotten better at doing processes that involve more visual elements.)
(Also, we’ve actually tried swapping around our usual modes of cognition for a day or two, which was interesting. When she took on my processing stack, we got along better, but when I took on hers, I was really stressed and depressed… but I had a lot more sympathy for some of her moods after that!)
Absolutely! Dweck’s fixed and growth mindsets are absolutely central to my work. I used to call them “naturally struggling” and “naturally successful”—well, I still do for marketing reasons. But Dweck showed with brilliant clarity where the mindsets come from: struggle results from believing that your ability in any area is a fixed quantity, rather than a variable one under your personal control.
If somebody wants a scientifically validated reason to believe what I’m saying in this thread, they need look no further than Dweck’s mindsets research. It offers compelling scientific verification of the idea that thinking your ability is fixed really IS “dumbass loser” thinking!
Um… PJ, this is just what psychoanalysts said… and kept on saying after around a thousand studies showed that psychoanalysis had no effect statistically distinguishable from just talking to a random intelligent caring listener.
You need to read more basic rationality material, along the lines of Robyn Dawes’s “Rational Choice in an Uncertain World”. There you will find the records of many who engaged in this classic error mode and embarrassed themselves accordingly. You do not get to just flush controlled experiments down the toilet by hoping, without actually pointing to any countering studies, that someone could have done something differently that would have produced the effect you want the study to produce but that it didn’t produce.
You know how there are a lot of self-indulgent bad habits you train your clients to get rid of? This is the sort of thing that master rationalists like Robyn Dawes train people to stop doing. And you are missing a lot of the basic training here, which is why, as I keep saying, it is such a tragedy that you only began to study rationality after already forming your theories of akrasia. So either you’ll read more books on rationality and learn those basics and rethink those theories, or you’ll stay stuck.
Rounding to the nearest cliche. I didn’t say my methods would help those other people, or that some ONE method would. I said that given a person Y there would be SOME method X. This is not at all the same thing as what you’re talking about.
What I’ve said is that if you have a standard training method that moves 50% of people from low to high on some criterion, there is an extremely high probability that the other 50% needed something different in their training. I’m puzzled how that is even remotely a controversial statement.
It is a conclusion that just doesn’t follow.
You ever heard of something called the Pygmalion effect? Did the study control for it?
By which I mean, did they control for the beliefs of the teachers who were training these subjects, in reference to:
the trainability and potential of the subjects themselves, and
the teachability of the subject matter itself?
For example, did they tell the teacher they had a bunch of students with superb hypnotic potential who just needed some encouragement to get going, or did they tell them they were conducting a test, to see who was trainable, or if it was possible to train hypnotic ability at all?
These things make a HUGE difference to whether people actually learn.
This is one area where rational thinking is of real benefit. Because not only is a ‘growth mindset’ more effective than a ‘fixed mindset’ when it comes to learning skills it is also simply far more accurate.
While I was devouring the various therios and findings compiled in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance I kept running across one common observation. There is, it seems one predictor of expert performance in a field that has a significant heritable component. It isn’t height or IQ. Although those two are highly heritible they aren’t all that great at predicting successful acheivement of elite performance. As best as the researchers could desipher, the heritable component of success is more or less the ability to motivate oneself to deliberately practice for four hours seven days a week for about ten years.
Now, I would be surprised to see you concede the heritability of motivation and I definitely suggest it is an area in which to apply Dweck’s growth mindset at full force! You also have a whole bag of tricks and techniques that can be used to enhance just the sort of motivation required. But I wonder, have you observed that there are some people who naturally tend to be more interested in getting involved actively in personal development efforts of the kind you support? Completely aside from whether they believe in the potential usefulness, there would seem to be many who are simply less likely to care enough to take extreme personal development seriously.
Yes and no. What I’ve observed is that most everybody wants something out of life, and if they’re not getting it, then sooner or later their path leads to them trying to develop themselves, or causing themselves to accidentally get some personal development as a side effect of whatever their real goal is.
The people who set out for personal development for its own sake—whether because they think being better is awesome or because they hate who they currently are—are indeed a minority.
A not-insignificant-subset of my clientele are entrepreneurs and creative types who come to me because they’re putting off starting their business, writing their book, or doing some other important-to-them project. And a significant number of them cease to be my customers the moment they’ve got the immediate problem taken care of.
So, it’s not that people aren’t generally motivated to improve themselves, so much as they’re not motivated to make general improvements; they are after specific improvements that are often highly context-specific.
I would like to affirm the distinction between the overall mindset you wish to encourage and the specific claims that you use while doing so. For example I agree with your claims in this (immediate parent) post and also your the gist of your personal development philosophy while I reject the previous assertion that differences between individuals are predominantly software rather than hardware.
(And yes, 50% was presented as a significant finding in favour of training from the baseline.)
I think we may agree more than you think. I agree that individuals are different in terms of whatever dial settings they may have when they show up at my door. I disagree that those initial dial settings are welded in place and not changeable.
“Hardware” and “software” are squishy terms when it comes to brains that can not only learn, but literally grow. And ISTM that most homeostatic systems in the body can be trained to have a different “setting” than they come from the factory with.