Self-help

Last substantive revision: 2015-12-09

Just some notes and reflections on what might generally be referred to as “self-help”.

The trap that most self-help falls into is that when somebody identifies the last critical node to change in their own process, they go straight to the man-with-hammer mode, propounding that one change as the Most Important Thing, when in fact it might merely be the first step for someone who still has problems at other nodes in the process.

I also like this comment by gwern on the Wait But Why piece on Elon Musk:

The whole thing reads like a fairly standard (but very disorganized) self-help tract trying to exhort people into being more agenty and strategic. Some of it maps directly onto LW self-help posts, even, like ‘people are not automatically strategic’ and existing techniques like COZE.

Since, for better or worse, most self-help material doesn’t wind up helping or harming even when someone actually tries to use them, I don’t think that this particular self-help tract will be any different - anyone trying to use the ideas and aspire to be a chef rather than a cook will wind up probably in the same place as they would before. People aren’t going to either become billionaires or homeless just because they read something online; if writing could reliably have that sort of impact, we would live in a very different and much more interesting world than we do…

I agree with OP that most people do have sub-optimal levels of agentiness and planning and have really wacky evaluations of risk (consider anything to do with children, or terrorism), so if it did do anything, it would probably be helpful on net.

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