Mate selection for the men here

The correlations with independent ratings of attractiveness were still .44 and .39. Compared to .04 and -.06 for intelligence, that still supports the conclusion that "sheer physical attractiveness appears to be the overriding determinant of liking."

They also used various personality measures assessing such things as social skills, maturity, masculinity/femininity, introversion/extroversion and self-acceptance. They found predominantly negative correlations (from -.18 to -.08) and only two comparatively small positive correlations .14 and .03.

Hmm. Yeah, I agree with you. But booze loosens something up for me. It turns something in my social brain on high. This is not the same thing as confidence, so my wording was bad.

To a guy, caring about who you know can sound "elitist", in precisely the same way that guys' concerns about various female characteristics can sound "shallow" and un-PC to women.

Thanks for draping me with stereotypes and assuming the worst, but that wasn't my objection.

Meta-comment unrelated to the substance of this thread: I want to apologize for the above response. I do think your analysis of my perspective is incorrect, but I realized that it's stupidly counterproductive to actively discourage random strangers from taking stabs at my underlying psychology or motivation. I'm usually annoyed by such speculation (not just when it's directed at me) because of its low average accuracy and distracting nature, but the expected utility of just one penetrating insight would easily outweigh the "cost" of ignoring or tersely refuting the inaccurate ones. It's my choice whether or not to "take it personally".

If a company says they prefer job applicants to have references, is that blind prejudice also?

This analogy is based on a reinterpretation of the original statement . Consider instead the trivially false statement: "if you don't have references, you will be a lousy employee".

I think you are confused, especially if you're connecting this to violence.

Which "this"? Your statement seemed to imply that I should "accept as valid" (which I assume means something along the lines of "don't publicly object to") a sentiment or preference with an understandable evolutionary origin. Why not a preference for violence?

Granted, Alicorn's way of expressing this fact was not especially PC from a male perspective.

According to you, her way of expressing this fact was to express a different fact.

To a guy, caring about who you know can sound "elitist", in precisely the same way that guys' concerns about various female characteristics can sound "shallow" and un-PC to women.

Thanks for draping me with stereotypes and assuming the worst, but that wasn't my objection. I was objecting to the elevation of a mere social intuition or preference to the status of a logical truth (note the if-then, case-by-base logical structure of the original context). If Alicorn had said "I think it's creepy when a guy doesn't know any women", I would not have replied.

In the "recent comments" segment of the sidebar, a pound sign appears which doesn't show up in the full comment. Could that be it?

#Testing. This paragraph begins with a pound sign.

#Testing. This paragraph begins with a backslash followed by a pound sign.

So apparently you did do formatting, accidentally. Escape the pound sign with a backslash to rid yourself of the giant bold text.

The reference you recommend seems to advocate changing one's attitude be engaging in a sequence of biases.

It's engaging in System 1 thinking, which of course has a different set of biases than System 2 thinking. The object is to activate the relevant System 1 biases, and then update the information stored there.

one should express their dislike in terms of their pettiest reasons, and identify with that expression.

Absolutely. How else would you expect to reconsolidate the memory trace, without first activating it?

Rather than seeking out one's true objection, ...

You mean your System 2 explanation whose function is to make your System 1 bias appear more righteous or socially acceptable. That "true objection"?

And one should "Simply pick a person or situation and write, using short, simple sentences", discouraging deep explanation, which in turn discourages deep understanding. An important filter is bypassed, allowing the bad reasons to mix with the good.

Precisely. We don't want System 2 to verbally overshadow the irrational basis for your reactions, by filtering them out and replacing them with good-sounding explanations.

The question "What is it that they should or shouldn’t do, be, think, or feel?" in the context of asking one's opinions is a setup to appear to commit the Mind Projection Fallacy.

Actually, it's an attempt to identify what conditioned standard or ideal you believe the person is violating, creating your irrational reaction.

Priming someone to say "X should" when they mean "I want X to" so you can later say "In reality, there is no such thing as a 'should' or a 'shouldn’t.'" is a sneaky debating trick.

Of course it's a debating trick. If fair, logical reasoning worked on System 1, there'd be no need for mindhacking, would there?

Of course one can not absolutely know that it's true, one should not assign probability 1 to anything.

And you are discussing this with System 2 reasoning - i.e., abstract reasoning. When you ask yourself this question about a specific thing, e.g., "can I absolutely know it's true that Tom should listen to me?", it is a request to query System 1 for your implicit epistemology on that particular topic. That is, how would you know if it were true? What if it weren't? How would you know that? In the process, this retrieves relevant memories, making them available for reconsolidation.

You are confusing a concrete system 1 practice with abstract system 2 reasoning. Again, if the two were the same, we would have no need for mindhacking, and the Dark Arts could not exist.

(That being said, I've honestly never found this particular question that useful, compared to questions 1, 3, and 4.)

Does one have a large accumulation of evidence that causes one to have high confidence that it's true? That seems like a more reasonable question

Indeed. However, if you were to translate that to a System 1 question, it'd be more like, "How do I know that it's true?". That is, something closer to a simple query for sensory data, than a question calling for abstract judgment. (I've actually used this question.)

which one of course should apply to one's true objection.

One's "true objection" is of course in most cases an irrational, childish thing. If not, one would likely not be experiencing a problem or feelings that cause you to want to engage in this process in the first place.

Then the question is asked: How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought? which would be fine if it were setting up to ask, "Is that reaction constructive? Are there more constructive ways you could react?". But instead, the follow up is: Who would you be without the thought?

Again, we need to distinguish System 1 and 2 thinking. "Is that reaction constructive?" and "Are there more constructive ways you could react?" are abstract questions that lead to a literal answer of "yes"... not to memory reconsolidation.

"Who would you be without that thought?" is a presuppositional query that invites you to imagine (on a sensory, System 1 level) what you would be like if you didn't believe what you believe. This is a sneaky trick to induce memory reconsolidation, linking an imagined, more positive reaction to the point in your memory where the existing decision path was.

This question, in other words, is a really good mind hack.

Mind hacking questions are not asked to get answers, they are questions with side-effects.

Hm, who would I be if it didn't bother me to have my face burned. Probably the sort of person who doesn't avoid being touch in the face by hot pokers.

You are equating physical and emotional pain; the Work is a process for getting rid of emotional pain created by moral judgments stored in System 1, not logical judgments arrived at by System 2.

And finally, there is the "Turn it around" concept. Now, holding oneself to the same standards one expects of others is good, but a big problem comes from asking one to "find three genuine, specific examples of how the turnaround is true in your life". This is advocating the Confirmation Bias. One is encourage to find supporting evidence for the turn around, but not contradicting evidence.

On the contrary, it is countering confirmation bias. Whatever belief you are modifying has been keeping you from noticing those counterexamples previously. Notice, btw, that Katie advises not doing the turnarounds until after the existing belief has been updated: this is because when you firmly believe something, you react negatively to the suggestion of looking for counterexamples, and tend to assume you've done a good job of looking for them, even though you haven't.

So instead, the first two questions are directed at surfacing your real (sensory, System 1) evidence for the belief, so that you can then update with various specific classes of counterexample. Questions 3 and 4, for example, associate pain to the belief, and pleasure to the condition of being without it, providing a counterexample in that dimension. The turnaround searches provide hypocrisy-puncturing evidence that you are not really acting to the same standards you hold others to, and that your expectations are unrealistic, thus providing another kind of counterexample.

If I have a problem with someone for being a chronic liar, it does not make sense for me to think it is OK because I can recall three time she told the truth, or three times I told a lie.

You will not arrive at useful information about the process by discussing it in the abstract. Pick a specific situation and belief, and actually try it.

What does make sense is to notice her unusually high proportion of lies to honest statements, and to not believe what she tells me without corroboration, and maybe even associate instead with others who reliably give me truthful information.

Sure. And if you can do that without an emotional reaction that clouds your judgment or makes you send off unwanted signals, great! The Work is a process for getting rid of System 1 reactions, not a way of replacing System 2 reasoning.

If this is the sort of mind hack you advocate, it is no wonder that people express skepticism instead of trying it. After all, our sister site is not called "Embracing Bias".

Mind hacking is working on System 1 to obtain behavioral change, not engaging in System 2 reasoning to result in "truth".

That's because, when your System 2 tries to reason about your behavior, it usually verbally overshadows system 2, and ends up confabulating.... which is why pure system 2 reasoning is absolutely atrocious at changing problematic behaviors and emotions.

(Edit to add: Btw, I don't consider The Work to be a particularly good form of mindhacking. IMO, it doesn't emphasize testing enough, doesn't address S1/S2 well, and has a rather idiosyncratic set of questions. I personally use a much wider range of questions and sequences of questions to accomplish different things, and last, but far from least, I don't unquestioningly endorse all of Katie's philosophy. Nonetheless, I recommend the Work to people because, performed properly it works on certain classes of things, and can be a gentle introduction to the subject. Another good book is "Re-Create Your Life" by Morty Lefkoe, which provides a difference evidence-based reconsolidation process, but The Work has the advantage of having a free online introduction.)

Previously in this thread I opined as follows on the state of the art in self help: there are enough gullible prospective clients that it is never in the financial self-interest of any practitioner to do the hard long work to collect evidence that would sway a non-guillible client.

PJ Eby took exception as follows:

you ignored the part where I just gave somebody a pointer to somebody else's work that they could download for free

Lots of people offer pointers to somebody else's writings. Most of those people do not know enough about how to produce lasting useful psychological change to know when a document or an author is actually worth the reader's while. IMHO almost all the writings on the net about producing lasting useful psychological change are not worth the reader's while.

In the future, I will write "lasting change" when I mean "lasting useful psychological change".

you indirectly accused me of being more interested in financial incentives than results

The mere fact that you are human makes it much more probable than not that you are more skilled at self-deception and deception than at perceiving correctly the intrapersonal and interpersonal truths necessary to produce lasting change in another human being. Let us call the probability I just referred to "probability D". (The D stands for deception.)

You have written (in a response to Eliezer) that you usually charge clients a couple of hundred dollars an hour.

The financial success of your self-help practice is not significant evidence that you can produce lasting change in clients because again there is a plentiful supply of gullible self-help clients with money.

The fact that you use hypnotic techniques on clients and write a lot about hypnosis raises probability D significantly because hypnotic techniques rely on the natural human machinery for negotiating who is dominant and who is submissive or the natural human machinery for deciding who will be the leader of the hunting party. Putting the client into a submissive or compliant state of mind probably helps a practitioner quite a bit to persuade the client to believe falsely that lasting change has been produced. You have presented no evidence or argument -- nor am I aware of any evidence or argument -- that putting the client into a submissive or compliant state helps a practitioner producing lasting change. Consequently, your reliance on and interest in hypnotic techniques significantly raises probability D.

Parenthetically, I do not claim that I know for sure that you are producing false beliefs rather than producing lasting change. It is just that you have not raised the probability I assign to your being able to produce lasting change high enough to justify my choosing to chase a pointer you gave into the literature or high enough for me to stop wishing that you would stop writing about how to produce lasting change in another human being on this site.

Parenthetically, I do not claim that your deception, if indeed that is what it is, is conscious or intentional. Most self-help and mental-health practitioners deceive because they are self-deceived on the same point.

You believe and are fond of repeating that a major reason for the failure of some of the techniques you use is a refusal by the client to believe that the technique can work. Exhorting the client to refrain from scepticism or pessimism is like hypnosis in that it strongly tends to put the client in a submissive or compliant state of mind, which again significantly raises probability D.

To the best of my knowledge (maybe you can correct me here) you have never described on this site an instance where you used a reliable means to verify that you had produced a lasting change. When you believe for example that you have produced a lasting improvement in a male client's ability to pick up women in bars, have you ever actually accompanied the client to a bar and observed how long it takes the client to achieve some objectively-valid sign of success (such as getting the woman's phone number or getting the woman to follow the client out to his car)?

In your extensive writings on this site, I can recall no instance where you describe your verifying your impression that you have created a lasting change in a client using reliable means. Rather, you have described only unreliable means, namely, your perceptions of the mental and the social environment and reports from clients about their perceptions of the mental and the social environment. That drastically raises probability D. Of course, you can bring probability D right back down again, and more, by describing instances where you have used reliable means to verify your impression that you have created a lasting change.

For readers who want to read more, here are two of Eliezer's sceptical responses to PJ Eby: 001, 002

If it makes you feel any better, I am not seeing you any more harshly than I see any other self-help, life-coach or mental-health practitioner, including those with PhDs in psychology and MDs in psychiatry and those with prestigious academic appointments. In my book, until I see very strong evidence to the contrary, every mental-health practitioner and self-help practitioner is with high probability deluded except those that constantly remind themselves of how little they know.

Actually there is one way in which I resent you more than I resent other self-help, life-coach or mental-health practitioners: the other ones do not bring their false beliefs or rather their most-probably-false not-sufficiently-verified beliefs to my favorite place to read about the mental environment and the social environment. I worry that your copious writings on this site will discourage contributions from those who have constructed their causal model of mental and social reality more carefully.

Acknowledged. However, I think it's a bad idea to make 'rationalist' mean something other than "one who consistently uses rationality".

I don't like 'locavore'.