We've been looking at the payments infrastructure in New Zealand recently and have discovered that, unless you find whoever wrote something 30 years ago, most of the senior payments people have limited and ofter contradictory understanding of the capabilities of the underlying systems.
Definately the US banking systems also still have the feeling that there's been an accretion of layers of technology over ancient systems. APIs that look like XML files wrapping fixed-field-length VAX-style data. It made me wonder - are there still mainframes under there? Or mainframe software being run in emulation? Or are the systems just patchworks maintaining the 1970s interchange formats because no one can stand to making breaking changes?
In general international agreements don't override national law, they just oblige the countries in question to pass laws that bring them in line with the agreement. Which they commonly fail to do in all sorts of interesting ways. Part of the mechanism in the New Zealand case has been closer to redefining what software is rather than what patents are.
For New Zealand to add software patents back in would require back tracking and quite a loss of political capital.
I suspect what's happening with all the people who this works for is that given there are some people who have a psychological component to their pain and some who have a mostly physical component.
Even if there are far fewer suffering from the psychological version, they are the ones who physical treatment will fail for. So they will be the ones that get as far as trying the pseudosciencey approach to dealing with the pain. So the mind body approach will have a high success rate amongst the people trying it even if it would be a terrible initial remedy to try.
I am amazed at the shallow thinking of many in this thread who dismiss the story as "quackery".
I'd encourage anyone who speaks of a "pseudosciencey approach" to do some careful thinking and propose an approach that would let us measure the effects our minds have on our bodies. So far most people sweep this effect under the rug calling it the "placebo effect" (a catch-all phrase for everything we do not understand). That's not an answer.
Notice: we live in the XXI century, and yet we treat our bodies as though our heads were detached and completely independent. Medicine as we know it is based on pills, syringes, vials and knives. Anything else is the "placebo effect" or in the (decidedly non-scientific) domain of psychologists and psychiatrists. I'd call that hiding our head in the sand (double-entendre intended).
We do all this while readily accepting that we can sweat, or get diarrhea from nervousness. If people accept that the mind can (subconsciously) control sweating, why can't they accept that it can (subconsciously) control the narrowing of blood vessels?
Most people dismiss psychosomatic effects without understanding what they are. Psychosomatic pain isn't any less real. The physical changes are there, they just might not be exactly the changes you are looking for (e.g. no inflammation). And they are caused by the mind, which is why we call them "psychosomatic". But they are not hallucinations, or misfiring neurons in your nervous system.
I am all for scientific approach to medicine. But that includes not shutting your eyes to an entire huge branch of it that we simply do not understand — the connection between the mind and the body.
Also, many people don't understand the mechanism behind all this. It's not that Sarno is a magic-voodoo healer. All he does is show you the mechanism — which is very often enough: the mind, once exposed to its own tricks, starts working differently. This is why just reading his books and thinking about them causes changes in so many people (either the pain is gone, or the symptoms shift and change).
Source: myself. I got rid of joint pain after 8 years of fruitless doctor visits. It is now almost completely under control: if it happens, I can tell why it happened and control it. As a bonus, it turned out that my frequent throat infections and the allergies are gone, too.
Don't dismiss psychosomatic effects. Sure, go see a doctor first, but if multiple doctors are unable to find a cause of your pain, at least read one of Sarno's books and think (critically!) about it.
This is really the kind of thing where A/B testing is both necessary and straightforward. Decently intuitive arguments can be made for both sides and there isn't really overwhelming strength on either of them.
What, pray tell, is the hypothesis to be tested? Whether "my" or "your" results in more clicks? How do we know they aren't clicks borne of confusion? Whether "my" or "your" users visit the site more often? Over what time frame? A day? A week? A year? A decade?
A/B testing isn't magic fairy dust that settles design questions. You need to have a clear hypothesis to test. It's especially difficult if the design question concerns long-term perceptions and psychology. An A/B test in this situation is anything but straightforward.
I'd be interested to learn about how this design decision was made in the companies that have had to face it.
It seems like this would also change per application, in which case A/B testing could really help you understand how users are thinking about and interacting with your program / tool / application. I think both of the paradigms that Dustin brings up in his article are good and there are applications I use that fall into both camps. Just as an example, SimpleDNS is a tool where I work on my stuff. Facebook is a social network where I got to interact with lots of stuff and the Your feels more appropriate there*
* Interestingly enough, it seems like most of the major platforms have moved away from using either "my" or "your" altogether, eg Facebook and Twitter both just have Friends, Followers, Tweets, Photos, etc.
This is the point where it's worth pointing out that the portion of the population involved in food production has collapsed massively over the last couple of centuries. People generally seem to find new things to value when their time frees up.
Philosophy of Science is an extremely broad field. And like any academic field it's easy enough to find crazy stuff at the edges.
I do think far more scientists would benefit from a bit more of a look at some of the more established philosophers of the last century. It seems that most gained some knowledge of Popper but nowhere near enough people are really familiar with Kuhn's work(http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/). Taking the time to think critically about what you're doing and what it would really take to change your views is critical to actually being open to broad possibilities.
I do think there's a bit of a glass-house problem: finding scientists doing not-great philosophy is not hard. (It's perfectly fine, of course, for one to be ignorant of the other if they aren't trying to do the other one; nobody can do everything.)
Theoretical physicists are particularly prone to lapsing, in later career, into armchair philosophy without bothering to actually read anything in philosophy of the past 100 years. That tends, unfortunately, to result in them producing philosophy that has flashes of insight mixed with stuff that could be a lot better if only they had read some of the existing literature, and addressed the obvious problems with some of the standard positions (which too often they reinvent).
Of course, philosophers could understand more science too, but I actually think there is more effort being made in that direction: philosophy of science programs are increasingly requiring substantial amounts of technical coursework, and it's a huge plus, for advancement, if you publish at least a few articles in technical journals, too. But in the other direction, there might actually be less philosophy instruction in science programs than there was 100 years ago now (surface-level understandings of Popperian falsificationism seem to be about as far as anyone gets, including my own formal education it must be said). This seems like a recent affliction, too: the early-20th-c scientists (Einstein, Bohr, etc.) were actually quite well-read in the relevant parts of philosophy. Heck, folks like Alan Turing published in peer-reviewed philosophy journals.
Poor Economics - Changed my views on some areas of how to combat poverty and poor education. As well as relating a huge amount a detail regarding the unexpected ways people with different backgrounds behave.
There is an interesting issue in the philosophy of science regarding the "hard center" of theories. Basically any prediction about a reasonably complicated situation will rely on a large number of premises.
If you happen to be committed to one premise more than the others, you will always blame one of the other premises when an observation doesn't fit your hypothesis.
In the case of sexism there are so many confounding factors that you'll never be able to say with certainty that sexism is the root cause, only that there is a good chance that it is.
If there is a good chance that something bad is happening then it seems like you could reasonably be expected to produce a non-zero amount of effort in avoiding it.
It seems to me that people that don't read self-help books lump a lot more books into the genre and that causes them to miss a number of books they should read.
Earlier this year I recommended Bargaining for Advantage to someone and they responded that they don't really read self-help books. There are a number of books like this that deal with particular topics inside of the broader self-help genre, many of them going to a much more useful level of depth.
In bookstores I regularly find very good books on particular areas of business mixed in with self-help in the more populist style.
Reading a number of these expert titles is very valuable. From the popular group often only one book is enough to cover the common sense side of things, for instance I recommend that all my friends read "how to Win friends and influence people".
People who don't want to read self-help books boggle my mind.
Self-help to me means seeing life as an MMORPG with infinite possibility: levelling up your player character, meeting cool guild mates, acquiring lots of loot, exploring new areas, etc. Who the hell doesn't want that?
Then again, most people probably think of the most egregious examples of cheesy New Age stuff when they think about self-help. What I advocate is more like "muscular self-help", ie everything that levels up life and leads to more winning! (heh). I will read anything that gives me a shot at that.
The point is: would you rather spend your time playing the game, or reading someone's stab in the dark on the mechanics of the game based on his/her personal experience and questionable expertise?
I can find out a lot of stuff on my own, but it never helps to read what someone else has figured out.
Analogy: I can figure out design patterns of programming on my own, but I can speed up the process if I read a book on it. Same with design patterns for happiness and success.
There are lots of things I consider possibilities now that were not even on my map before I read self-help books.
Personally, I agree (although I haven't actually read any books yet, but I'm interested). But I would much rather spend 100% of my time playing the game and 0% learning mechanics than I would spend 50% of my time playing and 50% learning mechanics. I imagine the anti-self-help attitude comes from looking at the 50/50 (or more extreme) people.
Isn't that what most people do, though? And most people are not living the optimal version of their lives, or anywhere close (optimal being defined as the life one wishes one had).
Before I started reading self-help materials, I was intellectually gifted but I was a mess in terms of communication with others, emotional stability, self-limiting beliefs, knowledge of possibilities in life, luminosity aka self-insight, strategicness aka getting shit done with a plan, etc.
Studying self-help materials for the past 5 years is the most important thing I've done in my life (a quite dramatic statement perhaps, but that's how it feels to me).
That's why I get a bit upset and argumentative when people slam self-help: it's a bit like saying I shouldn't have wasted my time reading all those things, and instead should have just plodded on in darkness.
My guess about the people who don't want to read self-help books would be this - they read a few, the ones that they read, turn out to be useless (they pick the wrong ones). so they pretty much give up the entire genre. Trust me, for every good self-help book out there, there are dozens of insanely useless ones - it is not easy to pick the good ones on one's own. self-help books are a big industry - even those who never read anything in their life, would give a few minutes of their attention to self-help books, because ultimately, everyone wants to become better at something
I just wish there were some good ways to quickly separate junk from good books.
I think most peoples' distaste with the self-help genre is that the books often feel more like a distraction or a tease than a source of change and improvement. People read the books and start to feel productive and like the solution to their problems is within their grasp. Then when the book is finished, almost no change in behavior or thinking result and you quickly lose the "high" you had while consuming the book.
Psychological and behavioral problems are highly individualistic and can be quite complex. Say you have a problem with procrastination. Maybe you have ADD? Maybe you are depressed? Maybe you are tired? Maybe you are afraid of failure? Maybe you hate your work? Maybe your mind is focused on other problems you need to address? Maybe your work is too difficult? Etc. We could go on listing hundreds of possible causes. Well, using a tomato timer or implementing GTD isn't going to fix any of those problems.
I think that the few well written and researched self-help books that are out there can give people useful strategies if they already have their shit together, but for most people they end up as a dud. That is if these people even finish the books to begin with.
I see what you're saying so maybe we should clarify things because there are essentially two types of self help out there from what I see.
The first kind is the in-your-face, "this book will change your life and teach you to be happy", it comes with a charming spokesman too, type of self help. This kind is often cheesy, not scientific, and is often more likely to be eventually seen as a disingenuous money making scam later on.
The second type is self-help that isn't marketed as self help. It's essentially a book on how to master a subject or art form. A book on Buddhism and Buddhist practices would qualify. Books on how to meditate fall into this too. They're teaching how to do something and they may talk about the positive effects they have but they're not the kind of things that we normally think of as lame self help.
Now that I'm thinking along these lines I think theres a third type. This type falls in between. You can spot it by its firm basis in scientific research. It's the kind of thing backed by science and it explains the subject by telling you about the research but at the same time also telling you how to specifically apply the research to help you improve some aspect of your life. The book "Feeling Good" co,es to mind in this category. The author studied the subject of depression and then takes the findings and applies them to helping people with depression. It's a book widely held to be actually useful the majority of the time. It's not a "hey, I'll teach you to be happy" book nor is it just a narrative explaining experiments and the results.
I think what I'm talking about speaks directly to your point about people that lump the books into one genre. So when we talk about self help most immediately think of the cheesy kind. If we broadened out definition of self help to include types 2 and 3 that I mentioned then maybe people wouldn't feel such disdain for the genre and be more apt to read more helpful books. It's a shame that often times the wrong people get into writing self help and spoil the genre for everyone.
