[repost from amor et licentia]
The psycho- and social technologies I’m most excited about are usually not the thoroughly evidence-backed ones that my friends encounter in their sessions with licensed therapists. This seems insane to some people, so I want to explain myself.
Let me start with two stories.
- I once knew a person who applied to a special needs school as a provider for horse-assisted therapy. The job interview went great, until she was asked whether she is certified in the leading method of horse therapy. Unfortunately, she had to confess that she could not provide any such certification. Because she had designed the method and the certification process herself.
- Once, I lead a workshop for processing AI x-risk anxiety that was based on the Work That Reconnects and adapted to rationalist culture. A participant asked: "...but is this backed by scientific studies?", to which I responded: "No. Just by 50 years of R&D among a bunch of hippies." The asker stared at me in dismay and disbelief, and I went on with my workshop.
I think it's good when people like my acquaintance’s potential employer or my aspiring rationalist have an appropriate amount of suspicion towards snake oil salespeople like us. Mind that survivorship bias is a thing and most things people try don’t actually work.
At the same time, I think both my acquaintance and I are entirely justified in our unlicensed loiterings. Because believe it or not - any therapeutic intervention that is now standardized and deployed on mass-scale has once not been backed by scientific evidence. And, the innovators who developed them have usually not been certified by the institutions that have been built to protect and preserve their heritage.
Freud was considered a crackpot when he first suggested that actually, how peoples' childhoods play out might have an influence on how they behave and misbehave as adults. When the Stoics laid the foundations of cognitive behavioral therapy, the scientific method wasn't even around. When Carl Rogers developed client-centered therapy, it was considered blasphemous that a psychologist dare do something that borders on psychotherapy, which back then was reserved to medical professionals. When the various schools of humanistic psychology emerged, that might have been impossible without the intellectual influence of outcasts and acidheads like Alan Watts or Aldous Huxley. Similarly, the current mindfulness-based third wave of psychotherapy would be unthinkable if some bums in India several millennia ago hadn’t decided to see what happens when you just sit very, very still for a while. Without any double blind experiments to reassure them while their minds disintegrated and went down all kinds of scary avenues.
In other words: The leading edge of cultural innovation never happens in health insurance-paid sessions with licensed therapists.
My young rationalist may be right to mistrust people like me. Meanwhile, I feel like I’m also right to trust that the past decade of studying human minds theoretically, on the meditation cushion, and in relationships, prepared me for the real world.
And thus, I skip the psychological papers and immerse myself in the healing circles of the world directly. Sometimes that’s just good fun. Sometimes, I find a tool that works so well that it seems worth spreading.
Then, I go forth and teach it to everyone who wants to listen and doesn’t bother asking for my license.
This is an excellent point that I think is under-appreciated, especially by would-be and new rationalists.
It's really tempting to dismiss stuff that looks like it shouldn't work. And to some extent that's fair, but only because most stuff doesn't work, including the stuff that looks like it should work. Things have to be tried, and even then the result of our best attempts at controlled experiments sometimes return inconclusive results. Determining causal relationships is hard, and when you find something that seems to work sometimes you just have to go with it whether it makes sense or not since reality is going to be how it is whether or not it fits within your model.
Meanwhile we've got to get on with the project of living our best lives whether the things we do seem like they should lead to winning. If you want to win, you've got to sometimes be willing to take the status hit, get out there, and do something weird that people will think is nuts to try because it sometimes works. It doesn't mean throwing out everything you know, but it does mean bothering to go live in the real world where things are messy and you can't always figure out what's up.
Time will tell. If you keep doing crazy stuff after it becomes clear it doesn't work, sure, that's a mistake. But it's also a mistake not to check. If you never verified that you don't have psychic powers, can't teleport, that healing crystals don't work, etc. then you're also going to miss out on things like weird therapy modalities that do work for some people for unclear reasons and idiosyncratic dietary changes that dramatically improve your life but would make someone else's life worse.
As you point out, the leading edge is not respectable. Being on the leading edge has costs, but also rewards. It's a test of one's strength of a rationalist to be able to go all in on something that has high EV and low probability to see if it might work. The only real failure is the failure to update once the evidence comes in.