Most personal development is notoriously unreliable.

Mark Manson, a popular personal development author, is making an effort to make his advice more scientific. To this end, he has started labelling his blog posts based on their evidence base. He writes that he has: "put together a team of Psychologists with MSc’s and PhD’s to help me research, outline and fact-check the content here on the site". He divides his blog posts into four categories:

  • Evidence-based: for posts that recommend actions based on academic research, where it has been checked that studies have replicated and have decent sample sizes, ect.
  • Fact-checked: for posts that have been fact checked and are descriptive (he only uses evidence-based to describe posts that recommend actions)
  • Theory: Rooted in academic theories that might be highly theoretical or not yet confirmed
  • Opinion: Articles based purely off his own personal opinion

Anyway, just thought that I'd mention this here, because it's great to see an example of a popular author shifting more this direction and adopting their own (less nerdy) version of epistemic statuses.

New Comment
3 comments, sorted by Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 1:07 AM

It's worth noting that Mark Manson is influencial for what other bloggers in the personal development field do (the German bloggers I know personally consider him a good role model). 

Here's a link to Manson's announcement. Always good to see more people trying to swim up toward the sanity waterline.

Yep, I saw that pretty recently. I love Mark Manson's work, and I'm not surprised he's trying to improve the quality of information on the internet. I also recommend his newsletter, which contains some great writing and ideas too.