one of the ideas that fucks me up the most is the possibility that people who strongly believe some psychological theory will sort of polarize everyone around them into acting in accordance with that theory
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i think this thought first vaguely occurred to me reading this bit from SSC's review of PiHKaL and it's just lived in my head rent-free ever since, accreting a shell around itself made of thoughts about self-fulfilling prophecies, evaporative cooling, etc
slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/11/boo
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also this bit from "different worlds," also by SSC
"This is worrying not just as a psychiatrist, but as someone who wants to know anything about other people at all."
slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/dif
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i suppose insofar as this sort of thing happens the decent thing to do is to err on the side of believing psychological theories that attribute people a lot of agency and fundamental goodness
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coherence therapy calls this "symptom coherence" - taking the stance that every thing you do that drives you nuts makes deep sense once you get the underlying emotional reality that's driving it. it very cleanly articulates something i've been grasping at for years and years
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also relevant to questions like "why is everyone's psych book full of case studies of patients for whom that specific psych method works so perfectly"
presumably there are multiple selection effects going on, and then perhaps more subtle influence stuff?
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hmmmm
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Replying to @QiaochuYuan @chaosprime and @embryosophy
maybe i'm moving towards a pov here where different therapy modalities are a bit less like different theories about some underlying True Psychology and a bit more like different schools of magic
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nice, look at this callback structure
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Replying to @QiaochuYuan
this seems kinda straightforwardly true and is a big part of why you should focus your time and energy on a theory that conjures a world you want to see more of
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It helps to test your theory against sources of evidence that are uncorrelated with the theory itself -- to try to escape self-fulfilling loops
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so *not* clients, aha, yes 😅
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some of these theories are such that you can map whatever happens to them
But I suspect a huge factor is that the way people vibe influences how other people act around them
If you draw people into an emotional outburst that's what you're going to see
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Whereas some people have basically a dampening field on emotion around them
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