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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one word for this is "yoga"
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hmmmmmmmm can you elaborate on this?
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well should check my ass here but it's something like getting an attractor loop running in your belly/wherever and various forms of subtle communication pulling people into an analogue of it
if you watch Wild Wild Country and squint you can kinda see Osho doing it
GIF
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one thing i've noticed here that seems relevant is that the inventor of a therapy modality seems to be able to run a much stronger loop than their students, and correspondingly seems to affect their clients more strongly and in ways more consistent with the modality
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it frustrates me a little that i haven't seen any commentary about this. but like i've watched a video of richard schwartz doing IFS and it feels really important to me that he sort of... vibe-ly hypnotizes people into believing that IFS works, which makes it work better?
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you could probably do the same thing as a faith healer and make faith healing work, as long as you were working with someone who was already inclined to believe that faith healing works (which is why i believe that faith healing works)
and the faith healing comparison is specifically b/c in this video i have in mind richard schwartz talks to this woman's parts for like 30m or whatever and in the end cures her *chronic back pain*
absolutely nuts
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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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There's actually a Netflix special about Derren Brown imitating faith healing with hypnosis. He's a very good hypnotist and pulls it off well. He has a very flashy dramatic style, but hypnosis is used for things like pain management a lot.
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