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)
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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
ok phew i got the buddhi yes i take that very seriously as evidence
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ah, ah, when a therapy modality claims "this is a scientific theory about a real objective phenomenon called True Psychology" that is actually how it taps into... the... magical structure of western civilization as a whole?
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yup
in particular how it makes an invocatory claim on the stores of quintessence laid up by the miracles achieved by germ theory
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catholic witch??? that one's new to me, sounds rad!
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1\n What surprised me about psychology was it's lack of focus on neural networks. It's not a holy grail, but it's a lens that accommodates the fuzzy and counterintuitive results from the psych world while also fitting nicely with sociology.
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2\ And rather than giving all the answers, it's a lens that shows that hard lines are not wise to draw when it comes to the shifting nature of minds over a life, their experiences over generations, and the theories developed about them in any one zeitgeist from any one pov.
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