11–20 of 323 posts
I think the invitation to subscribe to the author's newsletter at the bottom of the page is ironic. Love the label "insight-porn" though. Concisely captures the nauseous feeling of ingesting your 100th self help book.
I mean people have been living on this planet for 1000s of years without access to as much info as today.
Or they really are trying to package their trick in a way that's universally useful, but failing.
Because that's hard. Because people differ widely in the way they see and think. It's SO much easier to assume that they don't. But they do. One size does not fit all.
A truly sciency approach might be the missing link. Firmly establish a common context and such. But that might be tedious and off-putting.
I read a story where the main protagonist ran a business who did nothing but provide solutions to people. They would come in, pay a fee, and he would dispense a solution to their problem that would make things better if only the advice was followed. I thought it delightful. A problem I have that I can simply ask for a solution and get it? That would be great. The reason these bad actors exist is that they recognize t…
So I'd take it a step further - not just avoid insight-/grind-porn, and grind-adjacent-porn too.
By this, I mean the equally large industry around life optimisation - and consider it adjacent because of course you need to optimise your health, wellbeing, sleep, weight, muscle volume, whatever, to be a fully productive human and achieve the heights that are expected of you.
Take (possibly) the Daddy of the all: Tim Ferriss' blog/podcast. I believe it's basically well-meaning, but holy hell if you wanted to learn from and apply the life optimisations of all of his guests, you'd almost need to make it a full-time activity. (I guess that's why some of them --Peter Attia, for example-- are really appearing on the podcast to advertise their business, which [if you're rich enough] will take most of the hard work out of figuring everything for yourself.) And of course, don't get me started on trying to follow any of the advice while living in the Europe, without easy access to many of the items recommended.
And some of this slips out of the recrational space into the professional, too. A while back, I became aware of a professional/life coaching business[0] which was more holistic than the usual behaviourally-focussed professional coaches I'd experienced. Lots of well-meaning advice... until it hit me: maybe if I need to employ all of the little lifestyle marginal gains --green tea, optimised sleep, optimised diet, exercise-- just to cope with my f*cking job, the toxic demands of job itself is the problem?
Is it possible we've gone too far towards accepting and adapting to the grind... and maybe it's time to wind it back a little?
My guess is that a big chunk of the "insight porn" and self-help landscape would fade away if it was subject to a data driven evaluation. Given a piece of advice or a self-help book, how many people did actually change their behaviour after reading it? And did the change persist long-term? Unfortunately, such data is not available.
I read a story where the main protagonist ran a business who did nothing but provide solutions to people. They would come in, pay a fee, and he would dispense a solution to their problem that would make things better if only the advice was followed. I thought it delightful. A problem I have that I can simply ask for a solution and get it? That would be great. The reason these bad actors exist is that they recognize t…
A fool and his money are soon parted. The real question a society should ask itself is to what extent it should protect its fools from their own gullibleness and inevitable bad decisions.
If a business owner goes bankrupt because he believed the "insight peddlers" and their easy solutions, then according to capitalist theory, it's OK he'll be replaced by someone who is better at business.
The same also happens in the political realm. How much time and effort should a society spend on educating its fools, for example that their belief that the president shitposts on 4chan under the guise of "Q" to tell his followers about his secret plans, is based on nothing but lies and gullibleness?
Should we take our collective eyes off the ball of actual issues at hand and deal with our fools' every concern? Or should we just accept that we can't save every voter or every business man and just let the "market" do its thing? It's not black and white like that, because of course a society shouldn't be do-or-die about anything, but when the extent of foolery starts to threaten the fundament that allows it to exist, there's a limit.
I read a story where the main protagonist ran a business who did nothing but provide solutions to people. They would come in, pay a fee, and he would dispense a solution to their problem that would make things better if only the advice was followed. I thought it delightful. A problem I have that I can simply ask for a solution and get it? That would be great. The reason these bad actors exist is that they recognize t…
I, too, am a huge fan of Nathan for You [0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_for_You
If you follow anyone in the startup space, the profiles and recommendations they generate will fill up your entire feed with useless, like-farming threads on "how to be successful in 3 easy steps".
The part about it being extra dangerous because you feel productive even though you didn't do anything, is so true. It's like a new form of addictive, useless SoMe content for people over 25.