431–440 of 513 posts
Personally, I see the self-help industry dying because people are starting to realize that it’s just a network of individuals selling products, promoting each other’s products, and creating new avenues to sell more products. I refer to it as the “self-help mafia.” Tim Ferriss kind of created it.
There’s literally 100 years of self-help books before, who?
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I went down a rabbit hole of reading some of the "pickup artist" material many years ago, and it was fascinating because there was a whole range from the really ridiculous "one trick" peddlers who in some cases probably were proto-Andre Tates - isogynists who looked for all kinds of underhanded tactics to trick women and saw it as justified because they saw things as stacked against men - to people who were just a ha…
I went down that rabbit hole too and actually improved myself. I recommend Juggler (old school), Austen Summers and AttractionGym (Dutch). I would still recommend to use your common sense though. Not everything they say is good advice but I find them giving quite good advice while not being toxic (most of the time). Though what helped me most was a mix of being more assertive, meditation and a strong sense of playful…
I really want to ask: what would their reputation be if they were mainstream, in your opinion?
I find it to be a very interesting spot of culture and society, like at one point you had a bunch of guys who were dealing with the cognitive dissonance between what society asks of men and what society wants from them in a context that wasn't yet politicized.
It is my impression that when it started showing up a little bit in the mainstream, the accusations of misogyny came, and with that most who actually cared about misogyny left the boat, in public terms. So now all we have left is Tate and the likes.
In the first end - short-form content: yt shorts, tiktoks, tweets, ig posts - "authors" have interested to just have more engagement, so we end up with ragebait, fringe ideas, etc - everything for just viewers count go up, the substance doesn't matter at all.
In the other end - "long-form" content: books (usually thick ones), writers for some reason need to fill extra content alongside the substance, some off-topic stuff, I'm not professional writer/editor, but I suppose it's protection from some nitpickers, adding some scientific basis to look more solid (don't know why: author can pick any research that support's book idea, even already debunked), maybe there is requierement from publishers, editors, etc.
The sweet spot here are thin books here, but even that case they cannot help much, because even a therapy sometimes cannot help for someone (heck, there is a real person trying help, not just text with ideas!)
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Well stated. I read Nurture Shock before my kids were born. One of its main arguments is to praise effort rather than natural abilities ("you worked hard" rather than "you're smart"). Being one who naturally withholds praise, its message of not over-praising resonated with me. In retrospect, I should have praised kid #1 more. It took me 10+ years to realize that. The book was not wrong but also not the message I need…
I am definitely of the same generation. I notice my mom will praise my kid’s intelligence while we praise their effort. But I’ve definitely noticed my son responds to praise about ability more than my daughter and likely would appreciate more praise than her. What did you notice and what were the consequences of the strategy of praise. I’d like to learn from your experience.
Children the Challenge chapter 3 discusses encouragement.
All this stuff should be done tastefully and without being overbearing. Like the previous poster said, it's a balance.
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I’ve spent time to read the AI summary (which I normally never do) and the original (of course), and I can tell you the AI summary missed the most important point of the writing. I’d say what they are because it would defy the very purpose of what I’m trying to do. But I can tell you that it’s enough to refute the AI fallacy many believe.
Surely this could be corrected by using the correct prompt? If you ask an AI to summarise a book, it's going to cut out 99% of the content. If you wanted to read some of that 99% of the content, you need to be clear about what you want. Otherwise you're leaving the AI to decide. That summary might be good enough for others, but not you. Tell it the focus you would like it to use. E.g. "include anything about the phil…
AI is better at personalized information, short-form content offers a snappier and more "real" point-of-view.
What I find most interesting is the appeal to authority aspect. Self-help always has had its gurus. If self-help is getting hit harder than other genres, I wonder what that says about brand trust.
EDIT: could also be that these books are kinda fads. I would expect them to have a shelf-life.
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It is the same thing with documentaries. Youtube killed them because it is just a faster delivery of knowledge and information. For super-specific questions chatbots are even faster.
Idk, the average youtube video repeats the same question five times, dragging shit out with filler as much as possible to reach the required 10 minutes to qualify for two ad runs. It's become a horrible race to the bottom in terms of quality in recent years, though unlike TV documentaries at least it's possible to skip to the conveniently marked highlight these days. There was this recent Tom Scott interview where he…
To some extent, his awkward personality didn't help matters either, but he was the only one covering a niche topic I didn't know I cared about. So much of his catalog is unimitable.
After his hiatus and return, I must humbly recognize his genius and real passion.
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I went down that rabbit hole too and actually improved myself. I recommend Juggler (old school), Austen Summers and AttractionGym (Dutch). I would still recommend to use your common sense though. Not everything they say is good advice but I find them giving quite good advice while not being toxic (most of the time). Though what helped me most was a mix of being more assertive, meditation and a strong sense of playful…
>The more reasonable dating coaches are still out there. They simply aren’t part of the mainstream advice. I really want to ask: what would their reputation be if they were mainstream, in your opinion? I find it to be a very interesting spot of culture and society, like at one point you had a bunch of guys who were dealing with the cognitive dissonance between what society asks of men and what society wants from them…
I think effectively those coaches who worried most about reputations to a large extent pivoted from focusing on the dating aspect to more general self-improvement, where dating success might still get mentioned but without so much focus on it, and especially not so much focus on getting sex.
There's lots of mainstream self-help around overcoming shyness and getting better at socialising for example that was/is directly relevant to a lot of people who struggle with dating, and there are lots of ways of framing the non-manipulative, non-creepy parts of a lot of dating coach advice in ways that nobody would consider misoygynist.
But, yeah, I think at least to some extent the attention given to some of this subculture unwittingly ended up driving some of them into the arms of people like Tate. It's not that there weren't plenty of those coaches that deserved negative attention, but the end result might well have been worse.