Science behind Personal developement for Smart People
 

I am interested in self-developement stuff and I think that it's important to care about personality. But what is interesting about self-help books is that at most, there are opinions and techniques that "just work".

Advantages of this approach are obvious, but on the other hand, it lacks holistic perspective. No one will point on one book and say "Hey, this is all you need to know about self-development" - philosophically speaking.

There are no common teories and experiments behind self-developement. What I mean is that this area lacks of science. I am not hard-core scientist and I don't post this thread to just prove my point. I just want to know just your opinion about this question. I will put this philosophical question in the concrete:

Why isn't there any science behind book Personal developement for Smart people ?

This question is mainly for Steve, but If someone think that he has appropiate answer, feel free to post.

Thanks.

Okay I must confess I do not understand what you mean by "Science." Do you mean hard core sciences like Physics, Chemistry?

Life is complex. Hard core sciences cannot provide answers to questions like why you are unemployed or why you are broke. You may find some help in subjects like Psychology or Philosophy.

PDSP is based on truth, love and power and other principles that are based on these.

There's certainly plenty of scientific method, in the sense of encouraging the creation of hypotheses, experimentation (30 day trials), careful observation of the results (journaling and goal tracking) and writing up the observations.

If you mean that the book doesn't cite neuroscience or psychology papers, then that's true. (I'm not sure that it would necessarily have been improved or made more useful by referring to such research, but that may be a separate question.)

If some great idea come out, it should be deeply examinated.

Let's say that some scientist want to write article for scientific journal. His work has to be reviewed by several anonymous scientist to ensure that stuff is worth of including to the journal. Later on, other scientist who will read article will join the discussion.

Why I think that PDSP should be examinated ? Because it's great stuff. If it will be accepted by scientist, it will have much more impact on society - it would be taught in schools for example.

To sum up, I think that scientific work is higher level and I think that Steve's work is worth of scientific discussion.

That's not really true. There a lot of useful stuff in psychology that doesn't get taught in schools.

As a disciple science develops around what's measurable.
If you have the thesis that being aligned with the 7 seven principles that Steve advocates helps you to live the good life than you have a few challenges:
1) Measuring whether someone lives the good life.
2) Measuring whether someone is aligned with Steve's principles. How do you transform whether someone is aligned with truth into a number?
3) Personal development is hard work while taking a pill isn't. The idea of controlled studies is that the person who sets up the experiment can control what everyone is doing.
4) Because of institutional blindness it's difficult to get a grant to research something about personal development.
5) It's in it's nature not reductionist. If you do physiology than you get away with saying that you are dealing with system properties that aren't necessary explainable by looking at the parts of the system. I even had a physiology professor speak of energy without being able to tell me about what he meant when one left the system metaphor and moved into biochemistry (but he said that it was probably something biochemical).
In the hard sciences you get away with stuff like that but you don't get away with it in the soft sciences.

And this is what I am talking about ... No one knows, what good life is and that's why it should be examinated.

Of course, there will be difficulties, ... With everything new comes really big problems. I am only saying, that area of self-development is empirical and it's maybe time to get higher ...

I think that "the good life" is almost entirely subjective. What is "the good life" for one person is a pretty sucky life for someone else. For many people, "the good life" consists of having a full-time job, getting married, buying a house with a picket fence, having babies, going to church, etc. For someone like me, it consists of a non-traditional job, multiple romantic and sexual partners, attending pagan gatherings and fan conventions, NOT having kids, and having an active social life, among other things.

It really can't be measured, and I wouldn't want that anyway. Much better that each individual figure out what "the good life" is for him/her and does his/her best to attain that.

There are different degrees of "knowing".
Take information.
You could say that a high definition recording of a football match has 1000 times the amount of information as 'War and Peace' when you compare them by the amount of space that they take on a computer harddrive.

If you would however ask a literary scholar they would probably say that War and Peace contains much more information than your football match.
The scholar however couldn't give you a measurement.

People learn to drive cars in a very empiric way. They however don't really use metrics to guide their actions when they drive a car but instincts.
If they would they couldn't react in split second decisions when danger comes up.

If you see that as an important problem, work on it.

The principles in PDSP are more fundamental than science. PDSP is behind science, not vice versa.

Science can be classified into the PDSP system just like any other branch of human development. In this case science deals mainly with the principle of Truth, subtopic of Prediction. The value of most science lies in its predictive accuracy.

It does imply that there is no measurement for "worth/value of information", but it doesn't imply that it's not possible or it's not useful.

Thanks. I agree. Does it means, that science can't or shouldn't study PDSP ?

Science can't study anything since it's not a conscious entity. Scientists themselves, however, can study PDSP, and they would benefit greatly from it, thereby transforming the various fields of science as more scientists committed themselves to the PDSP principles.

In that case we'd see more scientists doing things like declining to perform biased studies that were funded by special interests to promote special interests. More scientists would respect the integrity of Truth first and foremost.

We'd also see a commitment from scientists to be more socially responsible (principle of Oneness), meaning more fewer inventions that pollute, cause cancer, kill people, etc.

And we'd see scientists speaking up more, becoming evangelists for good science and honest research and speaking up to warn of serious problems well in advance... instead of saying, "I'm only a scientist, not a politician." (principle of Courage)

But you can't do real science if you don't have numeric measurements.

I will give example of what I mean:

Intelligence (in terms of the ability to comprehend, to understand and profit from experience) was studied by scientists. And, they came up with IQ which is a measure of a person's intelligence as indicated by an intelligence test.

Sure, it isn't 100% accurate and it doesn't cover all areas of human intelligence, but thanks to their findings, we can say, for example, if somebody is capable of making conscious decisions (is mentally retarded) and have his own rights.

If someone will examinate PDSP principles like intelligence, he will be able to run tests and decide, whether is someone, for instance, capable of being judge (on court I mean).

It was only example, so take it lightly. I wanted to say that your principles can't be accepted by academics, because nobody knows what, for instance, truth actually is ... That is, what I mean by "science" - just deep examination of PDSP stuff.

The alternative is of course actually talking to the person and trying to understand them.
Firstly I don't think that it's true that there no academic that read PDSP and accepts it.
Of course that's not what you mean when you speak of accepting but it's important to understand the distinction.
When the academic wears his academic hat he will probably not "accept" PDSP. PDSP however isn't written for the academic discourse.

You don't have to use the same hammer for every problem.

Exactly. PDSP is mostly for ordinary, non-academic people.

But, I personally think, that Steve's stuff is worth of getting higher. By this I mean that PDSP may be examinate from scientific point of view.

This was main idea of this thread.

It might surprise you, but academics are also ordinary people. No yellow blood or anything like that.
Then go ahead and do it. Nobody is stopping you, expect maybe the reasons I numerated above.

If you don't have something meaningful to say about, maybe you shouldn't reply at all ...

Taking responsibility happens to be very meaningful. There no reason why someone else should do the work that you want to have done.
The frame that there some outside authority on which you should rely isn't what this forum is about. Academics are normal people and you could be one if you want.
Steve isn't really interested in academia but rather in changing peoples lives directly through workshops, articles and books. However ideas aren't owned by people. They are out there and everyone can do with them what they want.

Academia doesn't work that way that a single person from the outside come into academia with a big theory and does academia on the side.

You rather have some psychology graduate who takes it on him to write a doctoral thesis that tries to push the idea into an academic framework.

Thanks.

You are right, there is no reason why someone else should do the work that I want to have done. I don't want to convince Steve to do what I think.

I just want to point out that seeing one problem from different points of view (view of ordinary people, view of academics, view of religion for example) are much more valuable as it seems to be in the first place. "Point of view is worth eighty points of IQ." - Alan Kay

Sure, I will examinate Steve's stuff and do my own research. But, of course, it will take years to get proper knowledge and experiences.

By this is thread closed. Thanks for replies to all.