amor et licentia

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The hippies are right, actually

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The hippies are right, actually

Sev
Jun 8, 2023

The psycho- and social technologies I’m most excited about are usually not the thoroughly evidence-backed ones that my friends encounter in their sessions with licensed therapists. This seems insane to some people, so I want to explain myself.

Let me start with two stories.

  1. I once knew a person who applied to a special needs school as a provider for horse-assisted therapy. The job interview went great, until she was asked whether she is certified in the leading method of horse therapy. Unfortunately, she had to confess that she could not provide any such certification. Because she had designed the method and the certification process herself.

  2. Once, I lead a workshop for processing AI x-risk anxiety that was based on the Work That Reconnects and adapted to rationalist culture. A participant asked: "...but is this backed by scientific studies?", to which I responded: "No. Just by 50 years of R&D among a bunch of hippies." The asker stared at me in dismay and disbelief, and I went on with my workshop.

I think it's good when people like my acquaintance’s potential employer or my aspiring rationalist have an appropriate amount of suspicion towards snake oil salespeople like us. Mind that survivorship bias is a thing and most things people try don’t actually work.

At the same time, I think both my acquaintance and I are entirely justified in our unlicensed loiterings. Because believe it or not - any therapeutic intervention that is now standardized and deployed on mass-scale has once not been backed by scientific evidence. And, the innovators who developed them have usually not been certified by the institutions that have been built to protect and preserve their heritage.

Freud was considered a crackpot when he first suggested that actually, how peoples' childhoods play out might have an influence on how they behave and misbehave as adults. When the Stoics laid the foundations of cognitive behavioral therapy, the scientific method wasn't even around. When Carl Rogers developed client-centered therapy, it was considered blasphemous that a psychologist dare do something that borders on psychotherapy, which back then was reserved to medical professionals. When the various schools of humanistic psychology emerged, that might have been impossible without the intellectual influence of outcasts and acidheads like Alan Watts or Aldous Huxley. Similarly, the current mindfulness-based third wave of psychotherapy would be unthinkable if some bums in India several millennia ago hadn’t decided to see what happens when you just sit very, very still for a while. Without any double blind experiments to reassure them while their minds disintegrated and went down all kinds of scary avenues.

In other words: The leading edge of cultural innovation never happens in health insurance-paid sessions with licensed therapists.

My young rationalist may be right to mistrust people like me. Meanwhile, I feel like I’m also right to trust that the past decade of studying human minds theoretically, on the meditation cushion, and in relationships, prepared me for the real world.

And thus, I skip the psychological papers and immerse myself in the healing circles of the world directly. Sometimes that’s just good fun. Sometimes, I find a tool that works so well that it seems worth spreading.

Then, I go forth and teach it to everyone who wants to listen and doesn’t bother asking for my license.

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