603. Simple Recipes Attract Simpleminded People

603.   Simple Recipes Attract Simpleminded People

Texts presenting apparently easy recipes for about any problem or task are plenty in books, newspapers, the web and other media.    

Practical tasks sometimes do follow simple algorithms, which are not obvious without a step-by-step guide to follow through.   Recipes for cooking are an examples, manuals how to maintain and handle household appliances and machines are another.  

But most of the recipes concerning non-material topics are false promises offering pseudo solutions to very complex, difficult and strenuous tasks.  

1.  The attraction of recipes:  

Recipes are tempting to be believed and applied, whenever people struggle with the experience of failure, because they wish or crave for something, which

• can generally not be achieved
• is beyond someone's ability to achieve it
• could only be achieved by much more efforts than the person is ready and willing to invest

Recipes are expressed as assertive claims.   The apparent false authority of them misleads people to confound their mere wishful thinking as if it were something to come true as a secure success needing only limited efforts.   Recipes are most suggestive, when they are expressed in a way, which precludes doubts of failure and pretends programmed success.   

Recipes are usually either promising the certain way to reach one specific goal, or they offer a precise number of steps or items to work through towards a goal.   

2.  Some examples:

The following examples are chosen only because of the big claim made by the title.  

Examples of titles of books

Get the life you want

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

The 48 Laws of Power

Think and Grow Rich

The Feeling Good Handbook

How Successful People Think: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life

Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

Examples of 'how to' articles found by a google search:  

How to trick people into thinking you're good looking

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

How to Win Friends and Influence People

How to be an expert

How to Get a Life

How to Get Out of Debt

How to Lose 20 lbs. of bodyfat in 30 days

How to Read 300% Faster in 20 Minutes

How To Become Wealthy

Examples from a dating advice site:

10 things men should never say

Seven steps to the perfect first email

5 Habits that Hurt Your Relationship

Five dating tips for spotting ‘Mr Right’

3 Key Things to Discuss Before Moving In Together

3. Classification of recipes:

Falling for simple recipes can be caused by several different fallacies. 

• Absurdity.   Recipes advising religious rituals like prayer or a pilgrimage and woo-woo remedies like homeopathy are just absurd and irrational.  
• Pseudo-science.   Pseudo-science is suggestive, because uninformed people confound it with serious science.   NLP is an example.
• Exaggerated and biased truth.   A few good, valid tips can be convincing, even when they are banalities.   These tips can supply a tiny contribution to the problem, that makes them suggestive.   But they are nevertheless very insufficient, when exaggerated into an entire recipe, not applicable for the complex problem and for the wide variety of different people and situations.  

4.  Purpose for using recipes:

The recipes are used as a crutch to reduce insecurity and anxiety in areas of life, where the access to reliable information and better methods is difficult:  

• Self-improvement towards a better ability of understanding, predicting, influencing and controlling other people
• Health improvement

5.  Gullibility to the belief in simple recipes:

Not all recipes are fully worthless, when perceived with the critical mental distance to not succumb to unrealistic expectations.    If read skeptically, knowing that there cannot be simple recipes, there is sometimes some food for thought to be integrated in a larger frame of investigating the best way to cope with an issue. 

• Gullible, uneducated and simple minded people, who are prone to believe any irrational nonsense, are most prone to also fall uncritically for simple recipes.   Pressing problems like strong instinctive urges, which deactivate or blur the reason, often enhance the attraction of simple recipes.
  
• Intelligent and skeptical people with the ability for abstract and complex thinking are not prone to fall for simple recipes.   They understand the complexity and real magnitude of a task and react appropriately.  They prefer sources, which put the emphasis on the complexity of any issue and avoid any claims of easy solutions.     

6.  The authors of the recipes:

Those who produce simple recipes are

• frauds, who know, that they take advantage of other people's gullibility and simplicity to make money.  
• gullible and mislead themselves.    The feel a mission to propagate their delusional insights and wisdom.  
  
  • They want to earn a reward in the afterlife
  • They expect narcissistic supply as gurus.
  • They want to feel good about themselves by being altruistically helping others.

7.  The dangers of simple recipes for the applicants:

By relying exclusively on a simple recipe, people often enhance and prolong the problem, which they attempt to solve.  The focus on vain attempts to reach a goal with an oversimplified recipe impedes them to find a real solution.

When the wrong expectations for an easy achievement fail, a wrong attribution of this failure can damage a person's self-esteem and confidence.   This can lead to wrong decisions with long term fatal consequences in the realm of important life choices.

8.  The dangers of the impact of imposed simple recipes:

When people rely more on recipes than on direct information from the target of the applied recipe, then they can be a serious hazard to others,    The lack of any modification of the applied recipe by the target's direct influence can be caused by any combination of lacking trust, of lacking information and of failing recognition for the target being a source of information.

• Misjudgment by categorization:  
  Using astrology as a recipe of sorting people into 12 arbitrary categories and ascribing traits to them can cause harm.   A person is not treated according to how s/he really is but by ascribed traits.   A person chosen by wrongly ascribed traits as a mate or employee cannot fulfill erroneous expectations and may suffer from pressure.
  
• Misjudgment by unsuitable methods: 
  NLP includes pseudo-scientific recipes.  One such recipe claims, that specific eye movements were indicators for the difference between honesty and lying.    When trust is denied by this fallacy, this can prevent or destroy relationships and friendships.
  
• Unjustified blame: 
  When recipes promising benefits in the interaction with others fail, no matter if the goal is to be accepted or to gain control, this is a logical consequence of not perceiving the other as a partner, but as reduced to a mere target.   But due to believing in the power and correctness of the recipe, the failure is attributed to faults, flaws of defects of the target. 
  
• Enhancement of the detriments of power:  
  The more the person applying a recipe also has power, the worse the situation gets for the target.   People applying for a job or training can be rejected by invalid recipes like graphology.   Bosses, teachers, parents, wardens and caretakers in institutions can do a lot of harm by applying recipes derived from a religion, ideology or simply from an unqualified application or misinterpretation of recipes from any source.

I am personally scared of people, who believe so much in simple recipes of any kind, no matter if it is religion, woo-woo or pseudoscience, that this impedes and prevents me from influencing by proactive rationality, how I am judged and treated.    

My mindmate to be found is not simple minded, he does not use recipes upon me.  He is someone, who not only is able to think abstractly, but who also feels comfortable with cognitive complexity.  

534. The Pseudo-Evidence Fallacy

534.   The Pseudo-Evidence Fallacy

Whenever someone bases the decision, how to treat another person, on a belief, which is so strong, that it impedes and overrides the rational perception and comprehension of evidence and reality, there are more or less fatal consequences for at least the misjudged person, often for both. 

Examples:

1. A very drastic example was the alleged proof of who is a witch by throwing the unfortunate victim into the water to see if she floated or drowned.    Men believed in this cruel irrationality, even though their brain had nevertheless enabled them to become fluent in Latin.   
2. In some cultures, parents not only decide, whom to marry their children to, but they choose an alleged match following an astrologer's advice.   This has certainly caused millions of people to suffer from being tied for a lifetime to a mismatch, the worst fate being that of women being abused by a man, whom they would not have chosen.  
3. Today people are less prone to fall for very blatant irrationality.  But the more the irrational claims and beliefs mimic science, the more people are gullible to mistake pseudo-science for science.   
   NLP is a good example.   In entry 177 (The Jerks' Fascination with NLP) I already elaborated, why NLP is a belief system, and why this blend of some elements from scientific psychology with irrational and unscientific claims make this so attractive to people with a distorted self-concept as if being rational.  

In these as also in many more examples, there is a pattern of a specific fallacy:  

The person

• bases a rational decision process upon incorrect or insufficient information acquired by absurd, weird, preposterous or insane methods.   
• is unperceptive, mindblind, immune to or otherwise not impacted by any information coming directly from the target of the behavior.   The target has no influence upon what information is used to determine, how s/he is treated.
• imposes the decision upon the target or attempts to, feeling entitled and justified to do so. 

This fallacy impedes trust and as a consequence it impedes a relationship from becoming a safe haven, which is impossible without trust justified by trustworthiness.   
Trustworthiness can only be assessed by the rational method of evaluating evidence.  This method compares all of someone's verbal and non-verbal expressions and behaviors at any moment with all of this at any another time, and also with external independent sources.   
The more often this comparison is consistent, congruent and without contradictions, the more the person's overall trustworthiness can be estimated as probable.   Never discovering a lie is a part of this.

Any other method, which relies on unverified and unverifiable clues, is a hazard and misleading.   Earning trust depends not only on the own trustworthy behavior, it also depends upon the partner's ability to recognize trustworthy behavior as such by the correct perception of evidence.    Trust cannot be earned from a person using unsuitable methods.  

An honest person never lying is nevertheless not trusted by a partner using flawed methods to evaluate honesty.   The delusion of being able to rely upon firmly believed pseudo-clues makes him oblivious of reality.      
Fools believing in NLP derive the pseudo-evaluation of alleged honesty or lack thereof from the target's eye movements.   This is a hazardous fallacy, as the study quoted below clearly shows.    Eye movements can be caused, influenced and diverted by many triggers.  During any conversation, people's attention can be easily caught momentarily by events at the periphery of their vision.   
The haphazard location of such events suffices to determine the erroneous attribution of an alleged trait towards one of two errors:      
Accidental eye movements of a honest person can forfeit the chance to be trusted.  
The blind believer in NLP can also easily be mislead to trust by a liar's accidental eye movements.  

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120711205943.htm

"For decades many NLP practitioners have claimed that when a person looks up to their right they are likely to be lying, whilst a glance up to their left is indicative of telling the truth."

"Professor Richard Wiseman (University of Hertfordshire, UK) and Dr Caroline Watt (University of Edinburgh, UK) tested this idea by filming volunteers as they either lied or told the truth, and then carefully coded their eye movements.  In a second study another group of participants was asked to watch the films and attempt to detect the lies on the basis of the volunteers' eye movements.

"The results of the first study revealed no relationship between lying and eye movements, and the second showed that telling people about the claims made by NLP practitioners did not improve their lie detection skills,” noted Wiseman. "

The pseudo-evidence fallacy and commodification share the common defective acquisition of information.    In both situations, the target is excluded from being considered as a possible source when choosing, which information is used for the decision how to behave.  Both situations indicate depreciation and disrespect of the target, but it works differently.

In the case of commodification, the target is mistaken for a passive utility in a onesided relationship and therefore not considered as able to be a proactive source supplying any information.  
The pseudo evidence fallacy disregards, devalues and rejects the information input coming directly from the target.   The real information is noticed but replaced by the false beliefs.   The target is considered as a proactive source of irrelevant or worthless information.