So the old joke is right, and the lightbulb has to really want to change.

And the question is, how do we convince the lightbulb that change is possible and desirable?

“Have you ever convinced somebody that your beliefs are superior to theirs?”

Hell, just look at how hard it is to convince people that 9/11 was an inside job. (Ha ha ha, gotcha there, didn’t I?) But seriously, breaking people loose of a position that they have, by their lights, reasoned themselves into? Unbelievably difficult.

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Specialization is obviously for safe and predictable environments like Adam Smith’s London smith who makes only nails as a big city will surely always need a lot of them. Heinlein was writing about adventure i.e. the opposite.

Specialization requires exchange means it requires trust. Also exchanges are far too easy to tax. This why we in countries like Hungary do not specialize and do a lot DIY, because we don’t trust a contractor not screw us over for painting our house and if we pay him under the table we could get busted for tax evasion but when investing time not money, DIY then not. This is also why we are fricking poor.

Finally, specialization kills fun. Anna the accountant goes home after work and relaxes by watering her plants. Bob the plant shop worker who watered plants for 8 hours a day would hate to do it again, maybe he relaxes by playing a videogame with accounting aspects as well like running a corp in EVE online. Both feel the difference between work and play is doing something else. Variety is what differentiates work you don’t like to do from play you like.

Ideal but unethical setup: I would be a Reneissance Man doing many different things, all financed by my serfs who specialize. There is a reason that from Aristotle to the Reneissance you need financial indepence to do interesting stuff which reduced to living someone else’s labor. The laborers specialized, Aristotle didn’t. Replace serfs with robots for better ethics.

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My biggest problem with CBT is it’s total disregard for the unconscious. Current understanding of the brain says that we have 5 different memory systems broken down into implicit and explicit memory. CBT only works with explicit memory and ignores (some people deny) the existence of implicit memory. Emotions are primarily implicit and logic is primarily explicit. You’re going to have a really hard time changing a person’s implicit memory structure with purely logical techniques. Behavioral, Gestalt, and psychodynamic techniques are better equipped to address the implicit memory problems.

The phenomenon you point out about CBT working with intelligent people, rides this line as well. There is a strong cultural idea that intelligence is not emotional. Some of this is the straw vulcan phenomenon. Some of this is that emotions are not rational and really do make us choose un-intelligent choices. And some of this is that the brain uses competing resources to be empathetic or logical. On some level, our brains can’t do both.
http://www.spring.org.uk/2015/01/the-weird-reason-its-hard-to-empathise-and-be-logical-at-the-same-time.php

Additionally, proper CBT requires a formal diagnosis. CBT needs a disease to cure. Diagnosis in the therapy world is highly contentious. This is called the disease model and a great many therapists do not like this model of human distress. http://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/the-dirtiest-word-in-the-dsm-0130147

This diagnosis model is partly why CBT is so popular these days. Insurance operates on the disease model and CBT has provided insurance a clear path for labeling dysfunction. Whether the labels are correct or even helpful is entirely unknown, but insurance companies find them easy so they use it. This means that CBT gets more funding from insurance where other therapies would not, even though they have similar outcomes.

CBT also has bad outcomes on the long term scale. It’s almost guaranteed that you will relapse with CBT.
http://ebmh.bmj.com/content/8/3/75.full

A lot of that result has to do with poor etiology in the therapeutic world. All of these theories and treatments address symptoms and fail to understand causes.

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The actual technique used in counseling is largely irrelevant. The measured effectiveness of any technique is incredibly low. It is the therapeutic alliance and the client’s contributing factors that determine the success of therapy, not the technique or theory used.

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Not really. A study done in the 80’s had people report they had on average 4 close friends. That same study repeated in the late 2000’s had that number drop to 1.

More information here:
http://www.amazon.com/Loneliness-Human-Nature-Social-Connection/dp/0393335283

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Perception is all that matters (in this case). Obviously.

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Why is therapy that makes you unconditionally happy better than therapy that just stops your misery spiraling out of control, while meds that make you unconditionally happy are evil and we have to swear up and down that they just stop your misery spiraling out of control?

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