2022-11-22 Tue 17:57 PM ![[DALL·E 2023-11-01 19.25.28 - Create an illustration representing the dodo bird verdict in psychotherapy. In the center, depict a cartoonish, friendly-looking dodo bird standing co.png]] > [!-cf-] [[Related notes]] > - [[Replication crisis]] > - [[Goleta theory]] In the world of research into the effectiveness of psychotherapy, the "dodo bird verdict" is the name given to the finding that effectiveness of therapy seems independent of modality. That is, some things, such as the client-therapist relationship, do have a detectable impact on effectiveness; but some do not — and the theory or modality that the therapist subscribes to is in the latter category. The name comes from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland: > First [the dodo bird] marked out a race-course, in a sort of circle, ('the exact shape doesn't matter,' it said,) and then all the party were placed along the course, here and there. There was no 'One, two, three, and away,' but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out 'The race is over!' and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, 'But who has won?' > > This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo said, 'EVERYBODY has won, and all must have prizes.' > —[[Ref. Lewis Carroll 1865 - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland]] I originally found this result surprising. One would expect that in a [[We're pre-copernican in our understanding of the mind|pre-copernican]] field that's been developing and deploying techniques for many years, if all of a sudden, as happened in the 1970s, modern scientific evaluation techniques are used to measure the effectiveness of the various techniques in the field, we would see clear differences in their efficacy. But apparently we've done a lot of measuring and the differences haven't shown up. A thing that's said in response to this result is that perhaps factors common to all modalities (such as a warm therapeutic alliance) are the real active ingredients. cf [[Ref. Shedler 2010 - The efficacy of psychodynamic psychotherapy]]. But still: therapists put an enormous amount of energy into theorizing about the nature of the psyche and designing interventions based on those theories; I would expect that we'd see effects from that work. So what's going on? Are our modalities really all basically equally effective? Are there real differences and we're just not able to measure them? # [[Journal section]] ### 2022-12-05 Mon - 2022-12-05 Mon - [[Having a conversation with GPT-3 about the dodo bird verdict 2022-12-05 Mon]] - 2022-12-12 Mon 12:02 PM - So, possible explanations: - Methodological problems in the research. Eg: - We cherry-picked the "good" methodologies to measure. If we widened our net, and measure more of the stuff that's actually in use but that seems crazy/dumb, we'd see clear differences in effectiveness. - Our outcome constructs are flawed somehow and not tracking the actual gains - Replication crisis all the way down: https://twitter.com/literalbanana/status/1638387396009140224?s=20, study from uscb: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Andrew-Maul/publication/318918810_Rethinking_Traditional_Methods_of_Survey_Validation/links/5991d2d0a6fdcc53b79b5a04/Rethinking-Traditional-Methods-of-Survey-Validation.pdf - Common factors. Eg: - Perhaps all therapies cause increased introspective awareness, "thus leading to increasing psychological unity as internal conflicts are detected and resolved" [[Ref. Kaj Sotala 2019 - Multiagent models of mind (sequence)]] - Chance and outside factors. "Realistically most outcomes are products of chance and opportunity more than careful planning." [[Ref. Ragins 2016 - Person centered vs illness centered (recovery model)]] - Therapeutic relationship (okay but *how*) - Application of common sense (eg, perhaps each therapist has their protocol, but they are also responsive to what they're seeing and feeling, and they tend to do sensible things as needed even though it may be off book) - [[Ref. Kaj Sotala 2019 - Multiagent models of mind (sequence)]]: - > But situations which used to be catastrophic and impossible for us to handle before, aren’t necessarily that any more. It seems important to have a mechanism for updating that cache of catastrophic events and for disassembling the protections around it, if the protections turn out to be unnecessary. - > How does that process usually happen, without IFS or any other specialized form of therapy? - > Often, by talking about your experiences with someone you trust. Or writing about them in private or in a blog. - Maybe therapies converge, or converge at least on the parts that turn out to work. - > A counselor at my college taught a course on clinical psychology. Here I learned about the psychoanalytic approach to therapy that was being used with these inpatient adolescents, including the rationale for excluding families from treatment and for therapists to stay relatively distant from the kids (psychoanalysis has subsequently evolved to become more relational and inclusive of clients’ external contexts). — [[Ref. Richard Schwartz and Martha Sweezy 2019 - Internal Family Systems therapy, 2nd edition]] Schwartz, Richard C.; Sweezy, Martha. Internal Family Systems Therapy, Second Edition (p. 4). Guilford Publications. Kindle Edition. - nearly all people have pareto improvements to make on many frontiers. So any modality that's at a frontier will help ### 2023-07-28 Fri 13:01 [[Ref. Andrés Gómez-Emilsson 2023 - Neural field annealing and psychedelic thermodynamics]] Maybe the reason all our modalities work is they're all operating on a part of the problem. Different levels of abstraction. Eg [[Depth psychology]] going into the culture of [[Psyche]], [[Behavioral psychology]] working outside with intersubjectively accessible phenomena, thinking about habits and conditioning, [[Cognitive psychology]] working at the level of... mind as computational system. We as a civilization lack a [[Unified theory of consciousness]], so all of our modalities are coming from some [[We're pre-copernican in our understanding of the mind|pre-copernican]] paradigm. Cf [[Goleta theory]]