The More You Know, the Worse You Do
A rule is stated flatly, inside a 705-page book of methods and information:
A rule is stated flatly, inside a 705-page book of methods and information:
> The more methods and information you give people, the more they will tangle themselves up.
And the evidence given for it is one sentence of history. When Buddhism first arrived in China a large number of laymen succeeded, with only two methods available. Then more methods arrived, and the number who succeeded dropped tremendously.
- Two Methods Were Enough — the rule, the China evidence, and the book turning it on itself - Goal Dilution Effect — a supplement claiming four benefits outsells a single-benefit one by minus twelve per cent - The Four Esoteric Yogas in Sequence — the elaborate route the rule is aimed at, taught in full on the same pages - The Mantra Count Replaces the Goal — the failure mode arriving from the other direction
The authors see the problem and say so: from this aspect, you can even criticize all the information provided in this text as well. Their defence is one clause — it is time to unify the spiritual paths and make the stages clear.
Set the China claim against the marketing finding and the two look like the same law, which is why the pairing is worth having. Four benefit claims dilute each other. Fifteen methods tangle a practitioner. Same shape.
But they come apart on a point that decides what to do about it, and neither field notices the other.
Zhang and Fishbach's dilution is entirely in the buyer's head. The four-benefit supplement is exactly as effective as it ever was. Nothing about the pills changed; only the estimate moved. The finding is about inference from a signal.
The China claim is not about inference at all. It says the practitioners genuinely got worse. Nobody was estimating anything. The methods were good methods — the passage never says the later ones were wrong — and the outcome still fell.
So we have two accounts of one shape, one of which is a bias to be corrected and the other of which is a real loss to be avoided. And you cannot tell from the outside which one you are in.
[SPECULATIVE] The variable that separates them is whether the resource being split is inside the object or inside the person.
A supplement's efficacy sits in the pills, and adding a claim to the label takes nothing away from them — so the dilution is perceptual and the shopper's inference is a bias. A practice's efficacy sits in the practitioner's attention, and attention is finite and undividable, so adding a method genuinely takes something from the ones already running. Same curve, two different causes, and only one of them is a mistake.
Which produces a test the marketing literature does not have and this book does not state. Ask where the active ingredient lives. If it is in the thing, more claims cost nothing and the customer is wrong. If it is in the person doing the work, more options cost exactly what they add, and the customer is right — Five Guys really does make a better burger for only making burgers.
And it gives the book's self-indictment a sharper edge than the authors give it. Their defence is that a map is not a method. But a reader who finishes a 705-page map knowing eleven techniques they did not know before has had their attention divided by eleven, and the map's own rule predicts what happens next.
- The China claim would need any supporting detail at all. It currently has no period, no figures, no named schools, and an obvious confound: everything else about a society also changes across the centuries in which its methods multiply.
- Somebody would have to find a case where options increased and outcomes improved in a practice domain, which would break the attention account rather than the inference one.
- The distinction would have to survive mixed cases — a skill where the active ingredient is partly in the tool and partly in the hand.