Clear, thanks for the effort!
Agreed, this doesn’t hold water: “Popularizers of a-thing must be accomplished at a random b-thing, otherwise that’s evidence against [the effectiveness of] what they’re popularizing.”
It does change when popularizers are (implicitly or explicitly) making the stronger move: “Here’s this cool a-thing that helped me achieve b-thing, therefore a-thing will help you achieve b-thing.”
In that case, their testimonial is part of the evidence, so I want to see confirmation of the b-thing. The original post is a warning: if their main ‘achievement’ is producing content about a-thing, that’s not the b-thing they’re implicitly promising.
I’m not comfortable painting a whole industry with that brush, but it matches a lot of what I’ve seen. (I’ll dare say the most successful examples in this industry anyway.)
To be concrete: many note-taking writers market with a clear structure: “I’ve spent years practicing the method, it transformed my creative work, it can transform yours too.” But when the main evidence of transformation is the content about the method itself, the testimonial is circular. I’m sure some people genuinely benefit, but the success stories I see are often “I now have a better note-taking system” rather than external achievements.
To be clear: I’m not treating this as negative evidence against note-taking methods. I’ve simply discarded the self-promotion and testimonials as uninformative and I’m looking for better evidence.
(In that journey, I’m trying to be credible with Sturgeon’s law in mind. So I started looking for the 10% of this industry, with the hope that they’d have what I’m looking for. Help in finding the 10% is what I meant to ask help with in the first place.)