# Verifiability When you read something, can you verify the information? I once heard Buddhism described as requiring no faith[^1]. Instead, it is verifiable. By this, the author was actually referring to the practice of meditation, and how anyone can try meditation and see for themselves, what effect it has on their mind and their life. I suspect this is why there's relatively little snake oil in the software industry. A piece of software will either work or it won't work. There is of course the middle ground where a piece of software partially works for your use case, but doesn't solve your problem completely. Even so, by using software, you'll be able to judge whether or not its moving you closer to a solution. The particular subgenre of non-fiction called self-help literature is of course very different. If you read a self-help book, it's not necessarily easy to verify whether or not the information is valid. Self-help in general is fuzzy. Was the advice bad or did you fail to adhere to the advice closely enough? Did you simply give up too soon? It's unfortunate, but I see no way around this problem. My own approach is to fill my queue of self-help literature from recommendations of freinds. This provides signal amid the noise. # If it's verifiable, just give it a shot Now the anecdote: I was reading [[$100m Offers]] by Alex Hormozi and had a question about a point in the book. I searched online and found myself in a subreddit discussing whether or not he (Hormozi) is "for real". This particular subreddit had many comments, but lots of people opining some form of, "no, he's not for real" quote. But based on my limited skimming, no one had anything of substance to say. The thought struck me that since he writes about sales, anyone trying to sell something can verify his ideas. A sales strategy does not ask you to have faith, at laset not for long. You may have to commit to some significant ad-spend up front, but online advertising gives very quick feedback so you will be find yourself somewhere on the spectrum from failure to success very quickly. Furthermore, the book is ~3 hours in audio format. Before spending too much time trying to suss out whether or not he's worth listening to, just listen to the book and judge for yourself. In general, favor primary sources over internet commentary[^2]. [^1]: Unfortunately, I don't remember where I read this. Otherwise, I would provide a link. [^2]: I would put traditional news outlets into the bucket of internet commentary as well. --- As alluded to up above, I would also put meditation in this camp of verifiable non-fiction. With meditation you have to choose amongst many competing methodologies, but once you choose one you can give it a try. You probably have to "try" for months before you can say whether it works or it doesn't work, which feels like a sort of faith, but it's limited in its scope. If it doesn't work after a few months you can just move on.