What about readers who aren't "reasonably intelligent" (which often means "quite a bit more intelligent than the typical person")?

> To be more clear, I don't believe that your explanation could possibly be a good reason for these stories being included in a self help book, but without precluding they may serve another purpose.

What's the reason for your emphasis there? Are you reading the "self" part too literally or idiosyncratically? IIRC, the "self" just means the book is meant to help the reader with his problem without personal guidance from some professional. It doesn't mean the reader is supposed to figure it out on his own.

As I've gotten older, I've gotten more wary of certain biases that engineer-types often tend to indulge in. One of them is along the lines of "I'm so smart, I think I can figure it out on my own, therefore everything I think I don't need is unnecessary." Another is temptation to confirm one's intelligence by seeing the "real" reason as some cynical ploy that works on lesser people.

Also, I'm not saying every self-help book is good, or that it never happens that examples are truly just padding. It's just that there's good, non-cynical reasons to not to reduce everything down to some pithy list of axioms, and I know for a fact that at least one well-regarded one is structured that way, and it was a bit of a slog because of all the examples and stuff that didn't connect with my particular circumstance (but there's no way for someone I never met writing a couple years before my birth to tailor anything to me).