Your inner Google

I googled 'a specific person -"genghis khan"' and got Bob Dylan in the top result. If you want specificity, include "specific".

Then again, if Google were optimized to provide useful answers to queries like these, it probably wouldn't be very useful.

"This post cites sources supporting its specific claim" is not the same thing as "this post is likely to remind its readers of a source that made roughly the same point". As it is, the post is mostly a bunch of information with no support at all, apart from anecdotes that may come to the reader's mind. I see no reason to think that the brain actually works as the post says it works.

The post does contain a useful piece of advice, though: "instead of asking yourself why a problem exists, ask yourself how to fix the problem", or, more generally, "instead of asking questions that yield useless answers, ask questions that yield useful ones".

Heh, you understood my intent perfectly. I'm pretty pig-headed on my own, but thanks for the encouragement :)

I propose that we create an open thread called "Fringe topics we should research for potential usefulness". In this thread, the usual downvoting norms would be somewhat laxer.

Possibly I'm erroneously assuming that the vacuum-cleaner salesman voice is suboptimal because it annoys me.

I read an interview with a spammer, who said he experimented with different message types, and switched to writing spam in all uppercase with exclamation points because it got more positive responses.

Possibly, good mass-market salesmen optimize to sell to stupid people, whether what they are selling is good or bad.

A lot of LWites (including you based on your mention of LoveSystems) seem to be interested in PUA, which is similar to NLP in that it contains a LOT of scammers and creepy people, but also has a group of genuinely useful and non-scammy people (eg Rob Judge and Mark Manson). I think our quest for scientific stringency should not ALWAYS get in the way of investigating cool new stuff. I'm sure NLP could be tested. If it's possible to prove eg the existence of synesthesia in a lab setting then it should be possible to prove the stuff NLP talks about. But I'll admit the lack of scientific founding is fishy.

Here's another book I'm reading, btw. It's about NLP concepts of mirroring and rapport: http://www.begin2dig.com/2010/04/90-seconds-or-less-to-bond-skills-of.html

In essence, mirroring is about finding out how the other person's mind is wired to think (ie visual, auditory or kinesthetic for instance) and adapting your communications to that. It's like initiating a handshake with a server and choosing a protocol that it supports, I guess.

Agreed. There are plenty of minor names in the field though, who don't give me this impression. The NLP Mind Fest Event was apparently designed to bring out a lot of these lesser known people.

where can we find a step-by-step explanation and solid justification of that theory?

The usual answer I've seen NLP practitioners give to this question is that they're too busy successfully applying NLP to waste time on proving it to the losers who aren't. Which is itself an example of the NLP technique of reframing.

Yes, I realize that it sets of skepticism alarms. It did so for me as well when I first encountered it. It's a detriment to the field that it looks scammy on the surface :)

Yes, I love his article on happiness. The problem with ONLY going with research-backed stuff is that one might be missing out on potentially useful stuff. My argument here is NOT to take NLP on faith, but rather to perhaps to investigate it further and see what it can offer.

A lot of it seems to be based on introspection and informal experimentation. Which could be said for the father of modern psychology, William James. Not trying to appeal to authority, just making a parallell.

Here's an article about that similarity as well: http://www.neurosemantics.com/nlp/nlp-articles/william-james-could-he-have-invented-nlp

I've used their "fast phobia cure" to amazing effect - at least it amazed me (and him) at the time.

It took less than 29 minutes of text chat back in early April, and the issue remains solved.

Haven't dicked around much with it yet. But one thing I can tell is that a lot of the self-hacking stuff I came up with myself over the years has been laid out in much clearer form in NLP. Always cool to get those "ah! so that's what I was doing" moments.

One thing I'm going to be experimenting with is changing my chunking and anchoring around exercise. In other words, trying to change the number of steps I perceive it to be, and the mental images and feelings it evokes when I think about it.

Something I'm currently playing around with is imagining turning down negative self-talk and dimming mental images that I don't wish to have.

That Wikipedia page confirms that its widely disrespected, but read the Wikipedia on the actual studies performed. There is supporting research, some of it fairly impressive. The list of ratio of supportive studies to dismissive studies is very much skewed in support of NLP on this wikipedia page.

There are a few issues I see here.

1) NLP sets off big time "SCAM!" flags, since they seem to be trying to use NLP to sell NLP (to idiots).

2) Their theories can be useful, but are still crap. You can test it and "disprove" it by finding a flaw without finding the part that made it useful.

Because of these, it's going to take work to extract the value that's there.

3) It's hard to test things that have more than a couple causal factors. The hypnosis research, which is more respected, falls prey to this all the time. They measure one correlation resulting from a giant mess of factors without holding other factors constant (because they have failed to even identify them) and then are surprised when they cant' get consistent results for their oversimplified model.

4) "NLP" is being used too loosely. If they do a study that fails to find evidence for one theoretical claim NLP practitioners have made, its is interpreted as "NLP is bullshit". There are plenty of studies that go that way for various hypnosis theories, but it is interpreted as "Well then, hypnosis must work differently than that".

I ended up researching "hypnosis" instead of "NLP" because it seemed to be easier to extract useful information on the same subject (though there is still a huge pile of BS to sift through and piece together), but I will say that NLP can teach you to do stuff you couldn't do before.

Their "fast phobia cure" does work, for example. I've done it.

We've sort of been down this road before.

Given Sturgeon's law, "merely useful" is pretty high praise.

versus

huge piles of ore abound around a mining town near where I grew up, one could easily acquire millions of dollars worth of silver, though only extract it at the cost of at least twice that in refining costs. Hence, the silver ore is worthless

I found some info on research: http://realpeoplepress.com/blog/research-in-nlp-neurolinguistic-programming-science-evidence.

Disclaimer: the author of that post is a major NLP persona.

Keep in mind that formal science is not the totality of research, see for example the writings of Seth Roberts on self-experimentation (the guy who invented the Shangri La diet and Morning Faces Therapy, among other hacks).

Here are some common patterns: http://www.nlpu.com/NewDesign/NLPU_Archives.html

Again, I am NOT an expert on NLP. I simply find it to be intriguing and full of potential. Coming here and talking about should not be construed as advocacy, merely "hey guys, this looks neat, could it be useful?" :)

Oh one more thing: if you've seen PJ Eby's "How to clean your desk video", then that's pretty much an NLP technique he uses. I think the term is "future-pacing".

If you're not sure whether the correct term is future-pacing, I think that rather than suggesting LW investigate NLP, perhaps you should do some more investigating of it. ;-)

(Hint: technically, you could maybe stretch the term to say I am future-pacing the feeling of enjoyment, but as generally applied in NLP, future-pacing is used to link a behavior to a context, and that is not at all how it's being applied in the video.)

And, as long as I'm commenting here, I'll say that I agree NLP has LW-worthwhile things in it; the linguistic meta-model, for example, is a key rationalist toolkit.

Unfortunately, even though NLP began as an effort to make psychotherapy more evidence-based and results-oriented, the field as a whole went Affective Death Spiral a long time ago (or some other sort of death spiral), and actually extracting wheat from the chaff is incredibly difficult.

I've spent countless hours reading, analyzing, watching videos... and the REAL meat of the subject is almost always in little offhand remarks made by the original developers of NLP, little hints about sequence and structure and direction. It's pretty clear the founders know some really useful things... but are REALLY bad at communicating them. And their followers mostly communicate things that are easy to communicate, but not (comparatively speaking) that useful.

And for self-hacking, relatively little of the content-free NLP methods seem to work... at least for the more challenging sorts of personal problems I work on in myself and others. Dilts' work on imprinted belief systems and the "logical levels" model are probably the parts of NLP I use most in my work, but even that's more in theory than in practice. (That is, I expect Dilts would note that my methods operate on the entities described in his models, without being the same techniques as such. I don't use physical timelines, for example.)

The main thing I think folks are objecting to here is the idea of 'swallowing the NLP pill.'

You'll see plenty of self hacks and hacks that work on others (dark arts, etc) but none of it will be labeled NLP. I imagine plenty of the techniques we have here were even inspired in one way or another by NLP.

But here's my main point. We have kept our ideas' scope down for a reason. We DO NOT WANT lukeprog's How To Be Happy to sound authoritative. The reason for that is if it turns out to be 'more wrong' it will be that much easier to let go of.

Introducing the label NLP to our discussions will lend (for some of us) a certain amount of Argument from Authority to the supporters of whoever takes the NLP side, and we really do not want that.

(Sorry for replying to my own comments).

NLP can be used for lots of things, one of them being reverse-engineering the minds of other which is called "modeling". Here is an example: http://www.nlplive.com/nlp/tim-ferriss-mind-hack-by-mr-twenty-twenty/

It's very interesting. He goes into how someone who is thinking in Auditory who won't truly understand a person who is thinking in Visual-Kinesthetic, like in this example, and so won't be able to take their success and emulate it. Do as I think, not as I say :)

More on modeling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_neuro-linguistic_programming#Modeling

Modeling can also be used on yourself. Ie figure out why you are supremely successful in one area of your life and try to map those behaviors/beliefs/capabilities/identity/environment over to to another area of your life which is less successful. I've used this myself with good results. In essence it's about using the concept of design patterns outside of computer programming.