This post was, to some extent, directed particularly at you. It would seem that you haven’t taken my advice… I wish I knew of some good experimental results to back it up, as this would render it less ignorable.
What you’re talking about above is not a concrete experimental result. Neither is it a standard causal theory, nor is it a causal theory that strikes me as particularly likely to be true in the absence of experimental validation. Nor is it valid math validly interpreted, or logic that seems necessarily true across lawful possible worlds. I don’t care if it works for you and for other people you know; that doesn’t show anything about the truth of the model; there’s this thing called a placebo effect. The advice fails to meet the standard we’re accustomed to, and that’s why we’re ignoring it. It is just one more theory on the Internet at this point, and one more set of orders delivered in a confident tone but not explained well enough to interpret at all, really.
I’ve been whining at him for a while, though my complaint isn’t so much that his advice is misguided, as that he keeps offering pronouncements about how the mind works and how to make it work better, but evidence that his model and methods are sound seems sorely lacking (here, at least).
he keeps offering pronouncements about how the mind works and how to make it work better
...much of which has come attached with things that are actually possible to investigate and test on your own, and a few people have actually posted comments describing their results, positive or negative. I’ve even pointed to bits of research that support various aspects of my models.
But if you’re allergic to self-experimentation, have a strong aversion to considering the possibility that your actions aren’t as rational as you’d like to think, or just don’t want to stop and pay attention to what goes on in your head, non-verbally… then you really won’t have anything useful to say about the validity or lack thereof of the model.
I think it’s very interesting that so far, nobody has opposed anything I’ve said on the grounds that they tested it, and it didn’t work.
What they’ve actually been saying is, they don’t think it’s right, or they don’t think it will work, or that NLP has been invalidated, or ANYTHING at all other than: I tried thus-and-such using so-and-so procedure, and it appears that my results falsify this-or-that portion of the model you are proposing.”
In a community of self-professed rationalists, I find that very interesting. Not as interesting, mind you, as I would an actual result falsifying a portion of my model, though.
Because that, I would actually LEARN something from. I could try and replicate the person’s result, offer other things to try, or maybe even update my model. It does happen, pretty regularly—and the updates are almost equally likely to come from:
more-or-less mainstream psych and popularizations thereof,
pop, new age, or NLP stuff,
self-experimentation, and
unexpected events in client work
A recent mainstream psych example would be Dweck’s fixed/growth mindsets model, which I’ve now converted to a more specific model for change work that I call “or”/”more” thinking.
That is, a belief that “either I do this OR I fail”—a digital control variable of avoidance—is less useful than one where “the MORE I do this the more/closer I get”: an analog variable under your control.
This is a much finer-grained distinction than my older notion that didn’t include discrete/continuous, but focused strictly on the approach/avoidance aspect of the variables. It’s also a more narrowly-focused understanding of the difference than Dweck’s work, which speaks more about the effects of these mindsets than the mechanism of them, or how to change that mechanism in practice.
So now that I have this distinction, I’ve gone back and reviewed other things I’ve read that tie into this idea in one way or another, giving it more depth. That is, I can look at other discussions of “naturally successful” behavior, hypnotic techniques or NLP submodality techniques that link an increase in one thing to an increase in another, and so on.
In particular, I’ve found various techniques by Richard Bandler that describe how certain successful athletes and entertainers he worked with transformed “or” variables into “more” variables (although he didn’t use those terms).
I’m now in the process of self-experimenting with some of those techniques, preparatory to selecting ones to add to my personal and training repertoire.
That, more or less is my method for model refinement: read about ideas, try ideas, figure out what works, update models, find relevant techniques, try techniques w/self, w/clients, get ideas about what other ideas might be worth investigating, rinse and repeat.
Is it “the scientific method”. Probably not. Is it closer to the scientific method than the “I read something or believe something that means that won’t work, but can’t be bothered to tell whether it’s the same thing” approach favored by some folks? Hell yeah.
Btw, that attitude is why every new self-help author or guru has to come up with new names for every damn thing: the old names get worn out by people who conclude they already “know” what that thing is, because their brother told them something about something like that once and it sounded kind of like something else they tried that didn’t work.
Yet century-old techniques work fine, if you actually know how to do them, and you actually DO them. But surprisingly few people ever actually try, let alone try with all their might, in the “shut up and do the impossible” sense.
I am unable to make enough sense of what you say to try it. It is not written in a language I can read.
And that’s not a criticism I have a problem with. Hell, if you actually tried something and it didn’t work, and you gave me enough information to be able to tell what you did and what result you got instead , that would be excellent criticism, in my book.
Helpful criticism is helpful, and always welcomed, at least by me.
I don’t understand. Why should I have a problem with Eliezer’s criticism, or any considered criticism or honest opinion? It is only ignorant criticism and anti-applause lights that I have a problem with.
Well, that’s ambiguity in interpretation of “having a problem with something”. I (mis)interpreted your statement to mean “this kind of criticism doesn’t bother me”, that is you are not going to change anything in yourself in response, which would be unhealthy, whereas you seem to have intended it to say “this kind of criticism doesn’t offend me”.
I’m allergic to self-experimentation. I find that I’m not a very good judge on my own reactions. Furthermore, self-experimentation is probably the worst way to go about setting up a true model of the world.
Neither is it a standard causal theory, nor is it a causal theory that strikes me as particularly likely to be true in the absence of experimental validation.
Have you read the book? If not, I respectfully suggest you have not the slightest clue what you’re talking about.
This kind of argument is a winner in a war of attrition. It is a true game stopper, better than the responses of ever increasing length. It’s only fair that you have to argue the opponent into getting the book first. As a quick preliminary check, I looked it up on Wikipedia, and the following characterization doesn’t inspire:
At the time it was introduced, NLP was heralded as a breakthrough in therapy and advertisements for training workshops, videos and books began to appear in trade magazines. The workshops provided certification. However, controlled studies shed such a poor light on the practice, and those promoting the intervention made such extreme and changeable claims that researchers began to question the wisdom of researching the area further.
Online source? I’ve read The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense on matching modalities and it did not much impress me; I followed Nesov’s link and it says that NLP is currently in a state of having tried and failed to present evidence. I’m not likely to buy another book at that point, but could perhaps be convinced to read an online source which presents the result of an experiment.
Argh. You edited after I started replying. Here’s an online source that presents the result of an experiment, from the “NLP and Science” page on Wikipedia:
A study by Buckner et al (1987, after Sharpley), using trained NLP practitioners found support for the claim that specific eye movement patterns existed for visual and auditory components of thought, and that trained observers could reliably identify them.
By the way, as far as I can tell, the entire “NLP and science” page on Wikipedia is devoted to discussion of claims made in books other than NLP volume I, or that any rate are not central to the rep-systems and strategies model presented in volume I.
The major popular confusion about NLP is confusing techniques with the modeling method. Volume I is about modeling strategies: understanding what people do in their heads and bodies as a way of communicating those behaviors to other people. This is only tangentially related to therapeutic or persuasive applications of the models.
So, the idea of predicate matching is an application of NLP; not NLP itself. I’ve never read the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, so I’ve got no idea what it says or whether it’s sensible, any more than I could say whether an arbitrary “science” book is useful or helpful.
I’m not likely to buy another book at that point,
FWIW, Worldcat says there’s a copy at a library roughly 43 miles from SIAI HQ.
This seems… so classically crackpot.
I admit to initial skepticism towards NLP, but your posts have done nothing to alleviate that and most everything to confirm it. Are you saying that the best book (and thus the model) is 30 years old and the best experiments are 20 years old?
How about the experiments that went into proposing the model? To paraphrase someone, how was this model carved out of existence? Which information led to its identification contrary to the thousands of crackpot ‘theories’ of the mind? And what is your obsession with self-experimentation? That sounds like Hare Krishna.
You’re not doing well to distinguish NLP over the run-of-the-mill internet woo.
Are you saying that the best book (and thus the model) is 30 years old and the best experiments are 20 years old?
No, the best book I know of, about the core model of NLP: that everything we call “thinking” consists of manipulating sensory information, in one form or another, and that cognitive algorithms consist of transforming, combining, and comparing information across different sensory systems.
30 years ago, that was a revolutionary idea; now, it’s not actually that far off the beaten track, in that there’s recent mainstream support for a many of its ideas. (NLP had near/far distinctions 20 years ago, for example, and the critical role of physical sensations in mental recognition of emotions.)
How about the experiments that went into proposing the model? To paraphrase someone, how was this model carved out of existence? Which information led to its identification contrary to the thousands of crackpot ‘theories’ of the mind?
Bandler was editing books on therapy, listening to recordings of some very successful therapists, and noticed some interesting commonalities in their language. He talked to a linguistics professor at his college, who noticed it too.
Building on Bateson and Korzybski, they put together a linguistic model of information processing, to show how surface language structure reflects deep structure—i.e., what something says about how you’re likely thinking, grounded in what the therapists were doing to identify broken internal models in their clients.
In other words, they noticed that the successful therapists were noticing certain patterns of things people said, and then asking questions that forced the clients to reconsider their mental model of a situation.
Now, if this sounds familiar, it’s because REBT and CBT are based on the exact same thing, just without—AFAIK—as precise of a model as the linguistic one developed by B&G. And AFAIK, B&G described it first.
In my original version of this post, I went on to describe how they got to other models—that also now have experimental support—but it got bloody long. Short version: they got microexpressions first too, AFAIK, although they didn’t claim them to be universal. NLP practice drills focus on recognizing what the person in front of you is doing, not what everyone in the world might do.
And what is your obsession with self-experimentation?
That it produces useful results for the experimenter.
The link I gave to Amazon. If you mean a free online version, I don’t know of any. The Structure of Magic, Volume I is probably easier to find as a torrent or something, but it deals mostly with the mapping between linguistic structure and inner models. It predates NLP vI, and was the basis for the method by which they discovered the rep system and strategies model that was begun in NLP vI. It has been literally decades since I read it, and I don’t own a copy, so offhand I don’t know how illustrative it would be by comparison.
This post was, to some extent, directed particularly at you. It would seem that you haven’t taken my advice… I wish I knew of some good experimental results to back it up, as this would render it less ignorable.
What you’re talking about above is not a concrete experimental result. Neither is it a standard causal theory, nor is it a causal theory that strikes me as particularly likely to be true in the absence of experimental validation. Nor is it valid math validly interpreted, or logic that seems necessarily true across lawful possible worlds. I don’t care if it works for you and for other people you know; that doesn’t show anything about the truth of the model; there’s this thing called a placebo effect. The advice fails to meet the standard we’re accustomed to, and that’s why we’re ignoring it. It is just one more theory on the Internet at this point, and one more set of orders delivered in a confident tone but not explained well enough to interpret at all, really.
I’m relieved to read this Eliezer, because I thought it was just me who perceived pjeby’s advice as misguided.
I’ve been whining at him for a while, though my complaint isn’t so much that his advice is misguided, as that he keeps offering pronouncements about how the mind works and how to make it work better, but evidence that his model and methods are sound seems sorely lacking (here, at least).
...much of which has come attached with things that are actually possible to investigate and test on your own, and a few people have actually posted comments describing their results, positive or negative. I’ve even pointed to bits of research that support various aspects of my models.
But if you’re allergic to self-experimentation, have a strong aversion to considering the possibility that your actions aren’t as rational as you’d like to think, or just don’t want to stop and pay attention to what goes on in your head, non-verbally… then you really won’t have anything useful to say about the validity or lack thereof of the model.
I think it’s very interesting that so far, nobody has opposed anything I’ve said on the grounds that they tested it, and it didn’t work.
What they’ve actually been saying is, they don’t think it’s right, or they don’t think it will work, or that NLP has been invalidated, or ANYTHING at all other than: I tried thus-and-such using so-and-so procedure, and it appears that my results falsify this-or-that portion of the model you are proposing.”
In a community of self-professed rationalists, I find that very interesting. Not as interesting, mind you, as I would an actual result falsifying a portion of my model, though.
Because that, I would actually LEARN something from. I could try and replicate the person’s result, offer other things to try, or maybe even update my model. It does happen, pretty regularly—and the updates are almost equally likely to come from:
more-or-less mainstream psych and popularizations thereof,
pop, new age, or NLP stuff,
self-experimentation, and
unexpected events in client work
A recent mainstream psych example would be Dweck’s fixed/growth mindsets model, which I’ve now converted to a more specific model for change work that I call “or”/”more” thinking.
That is, a belief that “either I do this OR I fail”—a digital control variable of avoidance—is less useful than one where “the MORE I do this the more/closer I get”: an analog variable under your control.
This is a much finer-grained distinction than my older notion that didn’t include discrete/continuous, but focused strictly on the approach/avoidance aspect of the variables. It’s also a more narrowly-focused understanding of the difference than Dweck’s work, which speaks more about the effects of these mindsets than the mechanism of them, or how to change that mechanism in practice.
So now that I have this distinction, I’ve gone back and reviewed other things I’ve read that tie into this idea in one way or another, giving it more depth. That is, I can look at other discussions of “naturally successful” behavior, hypnotic techniques or NLP submodality techniques that link an increase in one thing to an increase in another, and so on.
In particular, I’ve found various techniques by Richard Bandler that describe how certain successful athletes and entertainers he worked with transformed “or” variables into “more” variables (although he didn’t use those terms).
I’m now in the process of self-experimenting with some of those techniques, preparatory to selecting ones to add to my personal and training repertoire.
That, more or less is my method for model refinement: read about ideas, try ideas, figure out what works, update models, find relevant techniques, try techniques w/self, w/clients, get ideas about what other ideas might be worth investigating, rinse and repeat.
Is it “the scientific method”. Probably not. Is it closer to the scientific method than the “I read something or believe something that means that won’t work, but can’t be bothered to tell whether it’s the same thing” approach favored by some folks? Hell yeah.
Btw, that attitude is why every new self-help author or guru has to come up with new names for every damn thing: the old names get worn out by people who conclude they already “know” what that thing is, because their brother told them something about something like that once and it sounded kind of like something else they tried that didn’t work.
Yet century-old techniques work fine, if you actually know how to do them, and you actually DO them. But surprisingly few people ever actually try, let alone try with all their might, in the “shut up and do the impossible” sense.
I am unable to make enough sense of what you say to try it. It is not written in a language I can read.
And that’s not a criticism I have a problem with. Hell, if you actually tried something and it didn’t work, and you gave me enough information to be able to tell what you did and what result you got instead , that would be excellent criticism, in my book.
Helpful criticism is helpful, and always welcomed, at least by me.
Why shouldn’t you?
I don’t understand. Why should I have a problem with Eliezer’s criticism, or any considered criticism or honest opinion? It is only ignorant criticism and anti-applause lights that I have a problem with.
Well, that’s ambiguity in interpretation of “having a problem with something”. I (mis)interpreted your statement to mean “this kind of criticism doesn’t bother me”, that is you are not going to change anything in yourself in response, which would be unhealthy, whereas you seem to have intended it to say “this kind of criticism doesn’t offend me”.
I’m allergic to self-experimentation. I find that I’m not a very good judge on my own reactions. Furthermore, self-experimentation is probably the worst way to go about setting up a true model of the world.
So basically are you saying Eliezer, gjm and others are falling for the fallacy fallacy ?
Have you read the book? If not, I respectfully suggest you have not the slightest clue what you’re talking about.
This kind of argument is a winner in a war of attrition. It is a true game stopper, better than the responses of ever increasing length. It’s only fair that you have to argue the opponent into getting the book first. As a quick preliminary check, I looked it up on Wikipedia, and the following characterization doesn’t inspire:
-- NLP and science on Wikipedia
Online source? I’ve read The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense on matching modalities and it did not much impress me; I followed Nesov’s link and it says that NLP is currently in a state of having tried and failed to present evidence. I’m not likely to buy another book at that point, but could perhaps be convinced to read an online source which presents the result of an experiment.
Argh. You edited after I started replying. Here’s an online source that presents the result of an experiment, from the “NLP and Science” page on Wikipedia:
By the way, as far as I can tell, the entire “NLP and science” page on Wikipedia is devoted to discussion of claims made in books other than NLP volume I, or that any rate are not central to the rep-systems and strategies model presented in volume I.
The major popular confusion about NLP is confusing techniques with the modeling method. Volume I is about modeling strategies: understanding what people do in their heads and bodies as a way of communicating those behaviors to other people. This is only tangentially related to therapeutic or persuasive applications of the models.
So, the idea of predicate matching is an application of NLP; not NLP itself. I’ve never read the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, so I’ve got no idea what it says or whether it’s sensible, any more than I could say whether an arbitrary “science” book is useful or helpful.
FWIW, Worldcat says there’s a copy at a library roughly 43 miles from SIAI HQ.
This seems… so classically crackpot. I admit to initial skepticism towards NLP, but your posts have done nothing to alleviate that and most everything to confirm it. Are you saying that the best book (and thus the model) is 30 years old and the best experiments are 20 years old?
How about the experiments that went into proposing the model? To paraphrase someone, how was this model carved out of existence? Which information led to its identification contrary to the thousands of crackpot ‘theories’ of the mind? And what is your obsession with self-experimentation? That sounds like Hare Krishna.
You’re not doing well to distinguish NLP over the run-of-the-mill internet woo.
No, the best book I know of, about the core model of NLP: that everything we call “thinking” consists of manipulating sensory information, in one form or another, and that cognitive algorithms consist of transforming, combining, and comparing information across different sensory systems.
30 years ago, that was a revolutionary idea; now, it’s not actually that far off the beaten track, in that there’s recent mainstream support for a many of its ideas. (NLP had near/far distinctions 20 years ago, for example, and the critical role of physical sensations in mental recognition of emotions.)
Bandler was editing books on therapy, listening to recordings of some very successful therapists, and noticed some interesting commonalities in their language. He talked to a linguistics professor at his college, who noticed it too.
Building on Bateson and Korzybski, they put together a linguistic model of information processing, to show how surface language structure reflects deep structure—i.e., what something says about how you’re likely thinking, grounded in what the therapists were doing to identify broken internal models in their clients.
In other words, they noticed that the successful therapists were noticing certain patterns of things people said, and then asking questions that forced the clients to reconsider their mental model of a situation.
Now, if this sounds familiar, it’s because REBT and CBT are based on the exact same thing, just without—AFAIK—as precise of a model as the linguistic one developed by B&G. And AFAIK, B&G described it first.
In my original version of this post, I went on to describe how they got to other models—that also now have experimental support—but it got bloody long. Short version: they got microexpressions first too, AFAIK, although they didn’t claim them to be universal. NLP practice drills focus on recognizing what the person in front of you is doing, not what everyone in the world might do.
That it produces useful results for the experimenter.
Online source?
The link I gave to Amazon. If you mean a free online version, I don’t know of any. The Structure of Magic, Volume I is probably easier to find as a torrent or something, but it deals mostly with the mapping between linguistic structure and inner models. It predates NLP vI, and was the basis for the method by which they discovered the rep system and strategies model that was begun in NLP vI. It has been literally decades since I read it, and I don’t own a copy, so offhand I don’t know how illustrative it would be by comparison.