Another huge link full of the jargon isn't helpful. What do the leaders in the field claim for it? I'm looking for straight-forward English sentences describing the effects of employing NLP. Like how, if I asked someone what you can do with aerodynamics they might reply "Build things that fly!".
It seems to be a kind of psychological therapy- but there are hundreds of such methods some supported by licensed clinicians and others not. All of it is subject to a huge placebo-like effect-- to the point where all of it may be no better than talking to a bartender about your problems. So picking a random set of ideas in the entire therapy/self help memeplex and saying "Less Wrong should investigate this" is a bit preposterous absent powerful claims or good evidence. Why shouldn't Less Wrong investigate one of the following instead: expressive art therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, functional analytic therapy, CBT, humanistic psychotherapy, existential psychotherapy, integrative-existential psychotherapy, re-evaluation counseling, psychodynamics, holistic psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, logotherapy, person-centered psychotherapy, primal therapy, psychosynthesis, REBT, RLT, Jungian psychotherapy, Lacanian psychotherapy, DBT, DDP, DNMS, conversation therapy, dance therapy, Daseinanalytic psychotherapy, feminist therapy, Gestalt therapy, Holotropic breathwork, rebirthing- breathwork, IFSM.
I haven't studied "NLP" much, but I've studied how it all works, mostly from hypnosis resources. CBT, NLP, and hypnotherapy all use similar approaches and can be explained by the same perspective.
Useful things I've done with my knowledge include pain control, phobia cures, motion sickness near-cures, helping people deal with intrusive thoughts, that sort of thing. All quite effective- not some years of talking it out therapy.
It's worth pointing out that "placebo effect!" isn't an argument against anything- if it works it works. It's just an argument for cheaper placebo's. However, the barman is not a skilled placebomancer, and neither are you unless you do your research.
I just heard a comment by Braddock of Lovesystems that was brilliant: All that your brain does when you ask it a question is hit "search" and return the first hit it finds. So be careful how you phrase your question.
Say you just arrived at work, and realized you once again left your security pass at home. You ask yourself, "Why do I keep forgetting my security pass?"
If you believe you are a rational agent, you might think that you pass that question to your brain, and it parses it into its constituent parts and builds a query like
X such that cause(X, forget(me, securityPass))
and queries its knowledge base using logical inference for causal explanations specifically relevant to you and your security pass.
But you are not rational, and your brain is lazy; and as soon as you phrase your question and pass it on to your subconscious, your brain just Googles itself with a query like
why people forget things
looks at the first few hits it comes across, maybe finds their most-general unifier, checks that it's a syntactically valid answer to the question, and responds with,
"Because you are a moron."
Your inner Google has provided a plausible answer to the question, and it sits back, satisfied that it's done its job.
If you instead ask your brain something more specific, such as, "What can I do to help me remember my security pass tomorrow?", thus requiring its answer to refer to you and actions to remember things and tomorrow, your brain may come up with something useful, such as, "Set up a reminder now that will notify you tomorrow morning by cell phone to bring your security pass."
So, try to be at least as careful when asking questions of your brain, as when asking them of Google.