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rysade comments on Your inner Google - Less Wrong
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Oh btw, I think there is a lot of stuff that was discovered by the LW community yet was already known by NLP. Take the concept of dissolving your intuitions. NLP would agree that intuitions are not atomic, and would try to look at the compontents from various angles:
Visual representation: mental images and movies
Auditory representation: linguistics/labels/associations/metaphors used to describe the intuition
Kinesthaetic representation: gut feelings, "uggghhh" fields
Chunk size: the level of abstractness, how many other concepts it subsumes
Ecology: how does this affect other parts of the person's psyche? Are there internal conflicts?
Secondary gain: ie the intuition might be harmful/counterproductive but the person gets some benefit from it, even if only a sense of certainty
They would probably go into more factors as well. I am still a neophyte to this. I just wanted to highlight an example of a similarity between NLP and LW. As I said, I think there are lots of these similarities.
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".
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.
"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."
This.
Whenever you give a collection of concepts a name, you almost automatically start to create a conceptual "immune system" to defend it, keep it intact in the face of criticism. This sort of getting-attached-to-names strikes me as approximately the opposite of Rationalist Taboo. (Hey, did someone just dis Rationalist Taboo? Lemme at 'em!)
I suspect that giving a name to a hypothesis can cause you to defend it but it might be able to do the opposite also if it is already a hypothesis you dislike. I suspect that it is more likely to move one's emotional attachment towards extremes rather than move one's attitude in any specific direction. I also suspect this is more likely to be a problem for extended hypotheses that are more networks of interlocking ideas than simple hypotheses (so e.g. NLP would be a name in this sense, but I suspect that "Rationalist Taboo" would be too simple to have much of an actual impact.)
Shorthand hypothesis names are generally helpful. I suspect that for most purposes naming hypotheses will provide more help (in terms of efficient communication and in terms of one's own mental shortcuts and processing) than it will harm.
I think the problem is not just giving hypotheses names, but giving large collections of hypotheses names. It bundles them together so that the strongest hypotheses in the group can defend the weakest ones, or the weakest ones can damage the strongest ones, even if the different hypotheses aren't actually related in a technical sense.
Dividing hypotheses into "NLP" and "not-NLP" is an attempt to carve hypothesis-space at its natural joints, and therefore needs to be justified by clear shared dependencies among those hypotheses.
The idea that giving a name to a hypothesis causes you to defend it is an interesting one.
That's the most meta concept I've heard in a while.
Absolutely agree with that. Was not suggesting wholesale acceptance of NLP (which is quite non-monolithic mind you) either, merely pointing at something and saying "let's find out if there's some value to that thing there".
The way I figure it, NLP is about hacking the psyche through manipulating the individual experience at a lower level than mainstream psychology (although there seems to be some overlap with eg CBT in the linguistic part of NLP). I can't think of any other therapy form that asks the subject to manipulate their mental images in order to achieve results, for instance. That part alone makes NLP very interesting to me.
I may be biased since I'm not so interested in eg quantum physics, Bayes probability, or AI theory, as many here are. My main interests lie in my own personal development/improvement. Hence my openness to checking out somewhat fringe topics.
Ordinarily, "great claims require great evidence" is a great attitude, but in the field of self help my heuristic is a little bit more liberal. In this area, I tend to think "great claims are worth investigating even if the evidence is a bit lacking".
So now you guys know where I'm coming from, and that I really meant no harm, and you may now continue wrecking my karma *sulk* :-)