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* :-)
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.