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.)
I'm reminded of a time I saw an NLP practitioner offer to work with volunteers from a crowd, and a friend of mine stepped up, and asked for help with a problem. I could tell what problem it was by the expression on his face, and it was something he'd spent months convincing himself was unsolvable. I wish I'd paid enough attention to have some idea of what the NLP practitioner tried, but it didn't work.
Do you have ideas about what to do if there are months of repeated words about a problem being unsolvable?
Also, what to you think of Core Transformation?
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.