Lots of people offer pointers to somebody else's writings. Most of those people do not know enough about how to produce lasting useful psychological change to know when a document or an author is actually worth the reader's while. IMHO almost all the writings on the net about producing lasting useful psychological change are not worth the reader's while.

You missed the point - I was pointing out there is no financial incentive for me to send somebody to download somebody else's free stuff, when I sell workshops on the same topic.

The fact that you use hypnotic techniques on clients and write a lot about hypnosis raises probability D significantly because hypnotic techniques rely on the natural human machinery for negotiating who is dominant and who is submissive or the natural human machinery for deciding who will be the leader of the hunting party. Putting the client into a submissive or compliant state of mind probably helps a practitioner quite a bit to persuade the client to believe falsely that lasting change has been produced. You have presented no evidence or argument -- nor am I aware of any evidence or argument -- that putting the client into a submissive or compliant state helps a practitioner producing lasting change. Consequently, your reliance on and interest in hypnotic techniques significantly raises probability D.

Holy cow, you're confused. To actually refute the huge chain of fallacies you've just perpetrated seems like it would take me all day. Nonetheless, I shall try to be brief:

1. I do not use formal hypnosis. I have recently been interested in the similarities between certain effects of hypnosis and my techniques.

2. I am not aware of any connection between hypnosis, dominance, and hunting parties, and would be very, very surprised if any arose, unless perhaps we're talking about stage hypnotism. The tools I work with are strictly ones of monoidealism and ideodynamics... which are at work whenever you start thinking you're hungry until it becomes enough of an obsession for you to walk to the fridge. That is what monoidealism and ideodynamics are: the absorption of the imagination upon a single thought until it induces emotional, sensory, or physical response.

3. I do not consider my work to be done until someone is surprised by their behavior or their automatic responses, specifically in order to avoid "false placebo" effects. Sometimes, a person will say they think they changed or that something changed a little bit, and my response to that is always to question it, to find out specifically what is happening. A true success nearly always involves something that the person did not expect -- indicating that their S1 behavior model has changed, relative to their S2 self-modeling.

4. A state of submission is not useful to my work; I spend a considerable effort getting clients out of such states, because then they will spend ridiculous amounts of time deprecating themselves, instead of actually answering the questions I ask.

Whew. I think that'll do for now.

When you believe for example that you have produced a lasting improvement in a male client's ability to pick up women in bars, have you ever actually accompanied the client to a bar and observed how long it takes the client to achieve some objectively-valid sign of success (such as getting the woman's phone number or getting the woman to follow the client out to his car)?

I do not believe I have produced such an improvement. I have had only one client who asked for anything like this, and it was for alleviation of specific fears in the matter... and the result was what I'd consider a partial success. That is, the alleviation of some of the fears, and not others. The client did not pursue the matter further with me, but has a girlfriend now. I don't know whether he met her in a bar or not, but then, the situation we discussed was talking to a girl on the subway. ;-)

If someone wants to learn to do pickup, they should go to a pickup coach. I don't teach pickup, and I'm not a coach.

In your extensive writings on this site, I can recall no instance where you describe your verifying your impression that you have created a lasting change in a client using reliable means. Rather, you have described only unreliable means, namely, your perceptions of the mental and the social environment and reports from clients about their perceptions of the mental and the social environment. That drastically raises probability D. Of course, you can bring probability D right back down again, and more, by describing instances where you have used reliable means to verify your impression that you have created a lasting change.

Since it is my clients' perceptions that determine their behavior (not to mention their satisfaction), what else is it that I should measure, besides their perceptions? What measurement of the goodness of their lives shall I use? Is there such a thing as a scale for objectively determining how good someone's life is?

I seem to remember someone who said something along the lines of "we pretend to treat people, and if we pretend really well, they will pretend to get better... for the rest of their lives." The point is not about pretending, the point is that virtually all of the measuring tools we have for subjective experience are themselves subjective. (Somatic markers are at least empirical, though still not entirely objective.)

In my book, until I see very strong evidence to the contrary, every mental-health practitioner and self-help practitioner is with high probability deluded except those that constantly remind themselves of how little they know.

I am most curious as to what this evidence would look like. How would you measure it? I would truly love to know about such an absolute measure, if it existed, because even if my methods scored low on it, it would offer me untold opportunity to improve -- provided, of course, it gave relatively fast feedback.

(I use somatic markers for measurement because they give extremely fast feedback, and sometimes fast feedback with modest accuracy can be much more useful than a precise measurement that takes weeks or months.)

I worry that your copious writings on this site will discourage contributions from those who have constructed their causal model of mental and social reality more carefully.

1. Replying to me with this type of thing is not a good way to discourage me from writing here.

2. Your models are not nearly as carefully constructed as mine, or you wouldn't be confusing hypnosis with social dominance.