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ChristianKl comments on Open thread, Nov. 02 - Nov. 08, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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There's research that indicates that the NLP Fast Phobia Cure produce effects but there no research that it's better than other CBT techniques.
I consider basic claims by Bandler about rapport as nowadays accepted by psychology as mimicry of bodylanguage. As far as I see nobody cited Bandler for that and mainstream psychology developed their ideas about mimicry separately decades later.
The idea that there are eye accessing cues that are the same in every person that NLP taught in it's early days has been shown to be false in methodically bad studies and it's not taught anymore by Bandler and good modern NLP trainers. You will however still find articles on the internet proclaiming the theory to be true as claimed in the early days of NLP.
In Bandler latest book he mostly talks about applying an idea about strengthing emotions that you want by spinning them in your body and disassociating negative emotions. I'm not aware about good published research around those mechanisms.
Another significant claim of Bandler is that he can cure schizophrenics. I don't know his approach with schizophrenics works and as far as I know there no research investigating it.
NLP trainers after Bandler are not in the habit of using language with the goal of saying things that are objective true, but focus on saying things that they believe will produce positive change in the person they are talking with.
Bandler is not open about what he beliefs he's doing when he's training NLP trainers. Science itself rests on people openly stating what they believe.
Bandler does tell people at the end of his NLP trainer programs that there no such thing as NLP, so the issue of whether he decides whether or not his methods are NLP is not straightforward.
NLP works very differently with epistomological questions. It has a different approach to the question of how you teach a person skills to be a good therapist than mainstream psychology.
I'm aware that Strugeon's law is in full effect within the NLP community, my questions were specifically about Bandler and his results.
I fail to see how anything you said has an impact on the observation that Andy did not need to return to the mental institute. Unless you dispute at least that single claim, the lack of research is better explained with the hypothesis that the researchers failed to understand the topic well enough to account for enough variables, like how Bandler almost always teaches NLP in the context of hypnosis.
If whatever Bandler does is producing verifiable results, shouldn't it be at least an explicit goal of science to find out why it works for him, as opposed to whether it works if you throw an NLP manual at an undergrad? Shouldn't it be a goal of science to find out how he came up with his techniques, and how to do that better than him?
YES!
Personally, I wouldn't take Bandler very seriously because of the whole "narcissistic liar" thing and the fact that the one intervention of his I saw was thoroughly lacking in displayed skill (and noteworthy result), but yes, you should look at the experts, not at the undergrads handed a manual designed by the researcher who isn't an expert himself. It's much better to study "effectiveness of this expert", not "effectiveness of this technique". I'd just rather see someone like Steve Andreas studied.
I know from personal experience that even people with good intentions will strawman the shit out of you if you talk about this kind of thing because there's so much behind it that they just aren't gonna get. Ironically enough, Milton Erickson, the guy who Bandler modeled NLP after, allegedly had this exact complaint about NLP ("Bandler and Grinder think they have me in a nut shell, but all they have is a nutshell." )
A while ago I would have agreed, today I'm not sure whether that would go somewhere. I think you need researchers with both scientific skills and which actual abilities.
Part of the reason why I respect Danis Bois so much is that after he was successful at teaching bodywork he went and worked through the proper academic way because he found the spiritual community to dogmatic. He got a real PHD and then a professorship.
For hypnosis it likely would have to be similar. Someone who went deep into it. Who lives in the mental world of hypnosis and does 90%+ of his day to day communication in that mode but who then feels bad about the unscientific attitude of his community. A person who then starts a scientific career might really bring the field forward.
Yeah, I see the distinction you're getting at and completely agree. I was referring more to showing "hey, this can't be nonsense since somehow this guy actually gets results even though I have no idea what he's doing", which is an important step on its own, even if it's not scientific evidence behind individual teachable things.
Look at the state of pyschology today. They tried to replicate 100 findings. A third checked out. A third nearly checked out and another third didn't check out at all.
If you are a psychologists at the moment and get embarrased as a result, you want to move in a direction where more results replicate. Studying highly performing people like Steve Andreas could very well not help with that goal.
Right.
To me, that looks like a slightly different angle on the same thing. If you want to nail down some things so you can say "hey look, we know some things", then studying high performing people wouldn't be the way to go. If, on the other hand, you're pretty okay with saying "hey look, of course we don't know anything, that's why we're still in exploration mode, but look at all this cool shit we're sifting through!", then it starts to look a lot more appealing.
It certainly doesn't surprise me that this kind of research isn't being done, and I can empathize with that embarrassment and wanting to have something nailed down to show the nay sayers. I also find it rather unfortunate. It strikes me as eating the marshmallow. Personally, I'd rather fast for a few days then drag back a moose.
That, actually, depends on whether this cool shit is a stable pattern or just transient noise. Looking at cool-shit noise is fine as an aesthetic experience, but I wouldn't call it science (or "exploration mode" either).
And, of course, there is the issue of intellectual honesty: saying "we found this weird thing that looks curious" is different from saying "we have conclusively demonstrated a statistically significant at the 0.0X level result".
I suspect you'll go off chasing butterflies and will never get anywhere, if we're getting into hunter-gatherer metaphors.
That's a terrible aesthetic experience. Your sense of aesthetics is supposed to do something
That's a very reasonable thing to suspect. It's a less reasonable thing to take as given, especially considering the size of the prize and the ease of asking a hunter "ever killed anything?".
LOL. Besides the whole going-meta-on-aesthetics thing, wouldn't that depend on how cool the shit it?
The hunter will proudly show you his collection of butterflies, all nicely pinned and displayed in proper boxes. Proper boxes are very important, dontcha know?
I have a feeling we have different images in mind. You have a vision of intrepid explorers deep in the jungle, too busy collecting specimens and fighting off piranhas and anacondas to suitably process all they see -- the solid scientific work can wait until they return to the lab and can properly sort and classify all they brought back.
I see a medieval guild of piece workers, producing things. Some things are OK, some not really, but you must produce the pieces, otherwise you'll starve and never make it from apprentice to the master. It would be, of course, very nice to craft a masterpiece, but if you can't a steady flow of adequate (as determined by your peers who are not exactly unbiased judges) pieces will be sufficient and the more the better.
Science itself is about the search for finding knowledge and not about sifting through cool shit. I also consider it okay that our society has academic psychologists who attempt to build reliable knowledge.
I think it's worthwhile to have different communities of people persuing different strategies of knowledge generation.
I don't disagree with any of the statements you made, and none of them are required to be false for my point to be valid.
I'm kinda getting the impression that you aren't being very careful or charitable in your reading of my comments. Is that impression wrong?
I don't think the point of a post is to show how another person is wrong or to only say things where who I'm talking about is likely to disagree.
Given the current scientific framework you don't change a theory based on anecdotal evidence and single case studies. Especially when it comes to a person who's known to be at least partly lying about the anecdotes he tells.
What do you mean with the phrase "explicit goal of science"? The goals that grand funding agencies set when they give out grants? To the extent that you think studying people with high abilities is good approach of advancing science, I wouldn't pick a person who's in the habit of lying and showmanship but a person who values epistemically true beliefs and who's open about what they think they are doing.
I think the term pseudoscience doens't really apply for Bandler. For me the term means a person who's pretending to play with the rules of science but who doesn't. Bandler isn't playing with the rules or pretending to do so. That doesn't mean that he's wrong and what he teaches isn't effective but at the same time it doesn't bring his work into science.
It's typical for New Atheists to reject everything that's not part of the scientific mosaic as useless discredited pseudoscience. I don't think that's useful way of looking at how the world works. If you want to go further into that direction of thought, a nice talk was recently shared on the Facebook LW group: Scientific Pluralism and the Mission of History and Philosophy of Science
For full disclosure, I do have a decent amount of NLP training with Chris Mulzer who attended Bandlers trainer training program every year for a decade. I know multiple people who attended seminars with Bandler.
Oh, I see the problem now. You're waiting for research to allow you to decide to do the research you're waiting for. When the scientific framework tells you there isn't enough research to reach a conclusion, doesn't it also tell you to do more research? Picking a research topic should not be as rigorous a process as the research itself.
Even if all the anecdotal and single case studies are false, shouldn't you at least be interested in why so many people believe in it? NLP is not a religion, you pick it up as an adult. Even if the entire NLP/hypnosis/seduction/whatever industry is just a giant crackpot convention, they still demonstrate enough persuasion techniques to convince people it's real. Shouldn't you be swarming over that with the idea of eliminating your suicide rate?
What do you mean when you say "you"?
I have more formal credentials with NLP then with academic psychology.
I have multiple friends who makes their living in that industry. One of my best friends worked for a while as a salesperson for Bandlers seminars. I don't have friends who have as much friends who have degrees in academic psychology.
I just understands both sides well enough to tell you about the situation we have at the moment.