where can we find a step-by-step explanation and solid justification of that theory?

The usual answer I've seen NLP practitioners give to this question is that they're too busy successfully applying NLP to waste time on proving it to the losers who aren't. Which is itself an example of the NLP technique of reframing.

I agree that it seems worth looking into. I've looked into NLP a little bit. I'm always turned off by the voices of its practitioners. Their tonality, speed, excitement, and rhythym scream "I am trying to sell you snake oil!" to me. This is odd for people who claim to be masters of subcommunication via speech. They often repeat the charlatan pattern I first observed in Tom Brown Jr., of spending as much time telling you how great what they are telling you is, as telling you things.

This applies also to the popular self-improvement gurus, including Tony Robbins. I cannot stand to listen to an audio of him; it's like being trapped in a small room with a door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesman.

So, like, what can you do with it?

the amazing stuff I am always reading about

I'm sure it's amazing to read about. How amazing have you found it in practice?

I haven't heard of NLP before, but reading about it now it's setting off all my old skepticism alarms. The claims it makes seem to be very vague and optimistic. I'm especially wary of things like the links you provided that talk about having "over 200 patterns"; I don't buy my textbooks based on their page count.

Self-hacking is cool, but any advice given along those lines needs to be backed up by solid literature something fierce (i.e. see lukeprog's How to Be Happy) to be plausible, and even then you should generally expect that any given piece of advice will only have a moderate chance of working on any given person.

Saying "I'm smart and I think it's worthwhile" isn't enough; lots of smart people think religion is worthwhile. If NLP has a central theory behind it, rather than just being an umbrella term for a bunch of disparate self-hacking techniques, then where can we find a step-by-step explanation and solid justification of that theory? And if there's isn't a central theory, then each "pattern" will have to be presented and justified on its own, and survive on its own merits independent of its sisters.

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".

To my understanding, what you are describing here is what is called a transderivational search in Neuro-Linguistic Programming. It is basically a "satisficing" (suffice+satisfy) fuzzy search.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transderivational_search http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing

Here's a pet peeve of mine: I think this site could find A LOT of benefit in delving into NLP. I mean, the whole field is basically a quest to find the machine-code of the human psyche. The version of NLP that is represented on sites like SkepDic seems like a poor representation of the amazing stuff I am always reading about, which is a shame as it turns people off from reading more about it.

Right now I'm reading Shlomo Vaknin's "Patterns of Neuro Linguistic Programming", which is pretty much a spellbook/hacking-manual containing 300+ patterns for doing all kinds of things to your mind.

http://www.amazon.com/Big-Book-NLP-Expanded-Programming/dp/9657489083 http://www.coachingleaders.co.uk/blog/nlp-book-review-the-big-book-of-nlp-techniques-by-shlomo-vak.html

The reason I bring up this book in particular is because it's a lot more concise and info-packed than any others I've seen, and so could serve as a good introduction.

There's an event going on right now called the NLP Mind Fest, which is proving to be very interesting. It's on day 4 already, though, and you can only listen to the presentations on a day-to-day basis.

http://www.nlpmindfestevent.com/

Oh, and this concept of asking better questions is something that Anthony Robbins is always talking about as one of the most important factors in self improvement. He says something to the effect of "the quality of your life is determined by the quality of the questions you ask yourself". And Robbins' background is in, you guessed it, NLP :)

TLDR: LessWrong needs to investigate NLP. I am a somewhat smart and non-kooky cookie and I find NLP interesting and worthwhile AND I am a big fan of LW. This might indicate that others could find value in the field as well.

To my understanding, what you are describing here is what is called a transderivational search in Neuro-Linguistic Programming. It is basically a "satisficing" (suffice+satisfy) fuzzy search.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transderivational_search http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing

Here's a pet peeve of mine: I think this site could find A LOT of benefit in delving into NLP. I mean, the whole field is basically a quest to find the machine-code of the human psyche. The version of NLP that is represented on sites like SkepDic seems like a poor representation of the amazing stuff I am always reading about, which is a shame as it turns people off from reading more about it.

Right now I'm reading Shlomo Vaknin's "Patterns of Neuro Linguistic Programming", which is pretty much a spellbook/hacking-manual containing 300+ patterns for doing all kinds of things to your mind.

http://www.amazon.com/Big-Book-NLP-Expanded-Programming/dp/9657489083 http://www.coachingleaders.co.uk/blog/nlp-book-review-the-big-book-of-nlp-techniques-by-shlomo-vak.html

The reason I bring up this book in particular is because it's a lot more concise and info-packed than any others I've seen, and so could serve as a good introduction.

There's an event going on right now called the NLP Mind Fest, which is proving to be very interesting. It's on day 4 already, though, and you can only listen to the presentations on a day-to-day basis.

http://www.nlpmindfestevent.com/

Oh, and this concept of asking better questions is something that Anthony Robbins is always talking about as one of the most important factors in self improvement. He says something to the effect of "the quality of your life is determined by the quality of the questions you ask yourself". And Robbins' background is in, you guessed it, NLP :)

TLDR: LessWrong needs to investigate NLP. I am a somewhat smart and non-kooky cookie and I find NLP interesting and worthwhile AND I am a big fan of LW. This might indicate that others could find value in the field as well.

My speculation: people in "our" personspace cluster tend to be pattern mismatchers/polarity responders (NLP lingo, there are probably some googleable descriptions). Whereas "normals" get good emotions from rapport, "we" are the opposite. A lot of nerd awkwardness probably comes from the failure to understand and utilize rapport.

What you are describing is well known in Neuro Linguistic Programming. I'm not super familiar with the terms (yet) but I THINK this is referred to as "chunking". "Submodalities" and "anchoring" might also be relevant.

More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming

I think LW could do very well to import a lot of knowledge from NLP and try to see what's valid and what's not. I've noticed that people here are often reinventing the wheel.

PJ Eby, please chime in on this.