Are you aware of my Best of Rationality Quotes post? I'm not saying that it is directly relevant for you, but there is stuff there that might give you some inspiration, especially the weird aggregate statistics at the end.

I am thinking of coding up a web app for accumulating, voting, and commenting on quotes. Kind of like bash.org but much fancier.

Is that something you guys would be interested in? If so, what features would you want?

This would be free to use of course, and the site would not lock down the data (ie it would be exportable to various formats).

I am thinking there are a lot of communities that post quotes for internal use, and might be interested in a kind of unified web site for this. My initial thought is that it would be like Reddit, where each tribe/community/subculture/topic/etc gets its own subdirectory.

I think one of my favorite things is to see someone earnestly defend a marginally valuable and slightly controversial theory on LW, because the resulting dynamics cause the good parts of the theory to be revealed while simultaneously producing an object lesson in identifying junk science and filtering poorly tested claims with reasonableness. Most of the regular commenters wouldn't advocate or support a theory like NLP and if it was left to them the community wouldn't produce conversation trees like this one, which I find quite educational.

I wish there was some natural way for me to use the voting system to express "Boo!" to the idea of LW becoming infested with normal NLP jargon and culture, but "Thanks!" for starting and sticking with a massive comment tree defending NLP. As there is no natural way to express this, I'm writing this comment and upvoting here and here explicitly :-)

The main thing I think folks are objecting to here is the idea of 'swallowing the NLP pill.'

You'll see plenty of self hacks and hacks that work on others (dark arts, etc) but none of it will be labeled NLP. I imagine plenty of the techniques we have here were even inspired in one way or another by NLP.

But here's my main point. We have kept our ideas' scope down for a reason. We DO NOT WANT lukeprog's How To Be Happy to sound authoritative. The reason for that is if it turns out to be 'more wrong' it will be that much easier to let go of.

Introducing the label NLP to our discussions will lend (for some of us) a certain amount of Argument from Authority to the supporters of whoever takes the NLP side, and we really do not want that.

tl;dr:

Science is designed to avoid belief in untrue things, not figure out what is most likely to be true.

Interesting, that seems like an especially cheap and concrete thing to test.

Keep in mind that formal science is not the totality of research

Hey, I thought you might like this post on Science.

Wikipedia suggests that NLP doesn't have any science behind it and it's predictions have been tested and disconfirmed. I'd have to hear a good explanation for this before giving NLP much time.

Status is in the map, not in the territory, siduri. The map of "snooty New-York poets" needn't be our own map.

Yes but being aware of what signals one is sending out is helpful. Given that humans play status games it is helpful to be aware of how those games function so one doesn't send signals out that cause people to pay less attention or create other barriers to communication.

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.