Richard Bandler hasn't demonstrated even a single verifiable, undisputable result with his methods, and he's been fabricating things like this for decades?

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.

his methods don't lead to his results in a way that matches his predictions?

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.

the creator of NLP is not qualified to decide whether or not his methods are NLP?

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.

So, apparently NLP is pseudoscience, and now I'm confused. Does anyone actually claim

• Richard Bandler hasn't demonstrated even a single verifiable, undisputable result with his methods, and he's been fabricating things like this for decades?
• his methods don't lead to his results in a way that matches his predictions?
• the creator of NLP is not qualified to decide whether or not his methods are NLP?

If there are no claims to any of the above, what exactly was discredited?

I have. I have no evidence that either pain killers or placebos work in any sort of medical sense; I have clear evidence that swallowing a pill causes me to relax, resulting in a immediate reduction in pain. This is stupid, and I am working on eliminating the pill, but still, if this is what works, I will continue to use it frequently until I find something better.

I think one of the major reasons that people dislike the idea of placebos is because they think that they are being medicine. This has not been my experience. Placebos are better than medicine, because they work directly on your mind, and your mind (my mind, anyway) is sometimes too stupid to pay attention to medicine. I would have been better off, and a bit wealthier, if a doctor had realized this before trying the medical route.

There is a particular danger in "grokking" quick-response and that is - it's extremely hard to self-evaluate that you're doing it wrong, and it takes a lot of time to unlearn a particular. I attest to this as a professional musician and advanced modal interfaces afficionado.

Also, I'm doubting the optimality of "eliminating your slow, conscious deliberation" in any non-synthetic scenario (like most Martial Arts contests and most Martial Arts in general are). There's a reason Law Enoforcers do not act as Martial Artists, and draw a fine line between deliberating consciously and acting on their motoric training, and run a scenario through a specific rule set.

I'd rather see this article using Law Enforcement instead of Martial Arts as an analogy. It would plant it in the grounds of reality more thoroughly.

If you have reason to believe the races to be different, and act differently towards them based solely on this difference, you're a Bayseian racist

So, let's take some Southern redneck. He interacts with black people on a regular basis and based on his personal experience he came to the conclusion that they are pretty damn dumb, dumber than white rednecks, anyway. Does he have a "reason to believe"? Is he a Bayesian racist?

Or let's take Alice. Alice knows the statistics about crime rates among black males and, say, Asian males. So on an empty street when she sees a black male she actively avoids him, but when she sees an Asian male she does not. Is she a Bayesian racist?

Is there a name for the following pattern?

• Argument or just noticing confusion
• "He looks way too confident, he's probably better at the field or has significant information"
• Catastrophic failure more or less matching my predictions

I seem to run into this a lot lately, but the alternative of assuming I'm correct seems even worse. I'm also often not in a position to ask about the source of their confidence.

You're allowed to check

If there are good Bayesian grounds.... Someone needs to demonstrate a hiring situation where group information masks individual information, AKA the resume.

Well, it's not like he had to teach the Basilisk a full Hogwarts curriculum; he only had to teach it what he knew that triggered the Interdict of Merlin, which is only the top whateverth percentile of his repertoire.

Fair point. I'd forgotten about the Interdict. With that said (and this applies to your second point as well), it seems unlikely that the Interdict of Merlin is the only reason for knowledge to be lost over time. For example, Riddle apparently found the horcrux ritual in a book, and that seems like powerful mostly-lost knowledge. Also, wizard society generally seems much worse at knowledge maximisation than muggle society. (side thought: is there even a single mention in either canon of wizard universities?)

The Basilisk may not have a perfect memory as an animal, but it "would be huge flaw in sscheme" if Salazar's magical Parseltongue knowledge was corruptible by the limitations of any old snake's brain.

True. One has to wonder, generally speaking, just how the whole thing worked, given that Parseltongue seems to blur terms for which it does not have an exact parallel ("schoolmaster", "hourglass to move through time"), and that seems like it would be a problem for advanced spell instructions.

I think you're extending your computer analogy too far. Salazar didn't have a revocable password to the wards, he knew the magic that created them, and the rest of the Founders certainly did not have the power to revoke spells from the Source of Magic.

We don't know that. The four founders came together to raise Hogwarts in the first place, suggesting that each of them knew only some of the magic necessary. There is no reason to believe that Salazar was the one who knew the magic for the Hogwarts wards, rather than, say, Rowena.

Additionally, you don't need to revoke a spell from the Source of Magic to prevent someone else making use of it. Going back to the computer analogy, being a system's original programmer doesn't mean you can automatically hack into any instance of that system. It is worth remembering that once Salazar left, it would have been three magical prodigies against one in the matter of establishing Hogwarts security.

Likewise don't get me wrong, I think it's reasonable to assume that whoever got the basilisk's knowledge got at least some very powerful magic from Slytherin; I just don't think we should overestimate how much that was.

I may be pointing out the obvious, but...

Professor Quirrell closed his eyes. His head leaned back into the pillow. "You were lucky," the Defense Professor said in a soft voice, "that a unicorn in Transfigured form... did not set off the Hogwarts wards, as a strange creature... I shall have to... take this outside the grounds, to make use of it... but that can be managed. I shall tell them that I wish to look upon the lake... I will ask you to sustain the Transfiguration before you go, and it should last long enough, after that... and with my last strength, dispel whatever death-alarms were placed to watch over the herd... which, the unicorn being not yet dead, but only Transfigured, will not yet have triggered... you were very lucky, Mr. Potter."

This is how the troll was smuggled into Hogwarts without the wards going off. In all likelihood, Quirrell had the transfigured troll on his person when Dumbledore identified to the Hogwarts wards "The Defense Professor stands within this circle". Trolls self-transfigure as a form of regeneration, so the transfiguration would not kill the troll or be detectable.