Thanks, Raemon, this is inspiring. It reflects my experience learning to draw as an undergraduate, many years ago. I have not drawn much since college, but I do recall vividly the experience of, "Holy crap, is that what a person really looks like?!?" upon first producing a half-decent quick figure drawing. I eventually developed a pretty decent drawing ability, which has atrophied quite severely in the intervening years. The experience definitely influenced my overall thinking though -- I'm very aware that my brain is not telling me the actual shapes and relations that correspond to the light hitting my eyeballs, unless I take the trouble to consciously examine that first-order sensory input. And taking that idea to the meta-level, realizing that my mental models of other things might be wrong in hard-to-notice ways, and taking the trouble to at least try to notice them, has been a valuable skill. (Even if not always applied rigorously.) So I think this is absolutely a valuable sequence; and it's prompted me to try drawing again, too.

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.

There is evidence that it applies to big decisions too, although there's a tradeoff between satisfaction and success on objective criteria. One of the studies in that genre involved graduating college students choosing a job. The main independent variable was the personality variable of maximizing vs. satisfacing, rather than choice set size, but the results had a similar pattern. Maximizers tended to consider more possible jobs, get a job that was better on objective criteria like salary, and be less satisfied with their job.

Iyengar, Sheena S., Rachel F. Elwork, and Barry Schwartz (2006), “Doing Better But Feeling Worse: Looking for the ‘Best’ Job Undermines Satisfaction,” Psychological Science, 17 (2), 143–50. pdf

Expanding upon Simon's (1955) seminal theory, this investigation compared the choice-making strategies of maximizers and satisficers, finding that maximizing tendencies, although positively correlated with objectively better decision outcomes, are also associated with more negative subjective evaluations of these decision outcomes. Specifically in the fall of their final year in school, students were administered a scale that measured maximizing tendencies and were than followed over the course of the year as they searched for jobs. Students with high maximizing tendencies secured jobs with 20 per cent higher starting salaries than did students with low maximizing tendencies. However, maximizers were less satisfied that satisficers with the jobs they obtained, and experienced more negative affect throughout the job-search process. These effects were mediated by maximizers' greater reliance on external sources of information and their fixation on realized and unrealized options during the search and selection process.

That is, murdering someone is so socially inexcusable that we have evolved to instinctively avoid murdering people - or doing anything that is close enough to count as murder in the eyes of our tribe.

Is evolution fast enough to have evolved this instinct in the past 4000 years? IIRC, anthropologists have found murder was the most common cause of death for men in some primitive tribes. There can't have been a strong instinct against murder in tribal days, because people did it frequently.

Offhand, I'd think that the only mainstream American religions which could be compatible for most LessWrongians would be Unitarianism and the Quakers.