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.
Possibly I’m erroneously assuming that the vacuum-cleaner salesman voice is suboptimal because it annoys me.
I read an interview with a spammer, who said he experimented with different message types, and switched to writing spam in all uppercase with exclamation points because it got more positive responses.
Possibly, good mass-market salesmen optimize to sell to stupid people, whether what they are selling is good or bad.
Yes, I’ve talked to at least one person who worked as a car salesperson for a while and is surprisingly intelligent for that job. Their take was essentially that for a lot of people the obvious salesmany tactics work. Moreover, they asserted that the people who they don’t work on are also generally people where even more polite tactics often won’t work on, so one isn’t losing that much.
I don’t know how much this applies to cars, but I’d suspect that this applies even more to spamming.
Whether this applies to the NLP people is probably to some extent whether the NLP people are trying to attract smart critical thinkers or trying to attract the general population. I don’t know enough about their goals to accurately speculate.
A lot of LWites (including you based on your mention of LoveSystems) seem to be interested in PUA, which is similar to NLP in that it contains a LOT of scammers and creepy people, but also has a group of genuinely useful and non-scammy people (eg Rob Judge and Mark Manson). I think our quest for scientific stringency should not ALWAYS get in the way of investigating cool new stuff. I’m sure NLP could be tested. If it’s possible to prove eg the existence of synesthesia in a lab setting then it should be possible to prove the stuff NLP talks about. But I’ll admit the lack of scientific founding is fishy.
In essence, mirroring is about finding out how the other person’s mind is wired to think (ie visual, auditory or kinesthetic for instance) and adapting your communications to that. It’s like initiating a handshake with a server and choosing a protocol that it supports, I guess.
Agreed. There are plenty of minor names in the field though, who don’t give me this impression. The NLP Mind Fest Event was apparently designed to bring out a lot of these lesser known people.
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.
Possibly I’m erroneously assuming that the vacuum-cleaner salesman voice is suboptimal because it annoys me.
I read an interview with a spammer, who said he experimented with different message types, and switched to writing spam in all uppercase with exclamation points because it got more positive responses.
Possibly, good mass-market salesmen optimize to sell to stupid people, whether what they are selling is good or bad.
Yes, I’ve talked to at least one person who worked as a car salesperson for a while and is surprisingly intelligent for that job. Their take was essentially that for a lot of people the obvious salesmany tactics work. Moreover, they asserted that the people who they don’t work on are also generally people where even more polite tactics often won’t work on, so one isn’t losing that much.
I don’t know how much this applies to cars, but I’d suspect that this applies even more to spamming.
Whether this applies to the NLP people is probably to some extent whether the NLP people are trying to attract smart critical thinkers or trying to attract the general population. I don’t know enough about their goals to accurately speculate.
A lot of LWites (including you based on your mention of LoveSystems) seem to be interested in PUA, which is similar to NLP in that it contains a LOT of scammers and creepy people, but also has a group of genuinely useful and non-scammy people (eg Rob Judge and Mark Manson). I think our quest for scientific stringency should not ALWAYS get in the way of investigating cool new stuff. I’m sure NLP could be tested. If it’s possible to prove eg the existence of synesthesia in a lab setting then it should be possible to prove the stuff NLP talks about. But I’ll admit the lack of scientific founding is fishy.
Here’s another book I’m reading, btw. It’s about NLP concepts of mirroring and rapport: http://www.begin2dig.com/2010/04/90-seconds-or-less-to-bond-skills-of.html
In essence, mirroring is about finding out how the other person’s mind is wired to think (ie visual, auditory or kinesthetic for instance) and adapting your communications to that. It’s like initiating a handshake with a server and choosing a protocol that it supports, I guess.
Agreed. There are plenty of minor names in the field though, who don’t give me this impression. The NLP Mind Fest Event was apparently designed to bring out a lot of these lesser known people.