This kind of argument is a winner in a war of attrition. It is a true game stopper, better than the responses of ever increasing length. It’s only fair that you have to argue the opponent into getting the book first. As a quick preliminary check, I looked it up on Wikipedia, and the following characterization doesn’t inspire:
At the time it was introduced, NLP was heralded as a breakthrough in therapy and advertisements for training workshops, videos and books began to appear in trade magazines. The workshops provided certification. However, controlled studies shed such a poor light on the practice, and those promoting the intervention made such extreme and changeable claims that researchers began to question the wisdom of researching the area further.
Online source? I’ve read The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense on matching modalities and it did not much impress me; I followed Nesov’s link and it says that NLP is currently in a state of having tried and failed to present evidence. I’m not likely to buy another book at that point, but could perhaps be convinced to read an online source which presents the result of an experiment.
Argh. You edited after I started replying. Here’s an online source that presents the result of an experiment, from the “NLP and Science” page on Wikipedia:
A study by Buckner et al (1987, after Sharpley), using trained NLP practitioners found support for the claim that specific eye movement patterns existed for visual and auditory components of thought, and that trained observers could reliably identify them.
By the way, as far as I can tell, the entire “NLP and science” page on Wikipedia is devoted to discussion of claims made in books other than NLP volume I, or that any rate are not central to the rep-systems and strategies model presented in volume I.
The major popular confusion about NLP is confusing techniques with the modeling method. Volume I is about modeling strategies: understanding what people do in their heads and bodies as a way of communicating those behaviors to other people. This is only tangentially related to therapeutic or persuasive applications of the models.
So, the idea of predicate matching is an application of NLP; not NLP itself. I’ve never read the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, so I’ve got no idea what it says or whether it’s sensible, any more than I could say whether an arbitrary “science” book is useful or helpful.
I’m not likely to buy another book at that point,
FWIW, Worldcat says there’s a copy at a library roughly 43 miles from SIAI HQ.
This seems… so classically crackpot.
I admit to initial skepticism towards NLP, but your posts have done nothing to alleviate that and most everything to confirm it. Are you saying that the best book (and thus the model) is 30 years old and the best experiments are 20 years old?
How about the experiments that went into proposing the model? To paraphrase someone, how was this model carved out of existence? Which information led to its identification contrary to the thousands of crackpot ‘theories’ of the mind? And what is your obsession with self-experimentation? That sounds like Hare Krishna.
You’re not doing well to distinguish NLP over the run-of-the-mill internet woo.
Are you saying that the best book (and thus the model) is 30 years old and the best experiments are 20 years old?
No, the best book I know of, about the core model of NLP: that everything we call “thinking” consists of manipulating sensory information, in one form or another, and that cognitive algorithms consist of transforming, combining, and comparing information across different sensory systems.
30 years ago, that was a revolutionary idea; now, it’s not actually that far off the beaten track, in that there’s recent mainstream support for a many of its ideas. (NLP had near/far distinctions 20 years ago, for example, and the critical role of physical sensations in mental recognition of emotions.)
How about the experiments that went into proposing the model? To paraphrase someone, how was this model carved out of existence? Which information led to its identification contrary to the thousands of crackpot ‘theories’ of the mind?
Bandler was editing books on therapy, listening to recordings of some very successful therapists, and noticed some interesting commonalities in their language. He talked to a linguistics professor at his college, who noticed it too.
Building on Bateson and Korzybski, they put together a linguistic model of information processing, to show how surface language structure reflects deep structure—i.e., what something says about how you’re likely thinking, grounded in what the therapists were doing to identify broken internal models in their clients.
In other words, they noticed that the successful therapists were noticing certain patterns of things people said, and then asking questions that forced the clients to reconsider their mental model of a situation.
Now, if this sounds familiar, it’s because REBT and CBT are based on the exact same thing, just without—AFAIK—as precise of a model as the linguistic one developed by B&G. And AFAIK, B&G described it first.
In my original version of this post, I went on to describe how they got to other models—that also now have experimental support—but it got bloody long. Short version: they got microexpressions first too, AFAIK, although they didn’t claim them to be universal. NLP practice drills focus on recognizing what the person in front of you is doing, not what everyone in the world might do.
And what is your obsession with self-experimentation?
That it produces useful results for the experimenter.
This kind of argument is a winner in a war of attrition. It is a true game stopper, better than the responses of ever increasing length. It’s only fair that you have to argue the opponent into getting the book first. As a quick preliminary check, I looked it up on Wikipedia, and the following characterization doesn’t inspire:
-- NLP and science on Wikipedia
Online source? I’ve read The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense on matching modalities and it did not much impress me; I followed Nesov’s link and it says that NLP is currently in a state of having tried and failed to present evidence. I’m not likely to buy another book at that point, but could perhaps be convinced to read an online source which presents the result of an experiment.
Argh. You edited after I started replying. Here’s an online source that presents the result of an experiment, from the “NLP and Science” page on Wikipedia:
By the way, as far as I can tell, the entire “NLP and science” page on Wikipedia is devoted to discussion of claims made in books other than NLP volume I, or that any rate are not central to the rep-systems and strategies model presented in volume I.
The major popular confusion about NLP is confusing techniques with the modeling method. Volume I is about modeling strategies: understanding what people do in their heads and bodies as a way of communicating those behaviors to other people. This is only tangentially related to therapeutic or persuasive applications of the models.
So, the idea of predicate matching is an application of NLP; not NLP itself. I’ve never read the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, so I’ve got no idea what it says or whether it’s sensible, any more than I could say whether an arbitrary “science” book is useful or helpful.
FWIW, Worldcat says there’s a copy at a library roughly 43 miles from SIAI HQ.
This seems… so classically crackpot. I admit to initial skepticism towards NLP, but your posts have done nothing to alleviate that and most everything to confirm it. Are you saying that the best book (and thus the model) is 30 years old and the best experiments are 20 years old?
How about the experiments that went into proposing the model? To paraphrase someone, how was this model carved out of existence? Which information led to its identification contrary to the thousands of crackpot ‘theories’ of the mind? And what is your obsession with self-experimentation? That sounds like Hare Krishna.
You’re not doing well to distinguish NLP over the run-of-the-mill internet woo.
No, the best book I know of, about the core model of NLP: that everything we call “thinking” consists of manipulating sensory information, in one form or another, and that cognitive algorithms consist of transforming, combining, and comparing information across different sensory systems.
30 years ago, that was a revolutionary idea; now, it’s not actually that far off the beaten track, in that there’s recent mainstream support for a many of its ideas. (NLP had near/far distinctions 20 years ago, for example, and the critical role of physical sensations in mental recognition of emotions.)
Bandler was editing books on therapy, listening to recordings of some very successful therapists, and noticed some interesting commonalities in their language. He talked to a linguistics professor at his college, who noticed it too.
Building on Bateson and Korzybski, they put together a linguistic model of information processing, to show how surface language structure reflects deep structure—i.e., what something says about how you’re likely thinking, grounded in what the therapists were doing to identify broken internal models in their clients.
In other words, they noticed that the successful therapists were noticing certain patterns of things people said, and then asking questions that forced the clients to reconsider their mental model of a situation.
Now, if this sounds familiar, it’s because REBT and CBT are based on the exact same thing, just without—AFAIK—as precise of a model as the linguistic one developed by B&G. And AFAIK, B&G described it first.
In my original version of this post, I went on to describe how they got to other models—that also now have experimental support—but it got bloody long. Short version: they got microexpressions first too, AFAIK, although they didn’t claim them to be universal. NLP practice drills focus on recognizing what the person in front of you is doing, not what everyone in the world might do.
That it produces useful results for the experimenter.