But is PUA discussed here because it’s a great example of evolutionary psychology in practise, or because this is a community of mostly single men who are interested in evolutionary psychology? I find neuro-linguistic programming endlessly fascinating and would love to see a good article on it at Less Wrong, but what are the odds that it will reference* pickup artists rather than, say, Derren Brown?
The odds that no pop cultural references will be made are low. This *is Less Wrong.
I admire Derren Brown enormously for his cleverness, but he’s not doing NLP (if indeed there’s anything to do: an article which addressed the evidence would be good, I think). He just wants you do think he is. The bit at the end of the trick where he gleefully shows you how he did it using NLP to implant words in people’s minds is itself misdirection. It’s part of his act, as pretending to be psychic would have been back in the days when people kind of believed in that.
Brown: “Years ago the issue was whether or not you told people it was psychic because people were prepared to believe in psychic ability—and how far down that road do you take them. Now we’re in a situation where we’re into pop psychology, and NLP, all these huge industries, and people are prepared to believe in that, and maybe in a way that’s the new psychic realm.” The whole interview the quote came from is worth reading.
The whole interview the quote came from is worth reading.
Especially since it contradicts what you just said about Brown not doing NLP. From the interview:
Well, I not a big a fan of it, but I’ve done it and think in some contexts there’s some use.… It’s not what I do. It’s part of what I do.”
It struck me that the interviewer was really pressing Brown rather hard to say that things like NLP and hypnosis are shams and false, and Brown was pressing back rather hard with the idea that no, people can actually get some benefits from learning these things, they just won’t be able to duplicate all my effects that way.
Of course, I’ve seen Brown do certain things that are pretty much straight-up, textbook NLP or hypnosis with no real embellishing. For example, confusing a woman about what color her car is—a simple submodality anchoring belief-change exercise, straight out of the NLP textbooks, with no alterations that I noticed.
And the one where he uses blank pieces of paper to pay for things as if it were money, he uses an NLP language pattern to prime the person at a critical moment with the idea that “it’s good; take it”. (Although I suppose you could say it’s an Ericksonian hypnosis pattern; the NLP inventors certainly were among the first to document it, however.)
That having been said, quite a few things he does are not NLP at all, or at least not any cataloged NLP technique I know of.
The bit at the end of the trick where he gleefully shows you how he did it using NLP to implant words in people’s minds is itself misdirection.
In neither of the two cases that I just mention, did Brown draw any attention to the NLP aspect of the effects, either verbally or nonverbally. He provided no explanation at all for either, actually. (Maybe he only does it with techniques that aren’t real NLP?)
Anyway, I had to very carefully view the paying-with-paper footage several times in order to notice what he was doing, as he was telling different stories each time in which to embed the “it’s good, take it” message, which was always timed to occur just as he was handing them the “money”.
(Of course, I also respect him for including outtake footage in the episode of him trying the trick on a suspicious hotdog vendor (whose English wasn’t so good) and having it fail miserably. I’m glad he’s not representing these things as working every time on everybody without fail.)
So, the context is whether it’s ethical to let people believe they’ve understood how the tricks work when their understanding is that it’s done with psychic powers or with NLP.
DERREN: Well, I not a big a fan of it, but I’ve done it and think in some contexts there’s some use—that’s a whole other conversation—but it’s a dirty word as far as I’m concerned. If somebody came up to me and said, “Look, I really liked your show, and I’m going to go to an NLP course,” which I’ve had happen, I would say to them, “Well, if you want to do that, do that, but here’s what you’ll get out of it. It’s not what I do. It’s part of what I do,” which is I think true, I think that’s fair enough to say.
I now have a lot of NLPers analysing my TV work in their own terms, as well as people who say that I myself unfairly claim to be using NLP whenever I perform (the truth is I have never mentioned it).”
Given the way NLP is a “dirty word”, I don’t think Brown is doing whatever you find on NLP courses, or at least, he doesn’t think it’s quite ethical to let people think he is and as a result decide to pay for an NLP course.
Whether there’s anything to NLP is a separate consideration from whether Brown uses it on stage (except that if there’s nothing to it, it’s obviously not how Brown does it). On the wider question of whether there’s anything to it, in the section on NLP in Tricks of the Mind, he says there’s some valid stuff in NLP, but he was put off actually being an NLP practitioner by attending an NLP course where there was a lot of bunk mixed in with the valid stuff.
The tricks where I’ve seen him “explain” how it was done using what I think of as NLP (although, as Brown says, he never uses that word) were the one where he predicted Simon Pegg’s ideal birthday present (a BMX bike), and the finale of one of his stage shows, where the effect is that he predicts a word freely chosen from a newspaper which itself was freely chosen from a bunch of possible newspapers (I can’t access the formerly working YouTube links for any of these, or indeed your own link, but that may be because I’m in the UK, so you might have more luck viewing them). In both cases, the “explanation” involved words hidden within sentences (“that would B-aM-Xellent present”). “Part of what I do” might mean that he does some stuff which NLP lays some claim to (telling people are lying by watching eye movements) and/or that his act includes him making it look like it was done using NLP :-)
“Part of what I do” might mean that he does some stuff which NLP lays some claim to (telling people are lying by watching eye movements) and/or that his act includes him making it look like it was done using NLP :-)
As I pointed out above, at least one effect of his is a straight-up use of two pure textbook NLP techniques: submodality elicitation plus anchoring. Thus in at least one case, “part of what I do” refers to “the entire mechanic of the effect”, while perhaps leaving out things like:
showmanship
carefully picking his subject
repeating attempts until he gets a subject that responds well enough to keep the footage
not showing the part where he puts color-vision beliefs back to normal
However, the actual application and result of what’s shown is precisely what you’d expect from a reasonably responsive subject, in response to the demonstrated NLP procedures.
On a semi-unrelated note, if someone you don’t trust to muck around with your head ever asks you the questions that Brown asks at the beginning of that video -- i.e. asking you about something that you believe and something that you don’t believe—you would probably be best off answering “no, thanks”. AFAIK, even the slimiest, mind-hackiest of NLP and hypnosis-trained PUA teachers don’t suggest doing something as unethical as what Brown actually did in that video would’ve been, if it were done to a non-consenting subject.
I did not realize that NLP was involved in that trick
If you mean the paper-as-money one, that one is probably more accurately classified as a hypnosis trick using “quotes” to mask an embedded command (“it’s good, take it”), although there are NLP books that explain/teach the same process. (You could consider it a form of applied priming, discovered by hypnotists and NLP people long before the modern studies of priming.)
I know little about it past the name (suggested remedy?).
Do you want technical/theoretical knowledge or practical applications? There are zillions of practical application books, most of which contain considerable amounts of nonsense.
Bandler and Grinder’s books also contain lots of nonsense, but it’s far more useful nonsense. (I think one even began by saying, “we’re going to tell you lots of lies. None of them are true, but most of them are useful. And if you pretend to believe these lies, and act as if they’re true, then your clients will also pretend to change. And if you pretend really well, they will continue to pretend to be better, for the rest of their lives.”)
Anywho, Structure of Magic I and NLP Volume I are probably the best books for getting the fundamental ideas/theories, and Using Your Brain For A Change contains the basics of the technique Derren Brown used in the car-color-confusion video. The “quotes” pattern and embedded commands (as used in the paper-money trick) are discussed in Frogs Into Princes and Trance-Formations. (All of the above are by Bandler and Grindler, or Bandler by himself, except for NLP Volume I which is by Dilts and others.)
Hats off to you for explaining this concisely. People are overly quick to bash on NLP. I just hope they have other means to get what they want. For those who might have quickly disregarded NLP for a quick laugh: if you learn it, you will be able to do some amazing things, from gaining control over your emotional responses, to befriending people out of your league, to learning to lead groups of people, to helping get yourself in the proper frame of mind or mood for what you’re supposed to be doing, such as getting in a frame of mind to work in the morning and to relax and enjoy cooking when you get home.
To avoid NLP quacks, yes there are some, do as much research on your own first and start by absorbing all the free material you can and test it and practice it. It may take a few years until you get your enhanced powers, but god damn it was so worth it for me. And many times I’ve sat there and watched people bash NLP and remained silent because I was happy to benefit and keep it secret how I do it… but now that I’m studying Buddhism, I’ve been practicing empathy and preferring to share with others how NLP can be useful… so take my words with a grain of salt and I wish for everyone, everywhere a lifetime of happy living.
Well, about fourteen lines later he starts talking about NLP again and says “I’ve taken NLP courses and learned some NLP” and “It’s part of what I do.” I do think it’s all part of his act when he lets you in on the NLP “secret”, but I think it’s also part of the magic that he puts it out in plain view so that people say “ah, that’s misdirection” and discard it. I think magicians have been using NLP much longer than NLP has been an acronym, and I think Brown uses it, along with a host of other methods. However, I think it is often mistaken for more fundamental (and tried & true) psychological techniques like priming.
My favourite of his shows is his Channel 4 special “Messiah”. It’s an extraordinary piece on confirmation bias, but worth watching purely for the entertainment value as well. Unfortunately, Brown declines to share his actual methods, although many can be inferred.
[edit] Adding to this, Brown himself is a rare phenomenon: an entertainment celebrity who promotes overcoming bias. Since he appeals to a large audience, not just those who are interested in ‘magic’ or psychology, I wouldn’t be surprised if his shows have caused a measurable increase of critical thinking among his viewers.
I didn’t get around to watching this until today, but having just finished part 3⁄8, I want to urge everyone to watch it and the end of part 2 as well; it was extremely moving and horrifying for me.
It didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know about what must necessarily be true about irrational believers, but it gave me a more detailed and authentic set of examples than I’d imagined.
Of course, it does occur to me that some of his amazing feats may have involved a few less successful attempts that didn’t make the cut—i.e. I feel like his success must be in some way exceptional or unusual (but probably it isn’t).
ETA: I’ll be sharing that video with family members that I’ve had fruitless discussions with in the past on psychics, alien abduction, etc.. It’s too bad that his programs aren’t shown in the USA and his DVDs aren’t available here for purchase. I wonder why that is? Surely not lack of interest, given that there are 5 times as many people in the USA than the UK. And the greater number (proportion?) of proudly irrational people in the USA would only ensure that any such program would be that much more controversial and thus that much more lucrative.
I find neuro-linguistic programming endlessly fascinating and would love to see a good article on it at Less Wrong, but what are the odds that it will reference* pickup artists rather than, say, Derren Brown?
One could also reference marketing; there are two NLP-in-advertising blogs out there that I read, for example. (http://nlplanguagepatterns.blogspot.com/ and http://nlpcopywriting.com/). Both are pretty shallow, though, compared to, say, the stuff Frank Kern does. Kern sort of is to other NLP marketers as Brown is to other NLP magicians—i.e., he disclaims any expertise in the subject, but wields it like a master of the craft instead of like a geek fascinated by the subject.
Funny thing that. Your mention of marketing gave me an instant “ick, sleazy” reaction. Does Alicorn feel the same way every time she sees mentions of PUA? If so, I can finally understand where she’s coming from!
Funny thing that. Your mention of marketing gave me an instant “ick, sleazy” reaction. Does Alicorn feel the same way every time she sees mentions of PUA? If so, I can finally understand where she’s coming from!
Be a rationalist and get over it, since it will inhibit your ability to accomplish “real world” goals like getting paid for your work. But more than that, it’ll diminish your quality of life, by requiring you to avoid things that are just a normal part of life.
One reason I’m here is because I used to be the sort of person who got all squicked out by PUA and marketing and whatnot, before I realized that most of my “rationality” was being used in the service of justifying my pre-existing emotional reactions to things.
The thing that really opened my eyes about marketing was understanding that people want experiences, not things, and trying to get them to want what you believe they should want (vs. giving them what they actually want) is not really about being nice to them: it’s just your ego talking.
This insight is equally applicable to marketing and PUA, as in both cases, the objection is, “but people shouldn’t want that”, whatever “that” is. Women “should” want nice guys, and people “should” want products based on their quality, instead of what makes them feel good or enhances their status or sounds more like it’s specific to their goals.
But they don’t. Not even the people who are talking about how it “should” be; they’re just not paying attention to how they actually make buying or mating decisions at the time they’re doing it. (It’s easy to rationalize afterwards.)
When I first started studying marketing, I began paying closer attention to how I made buying decisions, especially in areas where I had incomplete information or was in a hurry, or focused on some goal other than obtaining the best possible product. And I saw that what I’d been reading was true: I did make decisions based on all sorts of stupid little things, like a difference in one word on the box.
Not because I was stupid or being manipulated, but because I was using the best information I had to make a decision.
Meanwhile, I was also instantly filtering out and rejecting other products, because something sent up a red flag or a question in my mind.
So marketing and PUA are both practical arts of not getting filtered, and giving people what they actually want, without injecting your own ideas of that.
I read and view PUA stuff to understand marketing better, because the best of both have one concept in common: it’s called disqualification.
Disqualification means quickly turning off people who are not going to be happy with your product (or person), so as to better turn on the people who will be happy with the product (or person).
This is an inherently polarizing process, though, which is why all the people who aren’t in the market for “Obeying 1 Rule Of Fat Loss” or whatever are gonna get squicked, in the same way that women who aren’t attracted to the confidence of a man who says he has 30 girlfriends and she can only be his if she’s not jealous are going to be squicked by the very idea of it, let alone the actual experience of it.
This is also probably related to the “fandom requires something awful” concept. If you’re not willing to turn people off, you’ll be forced to dilute your signal to the people you actually want to reach.
That doesn’t mean you’re going to be perfect at it, of course. I’d prefer it, for example, if my “signal” were accessible to a few more people at LW than it is (notably EY), and I’ve made some minor tweaks for the LW audience in general. But I’m not going to change it significantly, because the most vocal parts of LW do not always correspond to the parts of LW that enjoy or are informed by what I write… any more than EY is going to change his style to attract religious people, just because Robert Aumann believes in God.
I am extremely leery of rationalism being used as a reason not to feel things.
giving people what they actually want, without injecting your own ideas of that.
I would just like to say that among the things most likely to make me want to scream at someone is when they try to give me what they think I want, or what they would want, or what most people superficially similar to me want, instead of what I tell them I want. In words. Out loud.
I am extremely leery of rationalism being used as a reason not to feel things.
And I’m extremely confused by your reference here to my post, which was an attempt to illustrate the dangers of allowing your thought process to be driven by your emotions, and to illustrate a tool for identifying whether that is happening (i.e., observing somatic markers).
When I say “get over it”, I don’t mean “don’t pay attention to your feeling”, I mean, “pay careful attention to this signal you aren’t thinking or behaving rationally, and do whatever it takes to change your thinking in such a way that the feeling does not arise in the first place.”
That is, when you can think about the subject in question without the somatic marker of “ick”, then you will know you’ve successfully removed whatever cached thought was making you feel that way. The “ick” does not exist in outside reality, it exists solely in your mind and body, and any attempt to justify it as existing in outside reality is prima facie bottom-line reasoning. That is, irrational.
Somehow I got the impression it was about quite the opposite.
It said that your emotions control your thought process. It didn’t say that was a good thing, it said it was a fact.
Emotions are powerful tools, and should not be undervalued.
Nor are they to be used inappropriately. Negative emotions in lasting doses are likely harmful to your health, as well as to your rationality. Depressed people aren’t thinking rationally.
I’ve noticed several instances of “that’s so gross and low-class” signaling at LW, and agonized over whether it was worth pointing out (that it’s signaling). I don’t claim that the internal gross-out feeling is affected; I have had similar reactions all by myself, especially to pumped-up motivational speak on e.g. pjeby’s site.
I’ve decided it’s still a valid signal, so I won’t be bitching about it when I see it, and I’ll continue to express disgust at trashy (even if effective) persuasion (I’m so sophisticated!), but I’ll try to moderate my actual feelings of revulsion, so (I hope) I can evaluate the content more accurately.
Relevant post. There is a huge difference between marketing communications which is the garden-variety sort of marketing you’re talking about, and marketing research, which is about giving people the things they’ll want to buy. (And not just what they say they want to buy, but what they’ll actually put cash down for).
To me the topics of PUA, marketing and self-help feel interrelated. Not just because it’s all applied rationality, but because it’s all about goal-directed tweaking of human wetware. Which is precisely the icky problem.
As a kid I invented and devoutly followed a strict moral injunction against any form of self-manipulation—what’s today called self-help—and against lying. As an adult I have relaxed both those requirements, but instead explicitly invented and have followed for years an equally strict injunction against manipulating other people (like in Games People Play). The only PUA techniques I ever adopted were about loss of fear and increase of self-esteem; I shied away from anything that smelled even vaguely manipulative. (I have grossly neglected the skillz over the last two years and will soon start practicing from scratch again, under the same restrictions.)
The morality of hacking minds is still unclear to me, but it feels worse if it’s done consciously. Not every means of reaching the goal is okay… even if it does no visible harm. According to my life experience, explicit mind-hacking harms the hacker.
(This will be my first post on the current flamewar, which I’ve been hesitant to post on, for obvious reasons.)
Does Alicorn feel the same way every time she sees mentions of PUA? If so, I can finally understand where she’s coming from!
If that’s where she’s coming from, it’s a horribly wrong reason to exclude discussion of it. Whether or not PUA techniques repulse you, whether or not you’d be receptive to them, whether or not you intend to use them...
You do need to understand why such counterintuitive methods work, to the extent that they do in fact work. Otherwise, you have a huge hole in your understanding of social psychology, and are setting yourself up to Lose, whether your are a man or a woman.
For what it’s worth, I also get a negative physical reaction from PUA discussion, though for very different reasons. I would describe it as a combination of hopelessness at my own ignorance, and refusal to accept that it could be true. In fact, the first time I’d heard about PUAs, someone referenced a related Feyman anecdote, and I rushed to look it up, and after I read it, I felt really, really, unexplainably miserable, almost giving up all hope. By itself, that almost made me fly into a rage.
But rather than ask to be shielded from this mental pain, I save the threads devoted to them, so I can process them at a later time, once I’ve built up the courage.
To avoid discussion of the topic on the grounds that it makes some people, even most people, feel icky, is to go against everything this site stands for.
You do need to understand why such counterintuitive methods work, to the extent that they do in fact work.
Agreed, but there’s a world of difference between a post that discusses PUA techniques under the assumption that the readership is actively interested in applying them, and a post that discusses PUA techniques under the assumption that the readership is interested in learning more about “the enemy”.
In much the same way, there would be a world of difference between a post that gave advice on how best to convert people to Christianity, or to market the latest designer piece of crap, and a post that documented commonly used conversion or marketing techniques for the purposes of understanding how people can come to believe silly things or buy stupid products.
I accept that, in the interest of good communication, people can do a better job with their tone and emphasis when they make PUA posts.
The danger, however, is buying into this idea that you have to adhere to some vague feminist concern that can only result in good-intentioned male posters walking on eggshells to avoid saying the wrong secret phrases. While there are valid feminist concerns about objectification, this kafkaesque hypervigilance simply serves to enforce a very self-limiting mindset in posters.
It wussifies them, in other words. I believe that has been my experience, having resolved at an early age to be supersensitive to offending women. I’ve certainly avoided it, but it’s not very conducive to leaving copies of me in the next generation.
Feminist concerns are vague and the only possible result of thinking about them is “good-intentioned male posters walking on eggshells to avoid saying the wrong secret phrases”?
I guess I can see how, if you don’t understand the relevant feminist concerns, then they will seem vague, and that the effect of not really knowing what it is you’re supposed to avoid could be quite frustrating. But I tend to think that vagueness, like probability, is in the mind, rather than being a property of the concerns themselves. If you do understand and appreciate such concerns, then it’s usually not very difficult to avoid offending people—and even if you do end up accidentally offending someone, it’s easy enough to just apologise after the fact, without it opening yet another front in the gender wars.
Maybe this means that the feminists among us need to do a better job of communicating the concerns, but it would also be nice if attempts to do so didn’t result in (IMHO pretty ridiculous) accusations of “kafkaesque hypervigilance”.
P.S. If trying to understand others’ perspectives and attempting not to unnecessarily offend them means that I’m a wuss, then I’ll wear the badge proudly. I can’t speak for anyone else, but certainly hasn’t affected my ability to leave copies of me in the next generation.
But the thing is, we’re interested in the truth. What you or anyone else will use it for is their own business. Our goal is not to filter out topics which could potentially enable marketers to sell more crap or something.
But the thing is, we’re interested in the truth. What you or anyone else will use it for is their own business.
Interesting, I don’t agree with this at all. Perhaps it comes down to a difference between those of us who are most interested in truth, and those of us who are most interested in winning.
Insofar as anyone’s utility function has a term for people-not-being-converted-to-Christianity, people-not-buying-loads-of-crap-they-don’t-need, or people-not-treating-members-of-whatever-gender-they-happen-to-be-attracted-to-as-sexual-trophies, what others do with knowledge is their business. Which is not to say that they should somehow censor people who advocate such things; but I wouldn’t expect them to sit idly by and pretend that they think these goals are all fine and dandy either.
I agree, but on the other hand, how important is the topic? We can rationally decide to lose the topic here on this ground: not everyone posting or reading has achieved perfect equanimity, but we can help them develop that quality more effectively by tricking them into thinking that we already have it (the illusion would be shattered in the type of failures elicited by each discussion of the sensitive topic).
An absolute prohibition would be ridiculous, though.
[Cousin It writes] Your mention of marketing gave me an instant “ick, sleazy” reaction. Does Alicorn feel the same way every time she sees mentions of PUA? If so, I can finally understand where she’s coming from!
Huh?!? Seriously, marketing seems sleezy to you but PUA doesn’t? To each his own I guess.
Cousin It lives in Moscow, where people tend to have a different take on free-market institutions such as speculators, middlemen and (as now appears likely) marketing.
50⁄50. I think Derren Brown has been mentioned the same number of times as PUA; it’s just that the latter threads are longer and less pleasant. Google doesn’t make it look like a lot, though.
But is PUA discussed here because it’s a great example of evolutionary psychology in practise, or because this is a community of mostly single men who are interested in evolutionary psychology? I find neuro-linguistic programming endlessly fascinating and would love to see a good article on it at Less Wrong, but what are the odds that it will reference* pickup artists rather than, say, Derren Brown?
The odds that no pop cultural references will be made are low. This *is Less Wrong.
I admire Derren Brown enormously for his cleverness, but he’s not doing NLP (if indeed there’s anything to do: an article which addressed the evidence would be good, I think). He just wants you do think he is. The bit at the end of the trick where he gleefully shows you how he did it using NLP to implant words in people’s minds is itself misdirection. It’s part of his act, as pretending to be psychic would have been back in the days when people kind of believed in that.
Brown: “Years ago the issue was whether or not you told people it was psychic because people were prepared to believe in psychic ability—and how far down that road do you take them. Now we’re in a situation where we’re into pop psychology, and NLP, all these huge industries, and people are prepared to believe in that, and maybe in a way that’s the new psychic realm.” The whole interview the quote came from is worth reading.
Especially since it contradicts what you just said about Brown not doing NLP. From the interview:
It struck me that the interviewer was really pressing Brown rather hard to say that things like NLP and hypnosis are shams and false, and Brown was pressing back rather hard with the idea that no, people can actually get some benefits from learning these things, they just won’t be able to duplicate all my effects that way.
Of course, I’ve seen Brown do certain things that are pretty much straight-up, textbook NLP or hypnosis with no real embellishing. For example, confusing a woman about what color her car is—a simple submodality anchoring belief-change exercise, straight out of the NLP textbooks, with no alterations that I noticed.
And the one where he uses blank pieces of paper to pay for things as if it were money, he uses an NLP language pattern to prime the person at a critical moment with the idea that “it’s good; take it”. (Although I suppose you could say it’s an Ericksonian hypnosis pattern; the NLP inventors certainly were among the first to document it, however.)
That having been said, quite a few things he does are not NLP at all, or at least not any cataloged NLP technique I know of.
In neither of the two cases that I just mention, did Brown draw any attention to the NLP aspect of the effects, either verbally or nonverbally. He provided no explanation at all for either, actually. (Maybe he only does it with techniques that aren’t real NLP?)
Anyway, I had to very carefully view the paying-with-paper footage several times in order to notice what he was doing, as he was telling different stories each time in which to embed the “it’s good, take it” message, which was always timed to occur just as he was handing them the “money”.
(Of course, I also respect him for including outtake footage in the episode of him trying the trick on a suspicious hotdog vendor (whose English wasn’t so good) and having it fail miserably. I’m glad he’s not representing these things as working every time on everybody without fail.)
So, the context is whether it’s ethical to let people believe they’ve understood how the tricks work when their understanding is that it’s done with psychic powers or with NLP.
There’s also Brown’s statement in Tricks of the Mind (see the Straight Dope article on Brown and NLP) that
Given the way NLP is a “dirty word”, I don’t think Brown is doing whatever you find on NLP courses, or at least, he doesn’t think it’s quite ethical to let people think he is and as a result decide to pay for an NLP course.
Whether there’s anything to NLP is a separate consideration from whether Brown uses it on stage (except that if there’s nothing to it, it’s obviously not how Brown does it). On the wider question of whether there’s anything to it, in the section on NLP in Tricks of the Mind, he says there’s some valid stuff in NLP, but he was put off actually being an NLP practitioner by attending an NLP course where there was a lot of bunk mixed in with the valid stuff.
The tricks where I’ve seen him “explain” how it was done using what I think of as NLP (although, as Brown says, he never uses that word) were the one where he predicted Simon Pegg’s ideal birthday present (a BMX bike), and the finale of one of his stage shows, where the effect is that he predicts a word freely chosen from a newspaper which itself was freely chosen from a bunch of possible newspapers (I can’t access the formerly working YouTube links for any of these, or indeed your own link, but that may be because I’m in the UK, so you might have more luck viewing them). In both cases, the “explanation” involved words hidden within sentences (“that would B-aM-Xellent present”). “Part of what I do” might mean that he does some stuff which NLP lays some claim to (telling people are lying by watching eye movements) and/or that his act includes him making it look like it was done using NLP :-)
As I pointed out above, at least one effect of his is a straight-up use of two pure textbook NLP techniques: submodality elicitation plus anchoring. Thus in at least one case, “part of what I do” refers to “the entire mechanic of the effect”, while perhaps leaving out things like:
showmanship
carefully picking his subject
repeating attempts until he gets a subject that responds well enough to keep the footage
not showing the part where he puts color-vision beliefs back to normal
However, the actual application and result of what’s shown is precisely what you’d expect from a reasonably responsive subject, in response to the demonstrated NLP procedures.
On a semi-unrelated note, if someone you don’t trust to muck around with your head ever asks you the questions that Brown asks at the beginning of that video -- i.e. asking you about something that you believe and something that you don’t believe—you would probably be best off answering “no, thanks”. AFAIK, even the slimiest, mind-hackiest of NLP and hypnosis-trained PUA teachers don’t suggest doing something as unethical as what Brown actually did in that video would’ve been, if it were done to a non-consenting subject.
I did not realize that NLP was involved in that trick, probably because I know little about it past the name (suggested remedy?).
Which video?
The one I linked to in the grandparent comment, which shows Brown confusing a woman about her car color.
If you mean the paper-as-money one, that one is probably more accurately classified as a hypnosis trick using “quotes” to mask an embedded command (“it’s good, take it”), although there are NLP books that explain/teach the same process. (You could consider it a form of applied priming, discovered by hypnotists and NLP people long before the modern studies of priming.)
Do you want technical/theoretical knowledge or practical applications? There are zillions of practical application books, most of which contain considerable amounts of nonsense.
Bandler and Grinder’s books also contain lots of nonsense, but it’s far more useful nonsense. (I think one even began by saying, “we’re going to tell you lots of lies. None of them are true, but most of them are useful. And if you pretend to believe these lies, and act as if they’re true, then your clients will also pretend to change. And if you pretend really well, they will continue to pretend to be better, for the rest of their lives.”)
Anywho, Structure of Magic I and NLP Volume I are probably the best books for getting the fundamental ideas/theories, and Using Your Brain For A Change contains the basics of the technique Derren Brown used in the car-color-confusion video. The “quotes” pattern and embedded commands (as used in the paper-money trick) are discussed in Frogs Into Princes and Trance-Formations. (All of the above are by Bandler and Grindler, or Bandler by himself, except for NLP Volume I which is by Dilts and others.)
Hats off to you for explaining this concisely. People are overly quick to bash on NLP. I just hope they have other means to get what they want. For those who might have quickly disregarded NLP for a quick laugh: if you learn it, you will be able to do some amazing things, from gaining control over your emotional responses, to befriending people out of your league, to learning to lead groups of people, to helping get yourself in the proper frame of mind or mood for what you’re supposed to be doing, such as getting in a frame of mind to work in the morning and to relax and enjoy cooking when you get home.
To avoid NLP quacks, yes there are some, do as much research on your own first and start by absorbing all the free material you can and test it and practice it. It may take a few years until you get your enhanced powers, but god damn it was so worth it for me. And many times I’ve sat there and watched people bash NLP and remained silent because I was happy to benefit and keep it secret how I do it… but now that I’m studying Buddhism, I’ve been practicing empathy and preferring to share with others how NLP can be useful… so take my words with a grain of salt and I wish for everyone, everywhere a lifetime of happy living.
Well, about fourteen lines later he starts talking about NLP again and says “I’ve taken NLP courses and learned some NLP” and “It’s part of what I do.” I do think it’s all part of his act when he lets you in on the NLP “secret”, but I think it’s also part of the magic that he puts it out in plain view so that people say “ah, that’s misdirection” and discard it. I think magicians have been using NLP much longer than NLP has been an acronym, and I think Brown uses it, along with a host of other methods. However, I think it is often mistaken for more fundamental (and tried & true) psychological techniques like priming.
Thanks for the link.
I’d love to see a detailed text on Derren Brown because the Wikipedia article about him is so intriguing.
My favourite of his shows is his Channel 4 special “Messiah”. It’s an extraordinary piece on confirmation bias, but worth watching purely for the entertainment value as well. Unfortunately, Brown declines to share his actual methods, although many can be inferred.
[edit] Adding to this, Brown himself is a rare phenomenon: an entertainment celebrity who promotes overcoming bias. Since he appeals to a large audience, not just those who are interested in ‘magic’ or psychology, I wouldn’t be surprised if his shows have caused a measurable increase of critical thinking among his viewers.
I didn’t get around to watching this until today, but having just finished part 3⁄8, I want to urge everyone to watch it and the end of part 2 as well; it was extremely moving and horrifying for me.
It didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know about what must necessarily be true about irrational believers, but it gave me a more detailed and authentic set of examples than I’d imagined.
Of course, it does occur to me that some of his amazing feats may have involved a few less successful attempts that didn’t make the cut—i.e. I feel like his success must be in some way exceptional or unusual (but probably it isn’t).
Great recommendation. Just watched it on youtube.
ETA: I’ll be sharing that video with family members that I’ve had fruitless discussions with in the past on psychics, alien abduction, etc.. It’s too bad that his programs aren’t shown in the USA and his DVDs aren’t available here for purchase. I wonder why that is? Surely not lack of interest, given that there are 5 times as many people in the USA than the UK. And the greater number (proportion?) of proudly irrational people in the USA would only ensure that any such program would be that much more controversial and thus that much more lucrative.
One could also reference marketing; there are two NLP-in-advertising blogs out there that I read, for example. (http://nlplanguagepatterns.blogspot.com/ and http://nlpcopywriting.com/). Both are pretty shallow, though, compared to, say, the stuff Frank Kern does. Kern sort of is to other NLP marketers as Brown is to other NLP magicians—i.e., he disclaims any expertise in the subject, but wields it like a master of the craft instead of like a geek fascinated by the subject.
Funny thing that. Your mention of marketing gave me an instant “ick, sleazy” reaction. Does Alicorn feel the same way every time she sees mentions of PUA? If so, I can finally understand where she’s coming from!
Be a rationalist and get over it, since it will inhibit your ability to accomplish “real world” goals like getting paid for your work. But more than that, it’ll diminish your quality of life, by requiring you to avoid things that are just a normal part of life.
One reason I’m here is because I used to be the sort of person who got all squicked out by PUA and marketing and whatnot, before I realized that most of my “rationality” was being used in the service of justifying my pre-existing emotional reactions to things.
The thing that really opened my eyes about marketing was understanding that people want experiences, not things, and trying to get them to want what you believe they should want (vs. giving them what they actually want) is not really about being nice to them: it’s just your ego talking.
This insight is equally applicable to marketing and PUA, as in both cases, the objection is, “but people shouldn’t want that”, whatever “that” is. Women “should” want nice guys, and people “should” want products based on their quality, instead of what makes them feel good or enhances their status or sounds more like it’s specific to their goals.
But they don’t. Not even the people who are talking about how it “should” be; they’re just not paying attention to how they actually make buying or mating decisions at the time they’re doing it. (It’s easy to rationalize afterwards.)
When I first started studying marketing, I began paying closer attention to how I made buying decisions, especially in areas where I had incomplete information or was in a hurry, or focused on some goal other than obtaining the best possible product. And I saw that what I’d been reading was true: I did make decisions based on all sorts of stupid little things, like a difference in one word on the box.
Not because I was stupid or being manipulated, but because I was using the best information I had to make a decision.
Meanwhile, I was also instantly filtering out and rejecting other products, because something sent up a red flag or a question in my mind.
So marketing and PUA are both practical arts of not getting filtered, and giving people what they actually want, without injecting your own ideas of that.
I read and view PUA stuff to understand marketing better, because the best of both have one concept in common: it’s called disqualification.
Disqualification means quickly turning off people who are not going to be happy with your product (or person), so as to better turn on the people who will be happy with the product (or person).
This is an inherently polarizing process, though, which is why all the people who aren’t in the market for “Obeying 1 Rule Of Fat Loss” or whatever are gonna get squicked, in the same way that women who aren’t attracted to the confidence of a man who says he has 30 girlfriends and she can only be his if she’s not jealous are going to be squicked by the very idea of it, let alone the actual experience of it.
This is also probably related to the “fandom requires something awful” concept. If you’re not willing to turn people off, you’ll be forced to dilute your signal to the people you actually want to reach.
That doesn’t mean you’re going to be perfect at it, of course. I’d prefer it, for example, if my “signal” were accessible to a few more people at LW than it is (notably EY), and I’ve made some minor tweaks for the LW audience in general. But I’m not going to change it significantly, because the most vocal parts of LW do not always correspond to the parts of LW that enjoy or are informed by what I write… any more than EY is going to change his style to attract religious people, just because Robert Aumann believes in God.
I am extremely leery of rationalism being used as a reason not to feel things.
I would just like to say that among the things most likely to make me want to scream at someone is when they try to give me what they think I want, or what they would want, or what most people superficially similar to me want, instead of what I tell them I want. In words. Out loud.
And I’m extremely confused by your reference here to my post, which was an attempt to illustrate the dangers of allowing your thought process to be driven by your emotions, and to illustrate a tool for identifying whether that is happening (i.e., observing somatic markers).
When I say “get over it”, I don’t mean “don’t pay attention to your feeling”, I mean, “pay careful attention to this signal you aren’t thinking or behaving rationally, and do whatever it takes to change your thinking in such a way that the feeling does not arise in the first place.”
That is, when you can think about the subject in question without the somatic marker of “ick”, then you will know you’ve successfully removed whatever cached thought was making you feel that way. The “ick” does not exist in outside reality, it exists solely in your mind and body, and any attempt to justify it as existing in outside reality is prima facie bottom-line reasoning. That is, irrational.
Wow. That post was particularly hard to read, but somehow I got the impression it was about quite the opposite.
Emotions are powerful tools, and should not be undervalued.
It said that your emotions control your thought process. It didn’t say that was a good thing, it said it was a fact.
Nor are they to be used inappropriately. Negative emotions in lasting doses are likely harmful to your health, as well as to your rationality. Depressed people aren’t thinking rationally.
I’ve noticed several instances of “that’s so gross and low-class” signaling at LW, and agonized over whether it was worth pointing out (that it’s signaling). I don’t claim that the internal gross-out feeling is affected; I have had similar reactions all by myself, especially to pumped-up motivational speak on e.g. pjeby’s site.
I’ve decided it’s still a valid signal, so I won’t be bitching about it when I see it, and I’ll continue to express disgust at trashy (even if effective) persuasion (I’m so sophisticated!), but I’ll try to moderate my actual feelings of revulsion, so (I hope) I can evaluate the content more accurately.
Relevant post. There is a huge difference between marketing communications which is the garden-variety sort of marketing you’re talking about, and marketing research, which is about giving people the things they’ll want to buy. (And not just what they say they want to buy, but what they’ll actually put cash down for).
Neither of which is, of course, the same thing as what they’ll actually enjoy the most.
This… merits a response.
To me the topics of PUA, marketing and self-help feel interrelated. Not just because it’s all applied rationality, but because it’s all about goal-directed tweaking of human wetware. Which is precisely the icky problem.
As a kid I invented and devoutly followed a strict moral injunction against any form of self-manipulation—what’s today called self-help—and against lying. As an adult I have relaxed both those requirements, but instead explicitly invented and have followed for years an equally strict injunction against manipulating other people (like in Games People Play). The only PUA techniques I ever adopted were about loss of fear and increase of self-esteem; I shied away from anything that smelled even vaguely manipulative. (I have grossly neglected the skillz over the last two years and will soon start practicing from scratch again, under the same restrictions.)
The morality of hacking minds is still unclear to me, but it feels worse if it’s done consciously. Not every means of reaching the goal is okay… even if it does no visible harm. According to my life experience, explicit mind-hacking harms the hacker.
(This will be my first post on the current flamewar, which I’ve been hesitant to post on, for obvious reasons.)
If that’s where she’s coming from, it’s a horribly wrong reason to exclude discussion of it. Whether or not PUA techniques repulse you, whether or not you’d be receptive to them, whether or not you intend to use them...
You do need to understand why such counterintuitive methods work, to the extent that they do in fact work. Otherwise, you have a huge hole in your understanding of social psychology, and are setting yourself up to Lose, whether your are a man or a woman.
For what it’s worth, I also get a negative physical reaction from PUA discussion, though for very different reasons. I would describe it as a combination of hopelessness at my own ignorance, and refusal to accept that it could be true. In fact, the first time I’d heard about PUAs, someone referenced a related Feyman anecdote, and I rushed to look it up, and after I read it, I felt really, really, unexplainably miserable, almost giving up all hope. By itself, that almost made me fly into a rage.
But rather than ask to be shielded from this mental pain, I save the threads devoted to them, so I can process them at a later time, once I’ve built up the courage.
To avoid discussion of the topic on the grounds that it makes some people, even most people, feel icky, is to go against everything this site stands for.
Agreed, but there’s a world of difference between a post that discusses PUA techniques under the assumption that the readership is actively interested in applying them, and a post that discusses PUA techniques under the assumption that the readership is interested in learning more about “the enemy”.
In much the same way, there would be a world of difference between a post that gave advice on how best to convert people to Christianity, or to market the latest designer piece of crap, and a post that documented commonly used conversion or marketing techniques for the purposes of understanding how people can come to believe silly things or buy stupid products.
I accept that, in the interest of good communication, people can do a better job with their tone and emphasis when they make PUA posts.
The danger, however, is buying into this idea that you have to adhere to some vague feminist concern that can only result in good-intentioned male posters walking on eggshells to avoid saying the wrong secret phrases. While there are valid feminist concerns about objectification, this kafkaesque hypervigilance simply serves to enforce a very self-limiting mindset in posters.
It wussifies them, in other words. I believe that has been my experience, having resolved at an early age to be supersensitive to offending women. I’ve certainly avoided it, but it’s not very conducive to leaving copies of me in the next generation.
Feminist concerns are vague and the only possible result of thinking about them is “good-intentioned male posters walking on eggshells to avoid saying the wrong secret phrases”?
I guess I can see how, if you don’t understand the relevant feminist concerns, then they will seem vague, and that the effect of not really knowing what it is you’re supposed to avoid could be quite frustrating. But I tend to think that vagueness, like probability, is in the mind, rather than being a property of the concerns themselves. If you do understand and appreciate such concerns, then it’s usually not very difficult to avoid offending people—and even if you do end up accidentally offending someone, it’s easy enough to just apologise after the fact, without it opening yet another front in the gender wars.
Maybe this means that the feminists among us need to do a better job of communicating the concerns, but it would also be nice if attempts to do so didn’t result in (IMHO pretty ridiculous) accusations of “kafkaesque hypervigilance”.
P.S. If trying to understand others’ perspectives and attempting not to unnecessarily offend them means that I’m a wuss, then I’ll wear the badge proudly. I can’t speak for anyone else, but certainly hasn’t affected my ability to leave copies of me in the next generation.
But the thing is, we’re interested in the truth. What you or anyone else will use it for is their own business. Our goal is not to filter out topics which could potentially enable marketers to sell more crap or something.
Interesting, I don’t agree with this at all. Perhaps it comes down to a difference between those of us who are most interested in truth, and those of us who are most interested in winning.
Insofar as anyone’s utility function has a term for people-not-being-converted-to-Christianity, people-not-buying-loads-of-crap-they-don’t-need, or people-not-treating-members-of-whatever-gender-they-happen-to-be-attracted-to-as-sexual-trophies, what others do with knowledge is their business. Which is not to say that they should somehow censor people who advocate such things; but I wouldn’t expect them to sit idly by and pretend that they think these goals are all fine and dandy either.
I find this excessively repugnant.
This “we know what’s best for you”/”for you own good TM” attitude is very disturbing.
“what others do with knowledge is their business.”
Rather, they think it is, but they’re wrong.
I agree, but on the other hand, how important is the topic? We can rationally decide to lose the topic here on this ground: not everyone posting or reading has achieved perfect equanimity, but we can help them develop that quality more effectively by tricking them into thinking that we already have it (the illusion would be shattered in the type of failures elicited by each discussion of the sensitive topic).
An absolute prohibition would be ridiculous, though.
Huh?!? Seriously, marketing seems sleezy to you but PUA doesn’t? To each his own I guess.
I really agree with pjeby below though.
Cousin It lives in Moscow, where people tend to have a different take on free-market institutions such as speculators, middlemen and (as now appears likely) marketing.
Nah, I like free markets. My negative impression is more of an intellectual aversion to the output of Western marketing gurus like Seth Godin.
Cousin It has “an intellectual aversion to the output of Western marketing gurus like Seth Godin”.
Godin seems pretty icky to me too. Paul Hawken’s book Growing a Business had some nice insights into marketing.
I recently unsubsribed from Godin’s feed after a sequence of particularly atrocious posts.
clientk writes about marketing, but in a pleasant and often insightful manner.
I’m not even sure what relevant difference there is, the fundamental character of both seem pretty much identical to me.
I’m curious why you have such different reactions to the two.
50⁄50. I think Derren Brown has been mentioned the same number of times as PUA; it’s just that the latter threads are longer and less pleasant. Google doesn’t make it look like a lot, though.