NLP is a load of crap!

[ballzac]

I kind of feel that 'anchoring' really illustrates my point. Is it really "the extension and development of the work of pavlov and his dogs", or is it just conditioning given a new name and a bit of pizazz to make it sound like something new?

I don't really expect to be taken too seriously on my opinions here because I don't really know enough about the subject, but a lot of what I have found when I research it on the internet makes me uncomfortable.

[XipeTotec]

you could call it chuggaluga if u like, it doesnt matter what it is called really... no-one can actually make you look past the gloss to see benefits or effective techniques in NLP if you dont want to. You point about pseudo-science it taken, and it is the case that many looking to make money from today's 10 minute fix problem, have latched onto NLP techniques to cash in. That though, does not automatically put it in the category of bullshit. I note, that you have done some research on this, which is good, because many miss out on much, because they right things off before actually looking into them.

Edited May 29, 2007 by shroomytoonos

[ballzac]

no-one can actually make you look past the gloss to see benefits or effective techniques in NLP if you dont want to.

It's not that I can't see that there may be effective techniques. It's just that if those techneques exist outside nlp, then I'm not going to attribute them to nlp.

[Hagakure]

drug use exists outside of shamanism

spinning in cirlces exists outside of the sufi religion

lighting incense exists outside of religious taoism

but each action is an integral part of each system and is approached in a specific manner within that system.

as for the extension and development.....

picasso's paintings were just an extension and development of the whole "put pigments on a surface" idea. pretty much every paper in science is the extension and development of an idea.

extending and developing is how humans progress.

NLP has taken a variety of concepts from different fields, developed them and put them together into a formalised system (though there is no official system which means it is impossible to make blanket statements about the field)

here is what happened

you went to a workshop run by a bunch of wankers trying to take your money. you were angry and attatcked the system they were selling to you.

you have formed a strong association in your mind between that system and negativity to the extent that you are psychologically blocking any possibility that there may be some parts of that system that arent bullshit.

this blocking has been enhanced as you have made your thoughts public which means you feel more compelled to defend your idea regardless of evidence.

hey, it happens to all of us. not a big deal.

Edited May 30, 2007 by Hagakure

[RonnySimulacrum]

Nice post Hagakure

But i think you are projecting

[ballzac]

Hagakure,

I think you are completely ignoring the fact that I totally agree that a lot of these techniques can be effective. i.e that not every aspect of nlp is, in and of itself, bullshit.

But...

If you mix dogshit in with my dinner. I'm gonna say, "I'm not eating this SHIT." You may say that it's only partly shit, and you're welcome to eat it if you want. But it still tastes like shit and it still makes you sick.

[Hagakure]

you are making that claim under the assumption that there is one chef and one meal.

some buddhists claim that karma is some law of the universe that means if something bad happens to you, it is because you did something bad to someone else previously or in a previous life. that is a product of religious authority trying to dictate actions of followers and is not what other more sensible versions of buddhism believe.

jus because there is a nugget floating in a bowl served by one group of buddhists, it doesnt mean that its floating in the bowl of another group of buddhists.

in the same way some NLP practitioners are quite grounded, scientific and would never mention the word "quantum" while talking about it.

you are going to get a different dinner served by different people.

while the movement had distinct founders it has fragmented into many schools of thought that blanket statements dont really work on.

Edited May 31, 2007 by Hagakure

[ballzac]

Your Buddhism analogy is quite a good one, as I totally agree with you with you on that. But there is one way in which it is not analogous to NLP: Some Buddhists claim that Buddhism is a religion, others claim that it is a philosophy. I don't know of any Buddhists that claim it is a science. As far as I can tell, NLP in general is presented as a science, yet proof that it is effective appears to be lacking in scientific journals. That doesn't mean that it can't be effective. But if something exists outside of the mainstream scientific community, I find it unselttling that it is being referred to as a science.

And it's not only proof that it is effective that is required (as I do believe that many of the techniques ARE effective), but also a more scientifically accurate formulation of the theory explaining those effects.

[Hagakure]

yeah its certainly not the best example of science.

i think i read some wiki article about the founders saying how they didnt bother with hard science and instead wanted to just go out and find things that work.

in the same way we may breed cacti that produce better mesc levels without knowing the genes that are responsible etc. the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

that said things to do with the brain are not as easy to prove as anything you can physically measure.

concluding remarks, NLP isnt rigourous science and it has a lot of nutjobs as practioners but, in my opinion, it does have some very interesting and effective practices that do work.

[The Dude]

lol, i really like the main issue being classification. Philosophy / religion / or Science.

Philosophy = how things are seen to be, with speculation of what causes things to be and creative thinking of how things Could be or what Could be a possible cause, it is the creative step of reality building.

religion = philosophy systemetised and translated into a symbolic language accessible to laymen = manipulation of reality on a larger transpersonal scale

science = observation and measurement of a reality already created by the philosophies, religions and/or other belief systems (such as material rationalism or "science")

Science as Philosophy = stagnant reality always self referencing itself with no seed of chaos or imagination. Self validating belief of things as being as they are resulting in things forever remaining as they are.

Science is wak anyway, it is only the end product, the end reaction, the final stage which we observe, it must be understood that there are causative agents of reality that cannot be detected with the -after the fact- recording capacities of Any material device.

I do not know much about NLP, or the particualr talk. I too hate people using buzzowrds w/out any knowledge of their actual meaning. This is in any field scientific or not. The point I'm making is science is a method of categorically explaining things into neatly explained clean categories. Philosophy transcends science in that it is not limited to recorded experiences but can become purely abstract and theoretical (which preceeds material existance anyhow).. so Imathinking it is the philosophers that are discovering each new frontier of thinking that create each new future legacy of thought, each new future possibility of thought is a continuation of our previous pathway.

Each possibility of thought is a possibility of reality. I'll throw "quantum" in there for the sake of it. I think the problem is that the mystical unexplained realm that philosophers are attempting to explore and explain is the very same level of study that physicists are now able to observe, only to observe that observation is an act of creation. Through smashing shit into ever smaller particles and observing their reactions the continuum of thought/reality is being rediscovered by even the most sectarian rational scientists. Philosophy and Science have always existed co-dependently. without imagination nothing could be discovered anyway The phenomena would occur without a creative hypothesis about its' cause.

With these kind of 'truths' it is the outlines.. the Bullshit facade, the distractions, the bullshit which reveals the truth. The connections of varying bullshits which shows through their interrelations there is a commonality. The universal truth is never seen bare, only ever covered in infinitely varying facades, but each incarnation when cross-examined against another is seen to be exactly the same as every other. It is through the differences that we can see what is essentially the same in everything. What's written between the lines. The rythmic information that lets you know where a beat "Should" be before it's even arrived into your sensory apparatus (body), Or the sly sarcastic joke that only makes sense in a certain context. There is a lot of information that is continuous and beyond the distinct bits we experience - it carries information that is related to it but not it, this is pattern assoication also, the processing that transcends individual bits of data and sees the greater connections, the part of 'mind' that is always taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture, it is through the realisation of the continous wave-like reality of reality (in more than the physical sense) that you experience godliness.

[edit]

huge rant dunno what its got to do with NLP, but about Science and Pseudo-Science.. there must be new definitions because i believe that Philosophy or the merging of Science (recorded fact) with philosophy or theory is an intrisic part of reality creation. Philosophy is the seed of creation which is given physical manifestation and validation through science. Maybe Pseudo-Science is more like MetaScience where the misuse of ontological definitions changes the consensus definition of the word and hence changes physical reality to suit the new ontological descriptors. see I don't know really how much we can shift and change reality. But we definitely change our descriptors and hence our perceptions of reality.. perception = reality.

Earth once was flat until we philosophised a round one (as far as we knew it WAS). This was deduced by observing the heavens, and then later validated through sceintific observance so now we knew we had a round one, but we know this on good faith really, daily experience tells us otherwise. Just like daily experience for most people give us the illusion we are in TOTAL control of ourselves and NLP is bullshit, poor flatlanders. but they're content in the lower dimensionality.

.. Later Einstein came up with some fancy shmancy pants equations and we made the a-bomb and went to space, where we saw some funky blackhole things and we're stuck at explaining them (and stuck at having a complete AND consistent model of reality).. which is poetically appropriate, demonstrating the futility of trying to know Everything as they suck information never to be retrieved again, not to us within our limited dimensional perceptions at least, not with our limited degrees of freedom. It seems we're better at placing static descriptors on a static reality and when infinity and chaos and higherdimensinal reality is concerned we get confused, i think the confusion and potential creativity are infinite like the mass of a blackhole.

We keep building onto what we'eve discovered before, and keep on discovering some more. New theoretical models don't always fit into old school definitions of what is what, as we change our very perceptions of what constitutes an is, what is a what, what constitutes isness... Yet. the psuedoscience of old would be something bullshit like wave-particle duality.. Obviously some oogie booige-aery-faery-mystical-new-age-hippy bullshit. how can a wave be a particle at the same time and vice versa ffs.. bloody PseudoScience!! but of course now thats been accepted as a mindbogglingly strange fact of reality, Last thing to finish my rant. "Truth is stranger than fiction"

Edited June 5, 2007 by El Duderino

[ballzac]

You cover so many points there, that it's hard to know where to start responding to that...

Your distinction between philosophy and science seems to me to be really describing the difference between theory and empirical evidence. All scientific discoveries come from a combination of theory and empirical evidence. A philosophical and creative approach is usually (if not always) invlolved, and you would probably be forgiven for calling science an art or a philosophy. After all, science evolved from what was originally considered philosophy, while modern philosophy branched away.

But I don't understand why you give credit to anyone other than scientists for scientific discoveries. Albert Einstein used a very creative approach to try to understand why light behaves the way it does, but this is what science is all about. Albert Einstein was a scientist, a great one. In over two thousand years of talking and writing, philosophy has still failed to actually prove anything. If something is not or cannot be proven, how can we discuss its merit as a model of reality.

Every time we use an electronic or mechanical device, we are manipulating reality. The reason that objects born of science allow us to manipulate our reality more effectively than those not, is that science understands our reality to a deeper and more certain level.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'science as philosophy', but it bothers me that you say:

Science as Philosophy = stagnant reality always self referencing itself with no seed of chaos or imagination. Self validating belief of things as being as they are resulting in things forever remaining as they are.

Science is anything but stagnant. We may be trying to describe the universe with a set of immutable equations and models, but the reality of the field of science is ever changing, as we attempt to get closer to the underlying principles of nature.

The scientific world may often get stuck in it's own way of thinking, but when someone has an idea that is considered 'crazy' by the scientific community at large, it can be tested, and the general scientific community is actually quite open to change through this avenue. That is why wave-particle duality and Einsteinian relativity are now accepted theories.

Wave-particle duality was never considered pseudo-science because it came from empirical evidence. Young's double-slit experiment showed that light behaves as a wave, whereas Einstein's demonstration of the photo-electric effect (for which he won the Nobel prize) showed that light also behaves as a particle. This is just a fact that it will behave as a particle under some conditions, and like a wave under others. There are many interpretations to this, and none are yet proven, but wave-particle duality was already proven before it was theorised.

[coin]

this is off topic, but hagakure - that is a strange way of interpreting the concept of karma...i'm a bit suprised

[The Dude]

I suppose I meant to say science without creativity is stagnation. Einstein said "Knowledge is finite, imagination encircles the universe" - something like that. What I'm saying is im not sure what you consider pseudoscience, but most studies of.. anything use real observances and experiences and data to build a theory. The theory is deduced by the experimental data, there is a model built, we have a model of reality built upon observances that we record with physical apparatus. we can never leave our observer position and we can never be objective (if there is such a thing as objectivity) The point is everything is intrinsically distorted until we get sharper and sharper eyes, but such as the case with anything infinite, reality will never be fully comprehended or at least not formulated and described in any 'real' physical way as we can never leave the personal perspective. That is the reality creating seat of perception. i mean objectivity if it exists must be an experience of totality and as such no perceptive distortion and creation. Nothing exists except by our perceptive distortions. That is reality a continually complexifying distortion, co-created by each subjective 'soul' which self directs reality but harmoniously with the rest dictated by the rythms of the shared subconscious mind.

My point is observation is only half the step without reflection and 'creation' or formulation of a possible hypothesis, science would not exist. .: philosophy MUST be an intrinsic part of science. Furthermore Emprical data is nothing more but a confirmation of our commonality, our collective soul. Fringe theories aren't believed by the establishment and hence never made 'real' to them. Not so sure on the 'crazy' stuff like telekenisis and remote viewing and such but i am convinced in a collective mind and i am experiencing a self validating belief of that. One Massive, all that stuff.

everything is an illusion anyway, its through creative distortions or 'alternate perspectives' that the artist lies to show the viewer the truth, stealing something from something picasso said.

Science is as much faith as any other. The structure of an atom is a model afaik, the true nature of light is only speculation. the model of gravity is that there are these tiny little particles called gravitons holding us down. that sounds stupid, surely it is a force and a wave.

NLP is a model based on observances and imo a science like any other, psychology can be considered a pseudoscience because it is highly theoretical and there are many theories that are contested. I suppose there may as well be a distinction of Science Based Theoretical Speculation and 'Real' scientific fact but i think speculative philosophy using scientific theories need not be seen as bad and unfortuantely people auto-dismis most fringe-theories as psuedoscience. Whatever if the theory is set and the results are there whatever the theory is, its the lesson learned by practicisng the techniques thats important if it works and you can use it then you can reclassify things more 'scientifically' if you want.

psuedo science is usally shit and maybe not the meta-science, but philosophy is the forefather of science and is needed for any continuation of it apart from recording what we already know.

[edit]

Edited June 6, 2007 by El Duderino