603. Simple Recipes Attract Simpleminded People

603.   Simple Recipes Attract Simpleminded People

Texts presenting apparently easy recipes for about any problem or task are plenty in books, newspapers, the web and other media.    

Practical tasks sometimes do follow simple algorithms, which are not obvious without a step-by-step guide to follow through.   Recipes for cooking are an examples, manuals how to maintain and handle household appliances and machines are another.  

But most of the recipes concerning non-material topics are false promises offering pseudo solutions to very complex, difficult and strenuous tasks.  

1.  The attraction of recipes:  

Recipes are tempting to be believed and applied, whenever people struggle with the experience of failure, because they wish or crave for something, which

• can generally not be achieved
• is beyond someone's ability to achieve it
• could only be achieved by much more efforts than the person is ready and willing to invest

Recipes are expressed as assertive claims.   The apparent false authority of them misleads people to confound their mere wishful thinking as if it were something to come true as a secure success needing only limited efforts.   Recipes are most suggestive, when they are expressed in a way, which precludes doubts of failure and pretends programmed success.   

Recipes are usually either promising the certain way to reach one specific goal, or they offer a precise number of steps or items to work through towards a goal.   

2.  Some examples:

The following examples are chosen only because of the big claim made by the title.  

Examples of titles of books

Get the life you want

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

The 48 Laws of Power

Think and Grow Rich

The Feeling Good Handbook

How Successful People Think: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life

Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

Examples of 'how to' articles found by a google search:  

How to trick people into thinking you're good looking

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

How to Win Friends and Influence People

How to be an expert

How to Get a Life

How to Get Out of Debt

How to Lose 20 lbs. of bodyfat in 30 days

How to Read 300% Faster in 20 Minutes

How To Become Wealthy

Examples from a dating advice site:

10 things men should never say

Seven steps to the perfect first email

5 Habits that Hurt Your Relationship

Five dating tips for spotting ‘Mr Right’

3 Key Things to Discuss Before Moving In Together

3. Classification of recipes:

Falling for simple recipes can be caused by several different fallacies. 

• Absurdity.   Recipes advising religious rituals like prayer or a pilgrimage and woo-woo remedies like homeopathy are just absurd and irrational.  
• Pseudo-science.   Pseudo-science is suggestive, because uninformed people confound it with serious science.   NLP is an example.
• Exaggerated and biased truth.   A few good, valid tips can be convincing, even when they are banalities.   These tips can supply a tiny contribution to the problem, that makes them suggestive.   But they are nevertheless very insufficient, when exaggerated into an entire recipe, not applicable for the complex problem and for the wide variety of different people and situations.  

4.  Purpose for using recipes:

The recipes are used as a crutch to reduce insecurity and anxiety in areas of life, where the access to reliable information and better methods is difficult:  

• Self-improvement towards a better ability of understanding, predicting, influencing and controlling other people
• Health improvement

5.  Gullibility to the belief in simple recipes:

Not all recipes are fully worthless, when perceived with the critical mental distance to not succumb to unrealistic expectations.    If read skeptically, knowing that there cannot be simple recipes, there is sometimes some food for thought to be integrated in a larger frame of investigating the best way to cope with an issue. 

• Gullible, uneducated and simple minded people, who are prone to believe any irrational nonsense, are most prone to also fall uncritically for simple recipes.   Pressing problems like strong instinctive urges, which deactivate or blur the reason, often enhance the attraction of simple recipes.
  
• Intelligent and skeptical people with the ability for abstract and complex thinking are not prone to fall for simple recipes.   They understand the complexity and real magnitude of a task and react appropriately.  They prefer sources, which put the emphasis on the complexity of any issue and avoid any claims of easy solutions.     

6.  The authors of the recipes:

Those who produce simple recipes are

• frauds, who know, that they take advantage of other people's gullibility and simplicity to make money.  
• gullible and mislead themselves.    The feel a mission to propagate their delusional insights and wisdom.  
  
  • They want to earn a reward in the afterlife
  • They expect narcissistic supply as gurus.
  • They want to feel good about themselves by being altruistically helping others.

7.  The dangers of simple recipes for the applicants:

By relying exclusively on a simple recipe, people often enhance and prolong the problem, which they attempt to solve.  The focus on vain attempts to reach a goal with an oversimplified recipe impedes them to find a real solution.

When the wrong expectations for an easy achievement fail, a wrong attribution of this failure can damage a person's self-esteem and confidence.   This can lead to wrong decisions with long term fatal consequences in the realm of important life choices.

8.  The dangers of the impact of imposed simple recipes:

When people rely more on recipes than on direct information from the target of the applied recipe, then they can be a serious hazard to others,    The lack of any modification of the applied recipe by the target's direct influence can be caused by any combination of lacking trust, of lacking information and of failing recognition for the target being a source of information.

• Misjudgment by categorization:  
  Using astrology as a recipe of sorting people into 12 arbitrary categories and ascribing traits to them can cause harm.   A person is not treated according to how s/he really is but by ascribed traits.   A person chosen by wrongly ascribed traits as a mate or employee cannot fulfill erroneous expectations and may suffer from pressure.
  
• Misjudgment by unsuitable methods: 
  NLP includes pseudo-scientific recipes.  One such recipe claims, that specific eye movements were indicators for the difference between honesty and lying.    When trust is denied by this fallacy, this can prevent or destroy relationships and friendships.
  
• Unjustified blame: 
  When recipes promising benefits in the interaction with others fail, no matter if the goal is to be accepted or to gain control, this is a logical consequence of not perceiving the other as a partner, but as reduced to a mere target.   But due to believing in the power and correctness of the recipe, the failure is attributed to faults, flaws of defects of the target. 
  
• Enhancement of the detriments of power:  
  The more the person applying a recipe also has power, the worse the situation gets for the target.   People applying for a job or training can be rejected by invalid recipes like graphology.   Bosses, teachers, parents, wardens and caretakers in institutions can do a lot of harm by applying recipes derived from a religion, ideology or simply from an unqualified application or misinterpretation of recipes from any source.

I am personally scared of people, who believe so much in simple recipes of any kind, no matter if it is religion, woo-woo or pseudoscience, that this impedes and prevents me from influencing by proactive rationality, how I am judged and treated.    

My mindmate to be found is not simple minded, he does not use recipes upon me.  He is someone, who not only is able to think abstractly, but who also feels comfortable with cognitive complexity.  

580. Pseudoscience, Lacking Abstract Thinking And The Dunning-Kruger Effect

580.   Pseudoscience, Lacking Abstract Thinking And The Dunning-Kruger Effect

Before the internet, I took it for granted, that having a university degree were an indication of a person's ability for abstract, scientific and skeptical thinking.    The internet has opened my eyes for the fact, that people can get degrees by having a good memory even in the absence of sufficient rationality.    Therefore for such people, a university degree is no protection against falling for pseudoscience.

Pseudoscience is a blend of scientific methods and gullibility to irrational beliefs.   The fallacy of pseudoscience can be on both ends of research, either by using the claimed belief as if it were a proven fact to be further investigated, or by interpreting results as if they were a proof of an unproven claim, and of course there can be both.   Sometimes even the methods are only pseudo-scientific.

This is a list of examples of pseudoscience:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_topics_characterized_as_pseudoscience

Those people, whose belief in a non-existent deity is blatantly absurd, often are at least aware, that their specific belief is not of general validity, but only shared by a limited number of people.   They can be aware of the impossibility of convincing others of a mere claim, which they cannot proof.  

Some believers in pseudoscience are even worse, because due to their impaired abstract thinking, they are not aware, that they confound pseudoscience with valid serious science.  They are duped by the superficial resemblance.  They are even more prone to be duped, when the pseudoscience appears to fulfill some of their dire needs.  

They expect to be rationally able to find general agreement based upon the validity of the results, the same way as if they were evaluating serious science.    

When a seriously ill person is religious, he may do both, praying and getting scientifically based standard medical treatment   Someone believing in pseudoscience as if it were science, gets duped to prefer quackery over standard medicine, believing it to be the most advanced science. 

The belief in pseudoscience leads to a variety of the Dunning-Kruger effect.   Someone believing in some variety of pseudoscience has often the delusion to be the one knowing better than the skeptical and rational person, who rejects and disbelieves it.   The rejection is misinterpreted as ignorance. The believer does not reconsider his belief, instead he feels a mission to instruct the allegedly ignorant.

People believing in pseudoscience are as annoying as are religious people.    It is better to avoid them, when the contact is not superficial enough to be able to avoid such topics.    I once attempted to explain to someone, why NLP is pseudoscience.   It was as futile as talking to a wall.    It is much more pleasant to interact with fellow apistics, who feel themselves annoyed by religion and pseudoscience.   

534. The Pseudo-Evidence Fallacy

534.   The Pseudo-Evidence Fallacy

Whenever someone bases the decision, how to treat another person, on a belief, which is so strong, that it impedes and overrides the rational perception and comprehension of evidence and reality, there are more or less fatal consequences for at least the misjudged person, often for both. 

Examples:

1. A very drastic example was the alleged proof of who is a witch by throwing the unfortunate victim into the water to see if she floated or drowned.    Men believed in this cruel irrationality, even though their brain had nevertheless enabled them to become fluent in Latin.   
2. In some cultures, parents not only decide, whom to marry their children to, but they choose an alleged match following an astrologer's advice.   This has certainly caused millions of people to suffer from being tied for a lifetime to a mismatch, the worst fate being that of women being abused by a man, whom they would not have chosen.  
3. Today people are less prone to fall for very blatant irrationality.  But the more the irrational claims and beliefs mimic science, the more people are gullible to mistake pseudo-science for science.   
   NLP is a good example.   In entry 177 (The Jerks' Fascination with NLP) I already elaborated, why NLP is a belief system, and why this blend of some elements from scientific psychology with irrational and unscientific claims make this so attractive to people with a distorted self-concept as if being rational.  

In these as also in many more examples, there is a pattern of a specific fallacy:  

The person

• bases a rational decision process upon incorrect or insufficient information acquired by absurd, weird, preposterous or insane methods.   
• is unperceptive, mindblind, immune to or otherwise not impacted by any information coming directly from the target of the behavior.   The target has no influence upon what information is used to determine, how s/he is treated.
• imposes the decision upon the target or attempts to, feeling entitled and justified to do so. 

This fallacy impedes trust and as a consequence it impedes a relationship from becoming a safe haven, which is impossible without trust justified by trustworthiness.   
Trustworthiness can only be assessed by the rational method of evaluating evidence.  This method compares all of someone's verbal and non-verbal expressions and behaviors at any moment with all of this at any another time, and also with external independent sources.   
The more often this comparison is consistent, congruent and without contradictions, the more the person's overall trustworthiness can be estimated as probable.   Never discovering a lie is a part of this.

Any other method, which relies on unverified and unverifiable clues, is a hazard and misleading.   Earning trust depends not only on the own trustworthy behavior, it also depends upon the partner's ability to recognize trustworthy behavior as such by the correct perception of evidence.    Trust cannot be earned from a person using unsuitable methods.  

An honest person never lying is nevertheless not trusted by a partner using flawed methods to evaluate honesty.   The delusion of being able to rely upon firmly believed pseudo-clues makes him oblivious of reality.      
Fools believing in NLP derive the pseudo-evaluation of alleged honesty or lack thereof from the target's eye movements.   This is a hazardous fallacy, as the study quoted below clearly shows.    Eye movements can be caused, influenced and diverted by many triggers.  During any conversation, people's attention can be easily caught momentarily by events at the periphery of their vision.   
The haphazard location of such events suffices to determine the erroneous attribution of an alleged trait towards one of two errors:      
Accidental eye movements of a honest person can forfeit the chance to be trusted.  
The blind believer in NLP can also easily be mislead to trust by a liar's accidental eye movements.  

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120711205943.htm

"For decades many NLP practitioners have claimed that when a person looks up to their right they are likely to be lying, whilst a glance up to their left is indicative of telling the truth."

"Professor Richard Wiseman (University of Hertfordshire, UK) and Dr Caroline Watt (University of Edinburgh, UK) tested this idea by filming volunteers as they either lied or told the truth, and then carefully coded their eye movements.  In a second study another group of participants was asked to watch the films and attempt to detect the lies on the basis of the volunteers' eye movements.

"The results of the first study revealed no relationship between lying and eye movements, and the second showed that telling people about the claims made by NLP practitioners did not improve their lie detection skills,” noted Wiseman. "

The pseudo-evidence fallacy and commodification share the common defective acquisition of information.    In both situations, the target is excluded from being considered as a possible source when choosing, which information is used for the decision how to behave.  Both situations indicate depreciation and disrespect of the target, but it works differently.

In the case of commodification, the target is mistaken for a passive utility in a onesided relationship and therefore not considered as able to be a proactive source supplying any information.  
The pseudo evidence fallacy disregards, devalues and rejects the information input coming directly from the target.   The real information is noticed but replaced by the false beliefs.   The target is considered as a proactive source of irrelevant or worthless information.  

373. Memory Function and Verbal Fencing

Memory Function and Verbal Fencing

I admire those rational people, who are quick-witted and come up with just the perfect repartee in discussions with believers of any kind.   The way, how my memory functions, impedes me from achieving this.    I have no chance in verbal fencing (entry 39) nor in hostile debates with contradictors (entry 281).  

I am a thinker but not a debater.  I can be convincing in constructive communication, but only with those, who are receptive to rationality.  This is a consequence of how my memory is working.    I remember conclusions and forget the premises, once I consider them as obsolete.   

A simple example:  When I need several items to repair something, after buying them separately, I add the prices to remember, how much I invested in the entire repair.   If someone later asks me the price of any specific one of the items, I cannot remember, having forgotten it after having calculated the total.  

But there are more relevant examples:    

In entry 177 I summarized my evaluation of NLP.    To come to the conclusion of the invalidity of NLP, I carefully I read some original sources, I read studies claiming to validate it checking them in comparison with serious scientific methods, and I compared my own conclusions with skeptical sources.    As a result, I discarded NLP as pseudoscience not worth to ever again waste time upon.    I was done with it, therefore I cleared my brain from all the further no more needed details about NLP.   
The situation is similar concerning astrology, except that it is even more obviously nonsense and needs less knowledge and intelligence to get aware of this, so I had already been done with astrology ages ago.

If somebody now mentions NLP or astrology, I have no fast repartee up my sleeve.    I am just annoyed to be bothered with it.   If someone is interesting to learn my reasons, I can do some thinking, check my notes and sources, restore my previous reasoning and explain it.   But the person has to expect from me sound reasoning and to be willing to listen and to take my explanations for serious.   
            

When I am interacting with any kind of a believer, who wants to continue to believe and considers me as wrong due to my not believing, the situation is very different.    The situation is either annoying or scary, depending on my liberty to avoid further contact with the believer.  

   
If his belief or delusion is immune to rational reasoning only because it fulfills an emotional need, then a good repartee or none makes no difference.  

But while a believer can never be convinced by a rational repartee, except if he already is prepared by intrinisic doubts, the lack of any repartee can be misinterpreted as an implicit admittance or acknowledgment of the validity of the belief, and this reinforces the believer's feelings of superiority and his disrespect.    His willingness to ever listen to reasoning dwindles even more, if that is still possible.  
This is the case, when a belief serves for someone as a source of feeling superior due to the delusion of having been chosen to receive wisdom or divine enlightenment.   It is also the case, when someone feels superior and justifies this by having a specific belief.    Contradicting to every disagreement with this belief serves the only purpose of having a reason to claim being right and thus feel superior.   

Both the believe in astrology and in NLP are reinforcing attitudes towards and treatment of another person as guided by the belief, while not taking any cognizance of the target's feedback.   

The fallacy of the believer in astrology is mistaking the zodiac as the most reliable information, believing it without a reality check.  They judge and treat a person as if the ascribed personality and traits were true.  The resulting misinterpretations, misunderstandings, misjudgements have the more severe consequences of distrust, accusations and expectations, that are completely false concerning the true personality.  

The fallacy of the believer in NLP is the belief, that if he wants something, using a NLP recipe is a legit, ethically correct and justified method to get it.   Any resistance justifies the application of more drastic NLP tricks.    Failure is attributed to flaws and defects of the target.   

Such fallacies are often as bad as causing the believer to convert a relationship into a power struggle and to belief also in the justification to dominate.     

Believers scare me, and it makes not difference, what they believe in.  

307. Alleged and Real Control Freaks

Alleged and Real Control Freaks
I have been accused of being a control freak a few times in my life.    Maybe what I am writing in this blog may also give a wrong impression.    I am a rationality freak, but not a control freak.    

A control freak is a person, whose high level of anxiety, fear, paranoia, insecurity drives him to get alleviation and reduction of these feelings by establishing control over his environment and all people in it.   
A control freak can appear to be a nice person, when he either really is in control or believes to be in control, because people of goodwill do him favors or just happen to accidentially do, what he wants.   A control freak becomes a nasty jerk, as soon as he feels out of control and attempts to reestablish it, ruthlessly oblivious or unconcerned of what harm he does to his victims.  

I fear wild animals like bears, I fear male animals using physical force to abuse of my body.   I feel fear, when I stand inside a house during an earthquake, and I would certainly feel fear of any real threat to my life.    Nothing of this gives me any reason to want to control people.    I am lacking the kind of anxiety to be a control freak. 

Rationality is in the core of my identity.  I want to live in an environment controlled by rationality.  But I do not want to fight for rationality, I wish it to just be there without me making any efforts.   

I can be nice and tolerant to anybody, whose brain is wired differently, who is religious, gullible and who believes in any nonsense, no matter if god or homeopathy.    I am polite and I hide my true opinion, but I have compassion for their bad luck of having this dysfunction and delusion wired in their brains.  But they have to be kept at a distance.  These kind of people just do not qualify to be my intellectual equals in a relationship.   It is not possible that I can respect someone like this enough to get involved with.  

It is obvious, that a relationship is doomed, when one partner considers the other as stupid and with a dysfunctional brain.    Therefore a rational person like me can only have a relationship with a truly rational partner.  

As a consequence, I may feel very strong about some topics, not to control someone's thinking, but to find an agreement based upon shared rationality.    I do not like the word control, so I want a relationship guided and determined by rationality and logic.

Also I am very eager to comprehend people's good rational reason for what they do.    If someone's behavior is incomprehensible, I feel uncomfortable, because this gives me the suspicion that he could be a believer and a gullible person, whom I cannot respect, and I feel an urge to restore respect by comprehending his rational reasons.    Therefore I have no wish to be right, I am just as content to be convinced, that I am wrong, as long as I can respect the reasons of the other as rational

To illustrate the difference between my importance of rationality and a control freak, the following is a hypothetical scenario.   It is immediately comprehensible to everybody, whose rational brain enables him to know, that NLP is  pseudoscience and a cult.   

In this scenario, I get in contact with someone, who claims to be an atheist and a skeptic.   Before I really know him well, he tells me, that he just has read his first book about NLP and that he has booked a course to learn more.    When I hear something like this, a flash of disappointment goes immediately through me, and my respect for that man is temporarily damaged, while I wonder, what is wrong with his brain.   

There are four different possible continuations.

1.  I explain, that NLP is pseudoscience, I give him the link to some skeptical articles and I let his rationality do the rest.  He will find out the obvious for himself, which he would find out sooner or later anyhow.   I do not control his thinking, I just give him a hint to avoid a detour to the obvious.

2.  All my explanations about NLP being pseudoscience bounce off him with no effect, as if he were deaf.   He really is a control freak, who grasps at NLP with some urgency, because NLP promises simple tricks how to manipulate people to gain power.    He believes to have found a method of control, that he perceives as too important for his survival in a hostile fear invoking world to allow himself to be deprived of by allowing reasonable doubts.    

Depending on my level of interest in him, I may continue my futile compulsive efforts to point out the facts to him much longer than it would make sense.    Reasoning with him is futile, because as little as NLP does, what it promises, for an anxiety driven control freak already the believe to have found a method to gain control helps him to reduce his anxiety.    So from then on, my respect is damaged and thus is my interest for this man.   
For him, I appear as If I were a control freak attempting to control his thoughts.    For him, agreement or not is of no importance, he wants to gain power by his learning NLP tricks.   He would allow me to disagree with NLP as much as I do, he concedes me tolerance, because what I think it not important, only gaining control over me is.     

3.  I know that it is never good to jump to conclusions.   As soon as I mention, that NLP is pseudoscience, he agrees immediately and explains, that he does not believe in it at all, but that he wants to have some first hand experience about the kind of gullible people, who attend such a course.   He may be writing an article about why quackery attracts people.    So something only appears weird, until I get a rationally convincing explanation.  


To sum it up:  My mindmate is someone, who really is rational, an atheist and a skeptic down to the bone.    Only in this case mutual respect, appreciation and valuation can be maintained.  

305. Atheists, Agnostics and Pseudo-Non-Believers

Atheists, Agnostics and Pseudo-Non-Believers

There are people, who claim to be atheists, they believe themselves to be atheists, but they are not.   

Atheism is derived from the Greek prefix a~ for the absence of something and ~theos, which means god.    That means, that an atheist is void of considering the existence of a god, he is someone, who lives as if he had never even heard of the claim, that there could be a god.   An atheist wonders as much about the existence of a god as a Neanderthal man wonders about the existence of a computer.    It just does no occur to him to consider the possibility.    An atheist is certainly not someone to believe in the non-existence of a god, as many people wrongly assume.

Agnosticism is derived from the Greek prefix a~ for the absence of something and ~gnosis. which means knowledge.   Agnostics make a point, that they cannot know, if there is a god or not. 

Both atheism and agnosticism are based upon the scientific thinking, that the non-existence of something cannot be proven, while the existence could be proven by evidence, which so far has not been found yet.  

Atheists and agnostics are therefore two varieties of non-believers.    The real difference between atheists and agnostics and pseudo-non-believers is the difference in their estimation of the probability of the existence of a god.

For an atheist, the probability of the existence of a god is so extremely low, that only the unprovability of non-existence makes the probability any different from zero.   
For an agnostic, there is no estimation of probability, he has no opinion, if the existence or the non-existence of a god would be more probable.  

For a pseudo-non-believer, the situation is very different.  He is deriving his momentary absence of a belief from his personal experience and not from scientific thinking.   He may even estimate the existence of a god as very probable, while personally not yet having experienced any evidence of the existence of a god, he is waiting for this to happen in the future.  
He either has an unfulfilled wish for a god, or he is a disappointed religious believer, who hoped in vain for a god's help in a crisis.    

Pseudo-non-believers often declare themselves as atheists or agnostics, not knowing the true meaning.   When rationality is not a part of their personality and when they have never had a chance to learn scientific thinking, they can be sincere in their self-labeling.   Pseudo-non-believers are gullible people temporarily not under the manipulative influence of a religious belief system.    They are somehow between believes as are unemployed people between jobs. 

For an atheist in search of a fellow atheist as a mindmate, religious people are easy to avoid.   But pseudo-atheists are dangerous, when they not only claim to be atheists, but are themselves convinced to be.   As soon as it comes to the necessity of solving life's challenges, there are fundamental differences in the approach.  
The atheist wants to solve conflicts by rational decisions derived from constructive communication.  
The gullible pseudo-atheist wants to get some higher authority to solve the problems for him.    He buys self-help books of any kind to get recipes.   If he cannot prey to a god to solve the problem for him, he instead believes for example in pseudo-science like NLP as a tool that allegedly enables him to gain control over others.   

177. The Jerks' Fascination with NLP

The Jerks' Fascination with NLP

Some time ago I was in contact with someone, who seems to be a bit too much fascinated and interested in NLP.    Then I was wondering, what he got from it and I suspected, that he hoped to improve his skill to manipulate people. 
When then googling for scientific information on NLP, I somehow overlooked something, that now I got aware of, when reading that book on how to abuse women mentioned in entry 175. 
Since NLP was mentioned in that book, I google for 'NLP seduction', and I got 221.000 results. 
All of a sudden, I understood:   That guy did not study NLP just with a vague hope to gain influence over people, he wanted to become a pick-up and seduction artist, but of course he did not admit that to me.   If there were no other reasons, why I am not in contact with him anymore, attempting to become a pick-up artist is by itself already a good reason to call it good riddance.   

1.  Parts of NLP are as scientific as snake oil. 

http://knol.google.com/k/neurolinguistic-programming#
http://skepdic.com/neurolin.html
http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/Neurolinguistic_programming

But I also superficially read two NLP books, which that guy had recommended to me, one by Bandler, the other by Hall/Bodenhamer.

It is obvious, why NLP has so much attraction for emotional morons, jerks and especially for those who wish to become pick-up and seduction artists. 

- It follows an egocentric approach, where every unpleasant or painful impact upon others is considered as collateral damage, when applying NLP on persons, whose consent was not ascertained first.

- It claims to lead to big and fast results with little effort.

- It promises self-improvement, but that means the power of manipulation, not to become a more ethical person. It promises purely selfish benefits to be gained from others, not to become more likable, lovable, bearable, pleasant to others.

- It is based on an asymmetrical situation. The powerful superior practitioner modifies an inferior submissive or ignorant and unsuspiciously trusting target. This fits his need and presumption and insolence to dominate.

- It is a compilation of many simple tricks, easily to memorize for someone with a good memory for small modules of information but trouble with complex interconnections and theories. There is no abstract, deeper theory, just little chunks of tricks to memorize like a shopping list.

- NLP is a mixture of pseudoscience and banalities. But those are banalities only in the perception of mature people, but could have had some surprising novelty for an emotional moron.

- As a cult, that has been compared to Scientology, it lives by selling the illusion of fast success in the form of selling expensive seminaries, books, courses to the gullible. By encouraging self-overestimation, they earn money and keep their disciples.    

 

2.   Richard Bandler's book has the title 'Get The Life You Want'.   That already tells, for whom it was written. Not for serious skeptical people, but for the easily gullible ones, who are willing to spend money on improbable claims. It sounds like a TV commercial encouraging people to consume products on credit.

I have often wondered, what a lifelong exposure to TV-commercial has on gullible people.  If someone hears countless times, how easy it is to solve any problem by just buying something, if all such claims are simplified and exaggerated, can this change the baseline of what appears reasonable?  Having seen hundreds of thousands of commercials during a lifetime, could this habituation to commercials desensitize people so much, that they do not perceive anymore, how absurd it is to expect to get the life they want from one book?

Reading that book, and reading between the lines, I got more and more aware of the background: Bandler's advice is written for persons, who are self-centered, having only shallow emotions directly connected with the strife for selfish well-being. Bandler's advice was meant to be suitable to all average people, not to a limited target group, so obviously Bandler considers everybody to be like this. I started to suspect, that Bandler was thinking, the whole world were like himself. Most of the book could have been included into a training program for jerks. I would retitle the book: 'How to be a successful jerk.'

So I googled Bandler, and bingo, he was called a sociopath, and he sounds quite narcissistic in some descriptions. No wonder, that such a book and author appeal so much to superficial people, who want an easy life.   A pill is a fast remedy against any ailment, an NLP trick is a fast remedy against any person resisting to be used and abused.

According to Bandler's book 'Get The Life You Want', people are supposed to trick themselves into changing unpleasant feelings without evaluating the cause. It is exactly, what exploitative sociopaths expect from their victims: They should not rebel, protest, they should accept, whatever is done to them, repress their natural emotions and trick themselves into not suffering.   But the jerk does not only expect this, he uses his NLP tricks for his attempt to manipulate and coerce the victims into acquiescence. 


3.  The book 'Figuring out People' by Hall and Bodenhamer also was interesting to read.  It is partly pseudoscience and partly big words for common sense and banalities, that any psychology student learns in the first year.  Bandler's book is worthless on the first glimpse, Hall and Bodenhamer succeed to appear scientific on a superficial level.

Reading Hall and Bodenhamer, I had the strong impression to read a guidebook, a cooking book for emotional morons.   It was all there, simple, easily memorable recipes suitable for persons with weak central coherence, easily to follow for people, who take everything literal and have problems with too much abstraction, completely egocentric perspective, a list of simple, mostly dichotomous items, easy to memorize and mentally apply item by item.

But it is even worse than that, the NLP authors are encouraging ruthless dishonesty, when they tell people to act and be fake and pretend any behavior for the purpose of eliciting information from human lab rats. They tell people to get information from others while hiding themselves behind pretensions. On page 203, I found the whole inhuman essence of the book: "So we first pace, then we lead." How much more cynical can someone be in teaching others to become jerks? No healthy person wants to be lead, so who leads but the ruthless, the amoral, the sociopath who happen to be accidentally in a position to use advantages to gain power. What a role model, when someone uses his prestige as a doctor to encourage people to be jerks? Bandler's diagnosis as a sociopath is known, but I wonder, how much Hall and Bodenhamer also are sociopaths or at least narcissists.

That guy called Michael Hall his mentor. The belief in NLP being unshakable by scientific evidence makes Hall appear more like a guru of a cult than a scientific mentor.   I do not doubt, that Hall is extremely clever, but he is ruthlessly making money with methods based on an unethical paradigm.
I doubt that Hall feels the least moral responsibility for the effect on emotional morons by his books.    Many people fall into a mental trap, that who is clever has also high ethics. Hall obviously has none, but for the gullible emotional morons, Hall's being clever leads to the erroneous assumption that Hall is morally qualified to be an ethical guru.   When an alleged ethical guru teaches the methods to be a successful jerk, this appears to justify to be a jerk.

One thing is certain:  If ever again anybody talks favorably about NLP, this is a huge red flag for me.   Decent, mature and educated people do not fall for that stuff.    

25. Thoughts on Myer-Briggs

Thoughts on Myer-Briggs

Many people, who are rationally refuting religion, still seem to fall too easily for other claims, that are also doubtable.   

The Myer-Briggs is a good example.    It claims that people can be classified along four dichotomies:

Extraversion <> Introversion

Sensing <> Intuition

Thinking <> Feeling

Judgment <> Perception

Excluding the obvious fact, that extraversion and introversion are dichotomies, I consider it as more than doubtable that the rest are dichotomies at all.   

Reasoning is a process, that consists of two steps:   Supplying the mind with information and then drawing conclusions upon this.  

The information needed consists of external information, that is sensed, and of internal information about the own feelings and needs, which are felt, and the values and attitudes of the person.   Thinking is logically processing all this information.   The result is a judgement.  

Therefore the capacity to sense all needed external information, the awareness of all own emotions and needs, and the ability of logical thinking are independent.  If measured as traits, they should be measured as three independent scales.    Judgement is also an independent scale, it should be a measurement, how strong someone is guided by values and ethics.

Intuition can be considered as reasoning going on in the subconscious.    If perception is understood as conscious awareness of all ingredients of the process of arriving at a judgement, then perception could be seen as the other part of a dichotomy of intuition vs. perception.

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Update 15. 9. 10

I have been criticizing the general concept of the MBTI.   After writing it,Ifound this much more detailed and thorough skeptical evaluation:  http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4221