> On Sat, 9 Dec 1995, Everett Lee Lady wrote a very good response to my query:

Um, gee thanks! Sorry for all the damn misprints. My mind always gets ahead of my fingers on the first draft.

Actually, I was feeling quite embarrassed this morning about what I'd written. It seemed to me, in retrospect, that it had been important for me to write it, but perhaps not important for anyone else to read it.

I guess the shorter answer to your query/comment is that I can't hope to convince anyone (at least anyone with any sense) that NLP is good just because I say so. But some people will find it interesting and find that it is something they want to know about and investigate further, even though there's not yet enough evidence to make a conclusive judgement on most parts of it. These are the people my articles are intended for.

Others, like JG, have a different attitude. These others will not find value in my articles. However, actually the JGs do serve a useful purpose, in that they keep the discussion going, which is important.

> Thanks for your message. It is difficult for me, because I think -- Hey,
> that NLP stuff should be easy to research,

Some of it should be incredibly easy to research. If the academics in clinical psychology are not able to determine, at least on a preliminary basis, whether a single-session cure for phobias has any value or not, then there's something drastically wrong with their methodology.

> bet it's pretty limited, but
> there's something good in there. Epistimelogically, I think that "research"
> never creates a good idea, but merely is a good way to stop most of the
> bad ideas.

Yes, that's the point. Although it depends on how you define "research."

I want to write an article on this, because it has a lot of relevance to my own life, both professional and personal. There are the two impulses in science (and many other aspects of life), which are both essential. One of them is the conservative doubting impulse that Asimov talks about, which safeguards science from going off completely half-cocked with enthusiasm for new ideas. (Well, at least a lot of the time it manages to do this.) Those who are attracted to this aspect are essentially the bean-counters of science (although this particular kind of bean-counting sometimes does require considerable imagination and vision) and are indispensible.

But if science is limited to bean counting, as so many of the people in clinical psych seem to advocate, then it never gets anywhere. The other impulse is also essential, which amounts to a curiosity which is a thirst, almost a rage, to discover. And which is very often willing to cut corners, take risks, risk making big-time mistakes. This is the high-stakes side of science. One can wind up getting a Nobel prize, or one may wind up being a virtual crackpot.

This is the approach that NLP has taken, especially in its early days when the "Bandler-Grinder boys" (as Gregory Bateson called them) were really a bunch of cowboys, taking a ride on the wild side of therapy, making assertions based on nothing but their own gut feelings (which in retrospect often turned out to be astonishingly good), and certainly doing things that would make any ethics committee cringe, such as sending beginning students out to try and hypnotize unsuspecting clerks at the neighborhood Safeway.

> In any case, let me reiterate that I enjoy your well tempered
> postings from time to time when they come up. I also don't see any
> difficulty in "re-hashing" old arguments every six months or so on a
> USENET newsgroup -- I suspect the readership has changed, and those who
> don't want to read can learn how to use killfiles.

The readership constantly changes. Even at the end of a long argument which has gone on for months, there will be somebody who will ask "What is NLP, anyway?" That's why I keep repeating the basic points and so often write, "NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming)" in my articles.

--Lee