Last year I posted about my (bad) experiences with ‘neurolinguistic programming’, the professional-sounding but scientifically dubious psychological help technique. I just found a group of NLPers discussing the post. They’re polite enough, even if they do suggest I have:

a strong external authority reference, and, like most (?) people, is convinced that the answers to hir [sic] problems lie outside rather than in hir [um, sic] own resourcefulness.

Not true, although it’s a false dichotomy to begin with. I do indeed defer to the external authority of the scientific method, though. Also:

the author’s scepticism seems, to me, to be more about metaphysics, reincarnation, quantum physics, etc. than NLP per se. In short, anything that lacks the seal of approval of the readily proven.

I’m not all that skeptical about quantum physics, but I think I know what they mean. ‘[A]nything that lacks the seal of approval of the readily proven’ isn’t fair, however. Skepticism is simply going where the evidence leads - if there were evidence for reincarnation or the tenets of NLP I’d happily believe it.

It’s always interesting to see these kinds of responses. One of the posters wants to provide a point-by-point rebuttal of the Skepdic dictionary’s take on NLP, which would certainly be an fascinating read.

IE7 isn’t displaying the comments on the original post for me - shall work on that.