[carapace]

Dude, I'm right here. You're calling me a liar|fool and that's not very civil. C'mon.

The seminar cost US$4000 but I only used about ten minutes of it. Best investment of my life.

Helped me stop being homeless and kick off my career as a professional programmer.

Ah, story time... I just remembered how I couldn't bring myself to go to CodeCon.

I had a ticket.

I got as close as the corner.

I just stood there and watched my fellow nerds walk up and go into the building for a while and then went home.

(You can't explain these things to normal people. They can't relate. My mom once said to me, "I know you're not faking this because no one would ever choose to be this miserable." which was actually more comforting than you might imagine.)

Anyway, next time, after my depression was cured, not only did I attend CodeCon, but I gave a presentation that went really well, and got my first job as a professional programmer. Literally a guy walked up to me after the presentation and asked if I would be willing to move.

Turns out with out the crushing depression holding me back I'm not too shabby. Yay!

- - - -

Ha! The audio of my presentation is on the Archive!

https://archive.org/details/codecon-2004-audio/CodeCon_2004-...

(Man, I sound so soupy. Packed nasal passages, no resonance. Allergies.)

I'm still bangin' away on the idea from time to time: https://sr.ht/~sforman/Xerblin/

[tsimionescu]

I'm sorry, but you're claiming you spent 4000 dollars and 10 minutes to cure a disease that millions of doctors and patients struggle with their entire lives. Furthermore, based on this personal experience, you claim that NLP is not the pure crackpot lunacy that it is, but some advanced, misunderstood science.

You may have personally been extremely lucky and experienced essentially a miracle.

But what you are claiming is similar to people claiming they cured cancer with healing crystals, or prayed the lupus away. There is no way to take your claim any more seriously: you are either lying or you experienced an extremely lucky break, and were lied to about the cause.

There is no other way to react to people promoting pseudoscience, especially in medicine. Someone else who is suffering could be duped by your well-meaning sharing of this experience into throwing their good money away on bullshit in hopes of reproducing a miracle.

[carapace]

> you're claiming you spent 4000 dollars and 10 minutes to cure a disease that millions of doctors and patients struggle with their entire lives.

Yes. Exactly that.

(In a sense I did get lucky: Dr. Bandler could have picked someone else for the demo.)

> based on this personal experience,

And a lot of other personal experience, and a pretty good understanding of the formal grammar analysis that spawned it (and that also underpins computer languages.)

> you claim that NLP is not the pure crackpot lunacy that it is,

That you claim it is...

Do you have any experience? I find a common denominator among strident skeptics like yourself is that they have no actual experience and have done no personal investigation. Are you an armchair skeptic? Have you any experience whatsoever with hypnosis or NLP?

> but some advanced, misunderstood

...yes...

> science.

No. Not yet. But it should be.

You insist that I must be a liar or a fool and yet you would prefer a miracle to rational investigation.

Well I'm no liar, but certainly one of us (at least) is a fool.

Good day sir.

[tsimionescu]

> And a lot of other personal experience, and a pretty good understanding of the formal grammar analysis that spawned it (and that also underpins computer languages.)

You see, this is where you lose me. Chomsky's work has absolutely no applicability to treating mental illness, and he would be the first to explain that. His work is not even applicable to language translation, and has no hope of being in the foreseeable future. It is just a framework for discussing some basics of how human language works and can be learned.

Hell, it's barely applicable to computer languages, where again, it's only a framework for discussion. It certainly doesn't 'underpin' computer languages (the work of Alan Turing, John von Neumann and others does instead).

> Have you any experience whatsoever with hypnosis or NLP?

No, and neither do I with crystal healing, praying the lupus away, acupuncture and a myriad others.