But you haven't presented "overwhelming evidence". You cited a meta-study paper that was prepared by a member of a Skeptics club. It's like you're not even trying.
(Look, from Shannon's Information Theory we have the result that the unpredictability of a message is a measure of its information content. Knowing only one piece of information about that paper: that the author is a Skeptic, I can already predict that that paper will have a negative result. There's really no information there, eh?)
Like I said, if you're willing to pick some actual scientific studies I'm willing to read them with an open mind. I'd like to get to the bottom of this little mystery. In fact, I'm going to read a bunch of these (studies that are referenced from the paper you gave, and others I can find) anyway.
> if you're willing to pick some actual scientific studies
And I have. Meta-reviews are considered important, effective, and valuable ways of probing the state of the literature. Dismissing it out of hand because you dislike who prepared it is fallacious.
> Dismissing it out of hand because you dislike who prepared it is fallacious.
Please, it's like you cited a paper called "Do Ghosts Exist?" prepared by a member of the There's No Such Thing as Ghosts club. You don't feel at least a little bit silly?
- - - -
Anyway, I'm reading the paper now.
He starts out well, with a DB of 315 articles, but then discards all but 63 of them "based on the criterion of whether the journal in which the given articles were publisher was recorded on on the Master Journal List of the Institute for Scientific Information in Philadelphia. This operation does not require justification
in more detail."
Okay...
That's about 20%. Didn't you just say that "18% is statistically insignificant"?
But for the sake of discussion, let it pass: we will assume that these 63 papers are a good sample of the available information.
He goes on to select "Thirty-three empirical articles, which tested the tenets of the concept and/or the tenets-derived hypotheses."
He breaks them down into three subcategories:
> 1. Nine works supporting the NLP tenets and the tenets-derived hypotheses (27.3%).
> 2. Eighteen works non-supportive of the NLP tenets and the tenets-derived hypotheses (54.5%).
> 3. Six works with uncertain outcomes (18.2%).
Note that in the abstract the numbers for "supporting" and "uncertain" have been exchanged:
> Out of 33 studies, 18.2% show results supporting the tenets of NLP, 54.5% - results non-supportive of the NLP tenets and 27.3% brings uncertain results.
Is 27.3% statistically insignificant?
Anyway, I'll dig through these papers but I doubt I'm going to find a "smoking gun" that invalidates NLP.
As for this meta-study, it's really just Skeptic propaganda:
> My analysis leads undeniably to the statement that NLP represents pseudoscientific rubbish, which should be mothballed forever.
That doesn't really sound like an objective scientific statement does it?
What I find extremely weird and a bit concerning is where he writes:
> Here I would like to refer to the statement expressed by O’Donohue and Ferguson (2006), who propose that each type of therapy that does not have empirical supportive evidence of its effectiveness should be called experimental. They also put forward a suggestion that each case of performing such therapies without informing the clients about its experimental status should be referred to and treated as criminal activity. I fully agree with this view.
I mean, talk about gatekeeping, eh?
He wants people to be charged with a crime for not prefacing their work with his disclaimer.
He believes that NLP is nothing, yet it's somehow so dangerous that it needs a warning label? That seems irrational.
Anyway, I'm going to look through the referenced papers and see if I can figure out what's going wrong...
I've looked over the "works non-supportive of the NLP tenets and the tenets-derived hypotheses" and, well, in the words of Inigo Montoya, "I do not think it means what you think it means."
Basically, in the mid-80's some researchers badly misunderstood a facet of NLP, researched it badly, and then declared the whole thing to be baloney. Here's a good (brief) paper describing some of the problems with the "research":
Einspruch, E. L., & Forman, B. D. (1985). Observations concerning research literature on Neurolinguistic Programming. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 32, 589-596.
Since then, as far as I can tell, almost no one has done anything like proper science to NLP at all, at all. The NLP people are merrily doing their thing, the research psychologists are doing their thing, and "never the twain shall meet", eh?
(Look, from Shannon's Information Theory we have the result that the unpredictability of a message is a measure of its information content. Knowing only one piece of information about that paper: that the author is a Skeptic, I can already predict that that paper will have a negative result. There's really no information there, eh?)
Like I said, if you're willing to pick some actual scientific studies I'm willing to read them with an open mind. I'd like to get to the bottom of this little mystery. In fact, I'm going to read a bunch of these (studies that are referenced from the paper you gave, and others I can find) anyway.