On Mistakes, Blunders and Errors VII: NLP

"Knowledge being to be had only of visible and certain truth, error is not a fault of our knowledge, but a mistake of our judgment, giving assent to that which is not true." (John Locke, "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding", 1689)

"Most mistakes in philosophy and logic occur because the human mind is apt to take the symbol for the reality." (Albert Einstein, "Cosmic Religion: With Other Opinions and Aphorisms", 1931)

"The most pervasive paradox of the human condition which we see is that the processes which allow us to survive, grow, change, and experience joy are the same processes which allow us to maintain an impoverished model of the world - our ability to manipulate symbols, that is, to create models. So the processes which allow us to accomplish the most extraordinary and unique human activities are the same processes which block our further growth if we commit the error of mistaking the model of the world for reality." (Richard Bandler & John Grinder, "The Structure of Magic", 1975)

"Since we have no systematic way to avoid all the inconsistencies of commonsense logic, each person must find his own way by building a private collection of 'cognitive censors' to suppress the kinds of mistakes he has discovered in the past." (Marvin Minsky, "Jokes and their Relation to the Cognitive Unconscious", 1980)

"All our language is composed of brief little dreams; and the wonderful thing is that we sometimes make of them strangely accurate and marvelously reasonable thoughts. […] What should we be without the help of that which does not exist? Very little. And our unoccupied minds would languish if fables, mistaken notions, abstractions, beliefs, and monsters, hypotheses, and the so-called problems of metaphysics did not people with beings and objectless images our natural depths and darkness. Myths are the souls of our actions and our loves. We cannot act without moving towards a phantom. We can love only what we create." (Paul Valéry, "The Outlook for Intelligence", 1962)

"To expect truth to come from thinking signifies that we mistake the need to think with the urge to know." (Hannah Arendt, "The Life of the Mind", 1977)

"To assume you know someone well enough that you can and do predict their behavior and mental perspective is a gross and often tragic mistake, for it eliminates that person's freedom to create his or her own opinion and drastically affects the emerging picture of the relationship." (Meredith L Young-Sowers, "Agartha: a journey to the stars", 1984) 

"Don't mistake a solution method for a problem definition - especially if it’s your own solution method." (Donald C Gause & Gerald M Weinberg, "Are Your Lights On?", 2011)

"Trust is fundamental to leading others into the dark, since trust enables fear to be 'actionable' as courage rather than actionable as anger. Since the bedrock of trust is faith that all will be OK within uncertainty, leaders’ fundamental role is to ultimately lead themselves. Research has found that successful leaders share three behavioral traits: they lead by example, admit their mistakes, and see positive qualities in others. All three are linked to spaces of play. Leading by example creates a space that is trusted - and without trust, there is no play. Admitting mistakes is to celebrate uncertainty. Seeing qualities in others is to encourage diversity." (Beau Lotto, "Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently", 2017)

Richard Brodie - Collected Quotes

"A belief system, through its memes, can spread in a way that looks just like a conspiracy without any conscious intention on the part of the participants." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"A meme is a replicator that uses the medium of our minds to replicate. Meme evolution happens because our minds are good at copying and innovating - ideas, behaviors, tunes, shapes, structures, and so on." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"A mind is a terrible thing to waste." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"A mutation is an error in copying. It produces a defective -  or possibly improved in some sense - copy instead of an exact duplicate of the original." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"A virus is anything that takes external copying equipment and puts it to work making copies of itself." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"A virus of the mind is something out in the world that infects people with memes. Those memes, in turn, influence the infected people’s behavior so that they help perpetuate and spread the virus." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"All cultural institutions, regardless of their initial design or intention (if any), evolve to have but one goal: to perpetuate themselves." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"Associations are connections between memes. When you are programmed with an association-meme, the presence of one thing triggers a thought or feeling about something else. This causes a change in your behavior, which can ultimately spread the meme to another mind." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"Beliefs are like cow paths. The more often you walk down a path, the more it looks like the right way to go." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"Complicated things arise naturally out of the forces of evolution. No conscious intention is necessary." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"Evolution is a scientific model of how things become more complex; entropy describes how things become simpler. They are the creative and the destructive forces of the universe." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"Evolution requires two things: replication, with a certain degree of fidelity; and innovation, or a certain degree of infidelity." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"Gaining someone’s trust is an effective way to bypass their skepticism and make it possible to program them with new memes." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"If we want to combat the mind viruses responsible for the decline of culture, we need to be conscious of our own programming, consciously adopting memes that take us in the direction we want to go." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"If you currently believe in any concepts or subcultures or dogmas that meet these requirements, and you didn’t consciously choose to program yourself with these memes, you are infected with a mind virus." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"Memes enter our minds without our permission. They become part of our mental programming and influence our lives without our even being aware of it." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"Memetics is the study of the workings of memes: how they interact, replicate, and evolve." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"One of the ways the memes you are programmed with greatly affect your future is through self-fulfilling prophecy." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"Strategies are beliefs about cause and effect. When you are programmed with a strategy-meme, you unconsciously believe behaving a certain way is likely to produce a certain effect. That behavior may trigger a chain of events that results in spreading the strategy-meme to another mind." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"Taking over bits of your mind and pulling you in different directions, mind viruses distract you from what’s most important to you in life and cause confusion, stress, and even despair." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"The evolution of ideas, culture, and society revolves around the selfish meme just as the evolution of species revolves around the selfish gene." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"The most interesting thing about memes is not whether they’re true or false; it’s that they are the building blocks of your mind." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"The most popular and prevalent parts of our culture are the most effective at copying memes." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"The universe contains many mechanisms for copying and dispersing information, and viruses are some of the things that are often copied and dispersed." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"The very act of asking people a question can cause them to create or reinforce a meme in their minds. Asking enough of the right questions can actually change someone’s belief system, and therefore influence the person’s behavior." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"The world is full of memes spread by mind viruses, all competing for a share of your mind, your perception, your attention. They care nothing for your well-being, but instead add to your confusion and subtract from your fulfillment." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"Those new memes conflict with your old ones, and a mental tension is created. Your mind wants to resolve the conflict. It does so by creating a new meme." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"Truth is not one of the strong selectors for memes." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"Viewed through memetics, all values, morals, traditions, and ideas with respect to God and rights are the result of meme evolution. And meme evolution is guided by our genetic tendencies, which in turn evolved around sex." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"We can either give up on the hope of having a fulfilling life and a better world or consciously choose which memes to program ourselves with and which we want to spread." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"We have an enormous hunger to understand the world around us, which was extremely useful when the world was simple and mostly consisted of physical rewards and dangers. In the society of memes, however, we are constantly trying to make sense of things that simply have no sense." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"You can be conditioned, through repetition, to acquire new distinction-memes that make reality look different to you and provide reinforcing evidence that keeps those distinction-memes in place." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

Richard Bandler - Collected Quotes

"Deletion is a process by which we selectively pay attention to certain dimensions of our experience and exclude others. Take, for example, the ability that people have to filter out or exclude all other sound in a room full of people talking in order to listen to one particular person's voice. Using the same process, people are able to block themselves from hearing messages of caring from other people who are important to them. [...] Deletion reduces the world to proportions which we feel capable of handling. The reduction may be useful in some contexts and yet be the source of pain for us in others." (Richard Bandler & John Grinder, "The Structure of Magic", 1975)

"Distortion is the process which allows us to make shifts in our experience of sensory data. Fantasy, for example, allows us to prepare for experiences which we may have before they occur. People will distort present reality when rehearsing a speech which they will later present. It is this process which has made possible all the artistic creations which we as humans have produced." (Richard Bandler & John Grinder, "The Structure of Magic", 1975)

"Generalization is the process by which elements or pieces of a person's model become detached from their original experience and come to represent the entire category of which the experience is an example. bur ability to generalize is essential to coping with the world." (Richard Bandler & John Grinder, "The Structure of Magic", 1975)

"Generalization may impoverish the client's model by causing loss of the detail and richness of their original experiences. Thus, generalization prevents them from making distinctions which would give them a fuller set of choices in coping with any particular situation. At the same time, the generalization expands the specific painful experience to the level of being persecuted by the universe (an insurmountable obstacle to coping)." (Richard Bandler & John Grinder, "The Structure of Magic", 1975)

"Models are not intended to either reflect or construct a single objective reality. Rather, their purpose is to simulate some aspect of a possible reality. In NLP, for instance, it is not important whether or not a model is 'true' , but rather that it is 'useful' . In fact, all models can be perceived as symbolic or metaphoric, as opposed to reflective of reality. Whether the description being used is metaphorical or literal, the usefulness of a model depends on the degree to which it allows us to move effectively to the next step in the sequence of transformations connecting deeper structures and surface structures. Instead of 'constructing' reality, models establish a set of functions that serve as a tool or a bridge between deep structures and surface structures. It is this bridge that forms our 'understanding' of reality and allows us to generate new experiences and expressions of reality." (Richard Bandler & John Grinder, "The Structure of Magic", 1975)

"The most pervasive paradox of the human condition which we see is that the processes which allow us to survive, grow, change, and experience joy are the same processes which allow us to maintain an impoverished model of the world - our ability to manipulate symbols, that is, to create models. So the processes which allow us to accomplish the most extraordinary and unique human activities are the same processes which block our further growth if we commit the error of mistaking the model of the world for reality." (Richard Bandler & John Grinder, "The Structure of Magic", 1975)

"[…] there is an irreducible difference between the world and our experience of it. We as human beings do not operate directly on the world. Each of us creates a representation of the world in which we live - that is, we create a map or model which we use to generate our behavior. Our representation of the world determines to a large degree what our experience of the world will be, how we will perceive the world, what choices we will see available to us as we live in the world." (Richard Bandler & John Grinder, "The Structure of Magic", 1975)

"To say that our communication, our language, is a system is to say that it has structure, that there is some set of rules which identify. I which sequences of words will make sense, will represent a model of our experience. In other words, our behavior when creating a I representation or when communicating is rule-governed behavior. Even though we are not normally aware of the structure in the process of representation and communication, that structure, the structure of language, can be understood in terms of regular patterns." (Richard Bandler & John Grinder, "The Structure of Magic", 1975)

"We are almost never conscious of the way in which we order and structure the words we select. Language so fills our world that we move through it as a fish swims through water. Although we have little or no consciousness of the way in which we form our communication, our activity - the process of using language - is highly structured." (Richard Bandler & John Grinder, "The Structure of Magic", 1975)

Joseph O’Connor - Collected Quotes

"A model is an edited, distorted and generalised copy of the original and therefore there can never be complete. A model is not in any sense ‘true’: it can be judged only by whether it works or doesn’t work. If it works, it allows another person to get the same class of results as the original person from whom the model was taken." (Joseph O’Connor, "Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People", 1998)

"All actions have a purpose. Our actions are not random; we are always trying to achieve something, although we may not be aware of what that is." (Joseph O’Connor, "Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People", 1998)

"Beliefs are those ideas we take as true and use to guide our actions. We all have beliefs about what sort of people we are and what we are capable of. These beliefs act as permissions for or limitations on what we do. When we believe something is possible, we will try it; if we believe it impossible, we will not." (Joseph O’Connor, "Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People", 1998)

"Every time we push the boundary on the outside world we also push the boundary on our inner world. We open a larger ‘idea space’. Every advance in science, art and technology means we have gone beyond the limiting ideas that have stopped us advancing in the past." (Joseph O’Connor, "Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People", 1998)

"Having a choice is better than not having a choice. Always try to have a map for yourself that gives you the widest and richest number of choices. Act always to increase choice. The more choices you have, the freer you are and the more influence you have." (Joseph O’Connor, "Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People", 1998)

"Neuro-Linguistic programming is the study of our subjective experience; how we create what passes for reality in our minds. [...] NLP also studies brilliance and quality - how outstanding individuals and organisations get their outstanding results." (Joseph O’Connor, "Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People", 1998)

"People respond to their experience, not to reality itself. We do not know what reality is. Our senses, beliefs, and past experience give us a map of the world from which to operate." (Joseph O’Connor, "Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People", 1998)

"The meaning of the communication is not simply what you intend, but also the response you get." (Joseph O’Connor, "Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People", 1998)

Robert B Dilts - Collected Quotes

"Another implication of the Law of Requisite Variety is that the member of a system that has the most flexibility also tends to be the catalytic member of that system. This is a significant principle for leadership in particular. The ability to be flexible and sensitive to variation is important in terms of managing the system itself." (Robert B Dilts, "Modeling with NLP", 1998)

"Behavior modeling involves observing and mapping the successful processes which underlie an exceptional performance of some type. It is the process of taking a complex event or series of events and breaking it into small enough chunks so that it can be recapitulated in some way. The purpose of behavior modeling is to create a pragmatic map or 'model' of that behavior which can be used to reproduce or simulate some aspect of that performance by anyone who is motivated to do so. The goal of the behavior modeling process is to identify the essential elements of thought and action required to produce the desired response or outcome. As opposed to providing purely correlative or statistical data, a 'model' of a particular behavior must provide a description of what is necessary to actually achieve a similar result." (Robert B Dilts, "Modeling with NLP", 1998)

"Competence involves consistency. But as soon as you are consistent in one area, you need to have flexibility in another area to be able to accommodate to the part of the system that is not changing." (Robert B Dilts, "Modeling with NLP", 1998)

"Features are the specific qualities or characteristics that we decide to filter for as we are modeling." (Robert B Dilts, "Modeling with NLP", 1998)

"From the NLP perspective, there are inductive transformations, through which we perceive patterns in, and build maps of, the world around us; and there are deductive transformations, through which we describe and act on our perceptions and models of the world. Inductive transformations involve the process of 'chunking up' to find the deeper structure patterns ('concepts', 'ideas', 'universals', etc.) in the collections of experiences we receive through our senses. Deductive transformations operate to 'chunk down' our experiential deep structures into surface structures; rendering general ideas and concepts into specific words, actions and other forms of behavioral output." (Robert B Dilts, "Modeling with NLP", 1998)

"In the NLP view, then, 'reality' is the relationship and interaction between deep structures and surface structures. Thus, there are many possible 'realities'. It is not as if there is 'a map' and 'a territory', there are many possible territories and maps, and the territory is continually changing, partially as a function of the way in which people's maps lead them to interact with that territory." (Robert B Dilts, "Modeling with NLP", 1998)

"[...] modeling involves achieving two simultaneous outcomes - getting a particular result, and, at the same time, learning explicitly how to do it. It is this feature that makes modeling one of the most powerful forms of 'learning to learn' that is available. [...] Modeling is the process of taking a complex event or phenomenon and breaking it into small enough chunks so that it can be recapitulated or applied in some way." (Robert B Dilts, "Modeling with NLP", 1998)

"Modeling is essentially a process of 'sharing ideas'. The ability to model effectively opens the door to many possibilities that have previously been unavailable to humankind. In addition to providing a methodology which can be used to make ideas more explicit and easier to communicate, modeling can transform the way we view and perceive one another." (Robert B Dilts, "Modeling with NLP", 1998)

"Models are not intended to either reflect or construct a single objective reality. Rather, their purpose is to simulate some aspect of a possible reality. In NLP, for instance, it is not important whether or not a model is 'true', but rather that it is 'useful'. In fact, all models can be perceived as symbolic or metaphoric, as opposed to reflective of reality. Whether the description being used is metaphorical or literal, the usefulness of a model depends on the degree to which it allows us to move effectively to the next step in the sequence of transformations connecting deeper structures and surface structures. Instead of 'constructing' reality, models establish a set of functions that serve as a tool or a bridge between deep structures and surface structures. It is this bridge that forms our 'understanding' of reality and allows us to generate new experiences and expressions of reality." (Robert B Dilts, "Modeling with NLP", 1998)

"Neural networks are computer structures, based on the way in which the brain functions. They are used to recognize complex patterns. They typically involve a number of interconnected elements that are used to create a type of "model" of some pattern or phenomenon. The model is formed as a function of the 'weights,' or strengths, of the connections between the elements in the network. This inner 'model' determines the output of the network." (Robert B Dilts, "Modeling with NLP", 1998)

"NLP contains a set of principles and distinctions which are uniquely suited to analyze and identify crucial patterns of values, behavior and interrelationships so that they may be put into pragmatic and testable implementations." (Robert B Dilts, "Modeling with NLP", 1998)

"NLP is the process by which the relevant pieces of these people's behavior was discovered and then organized into a working model." (Robert B Dilts, "Modeling with NLP", 1998)

"NLP operates from the assumption that the map is not the territory. As human beings, we can never know reality, in the sense that we have to experience reality through our senses and our senses are limited. [...] We can only make maps of the reality around us through the information that we receive through our senses and the connection of that information to our own personal memories and other experiences. Therefore, we don't tend to respond to reality itself, but rather to our own maps of reality." (Robert B Dilts, "Modeling with NLP", 1998)

"On one level, it's not possible to completely isolate anyone part of a system from another. People are influenced by many aspects of the system around them. It is important to take into account not only the processes that are happening within the individual, but also the influences on that person from the system around him or her." (Robert B Dilts, "Modeling with NLP", 1998)

"One of the goals of NLP is to identify problematic generalizations, deletions or distortions through the analysis of the 'syntax' or form of the surface structure and provide a system of tools so that a more enriched representation of the deep structure may be attained. Another goal of NLP, represented by the modeling process, is to be able to create better links and pathways between surface structures and deep structures." (Robert B Dilts, "Modeling with NLP", 1998)

"One of the real secrets of managing creativity effectively is determining where to put the point of flexibility. It is ultimately a matter of ecology." (Robert B Dilts, "Modeling with NLP", 1998)

"Perceiving a situation or experience from multiple perspectives allows a person to gain broader insight and understanding with respect to the event." (Robert B Dilts, "Modeling with NLP", 1998)

"Reality is a set of structural transforms of primary data taken from the world. The conversion of primary data into structures involves the selective deletion, distortion or generalization of primary data. The mind can neither mirror nor construct reality. 'Stronger' structures are formed from 'weaker' structures through selective destruction of information. Primary data becomes meaningful only after a series of such operations has transformed it to be congruent with a preexisting structure." (Robert B Dilts, "Modeling with NLP", 1998)

"The focus of most NLP modeling processes is at the level of capabilities, the how to level. Capabilities connect beliefs and values to specific behaviors. Without the how, knowing what one is supposed to do, and even why to do it, is largely ineffective. Capabilities and skills provide the links and leverage to manifest our vision, identity, values and beliefs as actions in a particular environment." (Robert B Dilts, "Modeling with NLP", 1998)

"The key to any effective model of behavior, however, is to find those distinctions which are the most fundamental, simple and impactful for producing practical results in the context in which one is operating." (Robert B Dilts, "Modeling with NLP", 1998)

"[...] the Law of Requisite Variety states that 'in order to successfully adapt and survive, a member of a system needs a certain minimum amount of flexibility, and that flexibility has to be proportional to the potential variation or the uncertainty in the rest of the system'. In other words, if someone is committed to accomplishing a certain goal, he or she needs to have a number of possible ways to reach it. The number of options required to be certain the goal can be reached depends on the amount of change that is possible within the system in which one is attempting to achieve the goal." (Robert B Dilts, "Modeling with NLP", 1998)

"The NLP modeling process consists of applying various strategies for examining the mental and physical processes which underlie a particular performance or the achievement of a particular result, and then creating some type of explicit map or description of those processes which can be applied for some practical purpose. Various modeling strategies delineate different sequences of steps and types of distinctions through which relevant patterns may discovered and formed into descriptions."  (Robert B Dilts, "Modeling with NLP", 1998)

"The objective of the NLP modeling process is not to end up with the one 'right' or 'true' description of a particular person's thinking process, but rather to make an instrumental map that allows us to apply the strategies that we have modeled in some useful way. An 'instrumental map' is one that allows us to act more effectively - the 'accuracy' or 'reality' of the map is less important than its 'usefulness'." (Robert B Dilts, "Modeling with NLP", 1998)

"[...] the philosophy of NLP is that effective learning and change involves initially setting goals, evidence and evidence procedures to reach a particular desired state. A wide coverage of strategies and activities are then provided in order to be able to vary the operations applied to reach goals." (Robert B Dilts, "Modeling with NLP", 1998)

"The primary function of NLP tools and techniques is to help to widen, enrich or add to our maps of the world. The basic presupposition of NLP is that the richer your map of the world is, the more possibilities that you have of dealing with whatever challenges occur in reality." (Robert B Dilts, "Modeling with NLP", 1998)

"[...] there is no one 'right' or 'correct' map of the world. We all have our own world view and that world view is based upon the sort of neurolinguistic maps that we have formed. It's these neurolinguistic maps that will determine how we interpret and how we react to the world around us and give meaning to our behaviors and our experiences, more so than reality itself. Thus, it is generally not external reality that limits us, constrains us, or empowers us, but rather it is our map of that reality. The basic idea of NLP is that if you can enrich or widen your map, you will perceive more choices available to you given the same reality." (Robert B Dilts, "Modeling with NLP", 1998)

"When modeling, it is important to always keep in mind that no single pattern finding method is foolproof." (Robert B Dilts, "Modeling with NLP", 1998)