At 4:07 AM -0500 12/21/98, Tom Lunde wrote:
<<snip>>
>
>Now you begin to get an understanding of how Bandler and Grinder's
>research
>explained the difficulty of increasing net baud rate. Their answer after
>studying a number of highly successful people was to state that some
>people
>have the flexibility to shift primary sensory modes while most people
>remain
>locked into their habitual perceptional framework. In fact they went
>so far
>as to claim that those above average people of our society have developed
>this flexibility and this allows them to communicate better with more
>people
>thereby increasing their ability to persuade and communicate. One of the
>goals of the discipline was through a series of exercises, to expand your
>individual flexibility by being able to identify another persons primary
>mode and move into an identical mode by having the flexibility to change
>yourself. They called this ability - exquisite. In your terms, it meant
>the ability to increase net baud rate with anyone.
>
>These skills could easily be taught in a conventional education set up
>except that discipline has never been able to penetrate the University
>educated elite who believe that it is what you know, not how you
>communicate
>what you know that is the essential skill.
>
Thank you for this intro to NLP, which I had heard OF but not much ABOUT.
I think that very often the "University educated elite" have as one
major (if unstated and sometimes perhaps not even understood) purpose
the blocking of communication, by the unnecessary use of jargon and the
tendency never to use a short word when a long one will do. This is
caused in part by the fact that a lot of people (including many writers
of textbooks) never learn to write proper English, so that education in
jargon is often stronger than education in English. But it is also
caused by the intention to exclude the unwashed (including those
educated in other niches). This is related to the professionalization
of everything which, as Ivan Illich preaches at length, has robbed
people and communities of the ability to deal with their problems as
they arise without "professional" intervention.
Many have noted that reductionism has severely hamstrung universities
and their graduates by blinkering them so that (for instance)
economists have trouble accepting the reality anything that is not
included in the GDP even when they pay it lip service. That is not
tomsay that reductionism has not been useful. It has enabled the
acquisition of a great deal of knowledge about the world. But it nneeds
to be counterbalanced by granting higher status to generalists, who are
usually treated with considerable disdain by the specialized elite, by
encouraging specialists to increase heir baud rate with the rest of the
world by eliminating unnecessary jargon and defing that which they use
(which sould be an extremely useful discipline in any case, and above
all by requiring that people are able to write a proper English
sentence before they are turned loose into the fields of jargon.
I would hasten to add that these remarks are not in any way pointed at
this list, which is in general (and definitely INCLUDING Douglas
Wilson) as distinguished by its ability to write clearly as by its
courtesy, civility, and erudition.
Caspar Davis
