Milton Erickson on NLP: "they got my work in a nutshell — but they missed the nut!"
StewartalsopIII · x · 2026-10-20
Stewart Alsop shared an anecdote: when asked what he thought of the neurolinguistic programmers who built NLP from his work, hypnotherapist Milton Erickson replied, "Well, they got my work in a nutshell" — then, after a long pause, "but they missed the nut!"
Alsop muses that AI oddly gives us access to what James Scott (Seeing Like a State) called Metis — the implicit, grandmotherly intuition about tricks that work — which Scott argued the state destroyed in its pursuit of legibility and paperwork.
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