bitshaker

Most certainly. This current work I am doing builds upon the mountaintops of huge amounts of work built by two men who base their work on yet more huge foundations.

Igor Ledochowski - http://hypnosistrainingacademy.com

John Overdurf - http://JohnOverdurf.com

As far as context-free therapy goes, that's a bit of an advanced subject, but can be learned and mastered through some of their programs.

The key tenets are simple though. As a model, consider that human language builds around 5 concepts: Space, Time, Energy, Matter, and Identity. These 5 also map cleanly to questions (5Ws and H) and language predicates in human language. Space is Where, Time is When, Energy is How, Matter is What, and Identity carries two with Why and Who.

Every problem you've ever had is built up of some combination of the 5 in a specific way, unique to you.

The pattern of all change is this:

1) Associate to a problem, or in other words, bring it to mind.

2) Dissociate from the problem, or basically get enough distance from it so that you can think rationally and calmly. Similar to a monkey not reaching for a banana when a tiger is running after it, your brain does not do change under danger and stress well. It can, but that usually leads to problems in the first place.

3) Associate (think about, experience) a resource state. Another thought or experience that will help with this one, for example if someone were afraid of clowns, I'd ask a question like, "What clowns fear you?" It usually knocks them out of the fear loop for a second.

4) While thinking about the resource, recall the problem and see how it has changed. Notice I said has changed. It always changes. You can never do your problem the same again. Will this solve things on the first go? Maybe. Maybe not, but it's enough to get a foothold and a new direction and loop until it's done.

Which is what makes this fun and exciting to do in person and fun and exciting to help teach a machine to mimic it to.

Thank you for expressing your opinion.

I wasn't interested in long citations or garnering proof of my work in particular with training a machine to do this work. I simply wished to add to this thread and did so, in order to show someone out there, maybe even you, what else is going on that is exciting in my little corner of the world.

I'm not that good of a programmer, so it's not in a state that it does work yet. I hope my original comment didn't suggest otherwise, but let me be perfectly clear here: I have no working machine implementation that can do what I want yet. It can work with simple canned responses like Eliza, but it's not enough. I am working on employing all of the techniques and tools mentioned, but progress is slow.

However, this is work and change I employ daily with my clients professionally and I can assure you that it does work.

You don't even have to take my word for it.

Consider....seriously consider: who would you not be if you weren't you?

If you thought about that one for a sec and felt a little spaced out for a second, you did very well.

If you came up with something quickly like "me" and didn't really actually consider the question, allow me to pose another to you. Again, seriously consider this. Read it a few times. Imagine emphasis on different words each time.

Who are you not without that problem you are interested in solving?

This work can be made more difficult by text only and seriously asynchronous communication, which is why I mentioned it being easier within conversation.

If you are interested in more, google "mind bending language" or "attention shifting coaching" and find Igor Ledochowski and John Overdurf. Their work has helped me change the lives of thousands.

The place I learned it was hypnosistrainingacademy.com and where he derived his teachings from was a man named John Overdurf who had a program called beyond words. I'd start with Igor's material first. He calls his version (which is based upon, but wholly distinct from beyond words) mind bending language. There are even card decks and training programs to consume. Or free articles if you wish to check it out.

Thank you. Those are great and I should look at incorporating more of those ideas into the work I'm doing.

My field is hypnosis, or more generally, "changework" which is jargon, but essentially hacking the psychology of clients to get desired outcomes.

There's been a renaissance of study in placebo effects, meditation, and general frameworks for how people change belief for therapeutic purposes or otherwise, but to me, that's been going on for a long time and is more about acceptance than being a new development.

One of the most exciting developments that's been coming out recently is playing with language to do what's called context-free conversational change.

Essentially, you can help someone solve an issue without actually knowing the details or even generally what they need help with. It's like homomorphic encryption for therapy. A therapist can do work, a client can report results, but the problem itself can be a black box along with a bit of the solution as well since much of the change is unconscious.

It works better with feedback (a conversation) of course, but often can be utilized in a more canned manner if you know the type of problem well enough.

I'm working on putting together an automated solution that's based on some loose grammar rules, NLP, Markov chains, and anything else I can use to help a machine be creative in language to help people solve their own problems, but as a first step as a useful tool for beginner therapists to help them get used to the ideas and frameworks with language to use.

So essentially, I'm getting a good chunk of the way toward hacking on a machine that can reliably work on people's problems without having to train a full AI or anything remotely resembling real intelligence, just mimicking it.

Before you go thinking, "Didn't they do that with Eliza?" Well yes, in a way, but my implementation is using an entirely different approach.

At our remote company, we use http://Jell.com which was built for this purpose.

In my experience, yes.

As to why, people like working with people who are like them.

Assuming that the development part is good enough, having people skills blows that person away.

I learned my skills from various sources, but I found a coach that took me to the next level. His name is Marcus Oakey. I'm sure he is still teaching.

I learned how to incorporate life lessons unconsciously. A vastly useful tool.

This is a classic problem and you're not alone. The solution is usually quite simple.

I work with people like you all the time in my coaching business.

Allow me to show you the light at the end of the tunnel.

A comment box isn't going to do this justice, so email me at Joe at thesuperhumanproject.com and I'll help you through this.

For the good of the community, we can do a write up of what we discussed or we can keep it private. It's up to you.

Some friends of mine teach this for target shooting with pistols.

They can teach anyone how to shoot amazingly accurately in about 15 minutes. Even if they haven't shot a gun before.

They call it the cybernetic loop.

http://insightfirearmstraining.com

I see this constantly in engineers. My theory is that we're trained to see life as pass/fail and that starts to become a general theory of life. I found this guy to be quite helpful.

http://yourcharismacoach.com

He's got some great videos like how to warm up to conversations

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtZUx6VLoY0

His stuff was so helpful to me I went to a seminar and then hired him and my social skills went through the roof. I got better clients (I run a consulting company), my marriage improved, and I just feel all the more outgoing despite a lifetime of being introverted.

My old employer Thoughtworks does this.

http://www.thoughtworks.com/careers/application-process

It's a fantastic way to vet candidates and there are multiple exits to the process. For obviously bad submissions, it's probably a no-hire, but I've even seen incomplete assignments get someone to the next level and then a hire.

Some people get sent to ThoughtWorks University which basically trains them to code, work in an agile environment and how to be a good consultant. Everyone that goes says it is a great experience.

Thanks. That's one avenue we've looked at already. I have also looked at traditional gamification techniques and found them initially motivating for users, but then engagement falls off a cliff. This has less to do with the techniques I suspect and more to do with the fact that people eventually hit a goal weight and think they are suddenly "fixed" and can go back to what they were doing before. We actively work to encourage the better mindset of making a permanent change in lifestyle where our system then moves from educational and informative to simply a tool to continue to plan and keep on track.

I am part of a team created a system that took the complexity of the human metabolism and reduced it down to a few vital statistics that are then used to create a individualized formula that tells people how to sustainably improve their metabolism and lose weight and gain muscle. The amazing part is that it works for everyone because it is custom tailored to them. The hard part here was 30 years of testing, thankfully not done by me, but by the CEO who happens to be a bodybuilder.

The formula is how much protein, carbs, and fat to eat and the appopriate exercise of 3 half hour workout sessions a week. No supplements or anything else. Just food and small amounts of exercise to stimulate hormone response. This is way more complex than some tracker or calorie counter. It takes into account insulin spikes, metabolic damage assessments, glycogen storage, and much more. The hard part here was integrating ~10 different disciplines in various sciences. Everyone had a piece of the puzzle, but we had to put it together.

That is then fed into an app that can then pick foods for you based on your formula that is then constantly refined based on your results. We took 1000 people through test runs tweaking our code to get it right. Now it works for everyone that we put on it and actually uses the system.

Our next challenge is the psychology and habit forming parts of the app we have built.

Oh and of course competing with well funded competitors in the space, but at least nobody can claim our results because they just track things instead of allow people to really plan for health.

Edit: Since you asked, it's called mPact (for metabolism impact) and the corporate site is at http://mPact.io