Epistemic status: Original work, explanation of a mental model that I developed for a few years that brings together knowledge from existing fields.

Is all communication manipulation? I hear this sentiment frequently expressed and want to explain in this article that there’s nonmanipulative communication by using protein folding as an intuition pump.

It is common knowledge within molecular biology that proteins fold into their native state. That native state is the folded shape that possesses a minimum of free energy. Finding global minima is however a hard problem. For bigger proteins, it's at the time of writing - still impossible to calculate the shape.

Even in vivo protein folding is a hard problem. Cells are densely packed with many different molecules that push against each other. Frequently, resources are wasted when a protein misfolds into a shape that's not its native state.

Nature is clever and developed a way to help proteins fold into their native state. Cells produce chaperones. A chaperone surrounds an unfolded protein to protect it from outside influences to help the protein to fold into its native state. A chaperone doesn't need to know the native state of a protein to help the protein fold into that state. Instead of manipulating the protein like a sculpture, it holds space for a protein to be safe from outside influences, while it folds into its native form.

This allows a chaperone that works in an uncomplicated way to achieve a result that very complex machine learning algorithms currently don't achieve. The machine learning algorithm tries to figure out the best way for the protein to fold while the chaperone just lets the protein find this way by itself.

The psychologist Carl Rogers advocated that good psychologists act in the same way nonmanipulative with their patients. In his view, it's not the job of the therapist to solve the problem of their patient by manipulating the patient into a healthy form. A good therapist isn’t like ta sculptor sculpts a sculpture. The job of the therapist is rather to hold a space for the patient in which the patient is safe from certain forces that prevent the patient from finding their healthy authentic native state.

I don't intend to argue for nonmanipulative communication from a moral perspective. In cases where you know how to fix the problem of the person you are talking with and are conf...

NLP and other Self-Improvement