Against covert hypnosis

I'm generally against covert hypnosis since it is usually unethical, risky, and not effective.

It's not always necessary to do formal "hypnosis" - conversational hypnosis is great. It's the "covert" part that I'm against. I'm against hiding things. I'm against there being anything to hide. I don't necessarily call attention to labeling the situation as "hypnosis" when I do conversational hypnosis, but that is because it's not helpful and there's nothing to interest them there - and not because there's important information that I'm hiding from them.

Direct symbolic manipulation

Our words are handles. And the images that form in our head - every aspect of them - are handles. Handles that pull on strings that are attached to "concepts" - or whatever you want to call your nodes on your neural net. And the strings are as strong as the conditioning between the concepts.