Scott Adams's Blog, page 218

Episode 100: Using Persuasion to Reduce Future Opioid Addiction

Corrected file: Initial post was the wrong audio file for the description. This is fixed.

This podcast is the audio from a Periscope session in which Scott Adams discusses how much we have learned about the tools of persuasion since the Nancy Reagan days of “Just Say No.” Can we persuade better today? Yes, we can.

The post Episode 100: Using Persuasion to Reduce Future Opioid Addiction appeared first on Dilbert Blog.

Episode 100: Using Persuasion to Reduce Opioid Addiction

Scott Adams tells you how the field of persuasion has advanced since the days of Nancy Reagan’s “Just say no” campaign against drugs. Can we persuade young people to stay away from opioids? I suggest one approach that could work.

The post Episode 100: Using Persuasion to Reduce Opioid Addiction appeared first on Dilbert Blog.

Things I Have Learned About Gun Control

One of the positive side-effects of the Trump administration is that citizens are far more informed on the issues than at any time in my memory. The public seems to be getting into the details on a lot of topics lately. Gun control is a great example. I consider myself under-informed on that topic, but improving daily, as are most of you who follow the news. And I thought it would be useful for some of you to compare your views on the topic to where I’ve evolved so far.

What follows is my public confession of ignorance on the topic. I will list the things I believe to be true, while asking readers to fact-check me. I’ll modify my list as corrections come in.

In no particular order, here’s what I think I know.

Gun control works. If it didn’t work, the Vegas shooter and the Florida school shooter would have used fully-automatic weapons and killed far more people. The one-time mass shooters are clearly using the most lethal weapons they can get without too much friction. Fully-automatic weapons are expensive, less available, and can create a paper trail with purchase. That’s evidently enough friction to make them not the weapon of choice. Therefore, the existing gun controls on fully-automatic weapons seem to work.

Professional criminals can always get weapons. But they are not the topic of most gun control conversations for that very reason.

States with tight gun control have lower gun violence. But those states are also blue states. The obvious correlation here is that liberals vote for gun control no matter how many or how few problems the state experiences. The state-to-state comparisons do not tell you if gun control works.

Comparing gun ownership in the United States to other countries is more misleading than illuminating because no two situations are alike. The United States isn’t Switzerland and it isn’t Japan.

Chicago has strict gun control and yet it has high gun violence. But that doesn’t tell you gun control doesn’t work. It might tell you Chicago is a blue (liberal) city with a gun violence problem. But that’s all it tells you. We can’t know if Chicago would have even greater problems without the existing gun laws.

Gun ownership is a safeguard against the government turning on citizens. While the professional military will always have overwhelming firepower compared to citizens, private guns would instantly be turned on the unprotected assets and family members of anyone involved in a coup attempt. That’s a safeguard.

The NRA opposes universal background checks for gun purchases because it creates a list of gun owners that would be useful for a government that might want to later confiscate guns. Yet the NRA itself is a list of gun owners, in effect. And any gun owner who buys a weapon, ammo, gun accessories, or uses a gun range is discoverable by their credit card or check purchases. If you subscribe to Guns & Ammo magazine, or visit gun websites, or say pro-gun things on social media, that’s discoverable too. So 98% (just a guess) of gun owners are already discoverable by the government.

There’s probably no practical way to effectively regulate or ban private person-to-person gun sales. But you could pass a law putting some liability (say a $10,000 fine for example) on the private seller in case the gun is used by the buyer for a crime within, let’s say, one year. Under this scenario, you also want to have legal ways to privately sell guns without the liability risk. That could include buying a one-year surety bond, or selling the gun to a licensed dealer. Just brainstorming here.

Gun owners worry about a slippery slope from background checks to gun confiscation. But with hundreds of millions of guns already in circulation, and a gun culture in our DNA, we already have Mutually Assured Destruction if the government were to attempt confiscation. The government itself would fall within a week, in my opinion. I judge the slippery-slope-to-confiscation argument to be a real risk, but a smaller risk than just about any other risk the country routinely discusses.

Politicians and citizens often refer to AR-15 rifles as assault weapons, or assault rifles. But a more accurate description, by far, would be “defensive weapon.” I would imagine that for every 10,000 AR-15 sales, perhaps one nut is buying for actual assault purposes. The rest are for sport shooting and defense. Words matter in political conversations.

According to at least one ER doctor who has seen many gunshot wounds, the high-velocity rounds of an AR-15 will explode organs and make wounds unsurvivable, whereas the typical lower-velocity handgun wounds often leave cleaner holes that can be less lethal. This generality assumes most handguns don’t have special rounds that could also explode organs. And distance from target makes a difference, I hear.

Gun owners say handguns are just as effective as AR-15s for mass shootings. This is clearly untrue for special cases such as the Vegas event where shooting distance was a variable. And I would expect human psychology to favor AR-15s for any “make me famous” killings such as the recent school tragedy. I hate to say it, but a military-looking weapon is going to be more appealing, and feel more dominant, for such killers. It would also be an advantage over police on the scene if the first responders had only handguns and shooting distance is a factor. So while it is true that handguns can produce mass casualties, and have, it is also probably true that access to AR-15s raises the risk of mass shootings and the death count too. No one can estimate how much of a real difference it would make. My best guess is “some,” but a small improvement might be enough to matter.

Gun owners say gun control doesn’t work because any law can be skirted. You can’t plug all of the holes in the system. But gun control doesn’t attempt to plug every hole. It attempts to add some useful friction in places that might improve things by 2%, for example. When it comes to life and death, small improvements count.

Some people tell me there are already universal background checks in the law (and therefore existing lists of gun buyers) but I assume that system is incomplete or we wouldn’t be discussing it. I could use some fact checking there.

If universal gun background checks are objectionable to the NRA, would a no-buy list also be objectionable? A no-buy list also carries the risk of identifying legal gun buyers simply because you have to do a search with the buyer’s name to know if he or she is on the no-buy list. But maybe we could mitigate that risk by designing a system that automatically sends a thousand random names of real people with every query so the government can’t tell who the search was for. The gun store owner would get back only the no-buy names from the thousand, in alphabetical order, so it would be easy to check if the customer in front of you is one of them. Or perhaps the gun story owner can see a list of no-buy people in the buyer’s zip code so no query with the buyer’s name is ever used. Just brainstorming here. Might be other solutions that are better.

I will correct and update this list as I learn more on the topic. How close is my understanding to yours? Let me know in the comments or on on Twitter at @ScottAdamsSays.

I started a Patreon account so my audience can influence my content — via micro-donations as low as one dollar.

Writing about persuasion and politics reduced my income by about 30-40% because of tribal effects. I took that risk with full understanding of the outcome because I thought it was worth educating the public on what they were witnessing.

Patreon funding will persuade me to express my opinions as often as practical without worrying about the sensibilities of sponsors, advertisers, or corporate bosses. I appreciate all of you who are making this happen.

 

 

 

The post Things I Have Learned About Gun Control appeared first on Dilbert Blog.

How to Criticize a Political Opponent Using List Persuasion

I’m seeing a lot of “list” journalism now that is designed to paint President Trump in a negative light. The power of the list is that the more items on the list, the more persuasive it looks, even if the items are weak. Here’s a good example.

If you want to create a persuasive political attack list, be sure to include the following elements in various combinations.

Situations that could turn out bad but probably won’t
Imperfect situations that aren’t terribly important
A rumor that would be bad if  it were true, but probably isn’t true
Words such as “stunning” and “death match” to convey badness without reasons
A misinterpretation of what your target said or meant
Intentional omission of relevant context including any positives
Expert opinions that the candidate who won the presidency with no political experience and had one of the best first years of any president (for conservatives) doesn’t know how to do things
Opinions based on mind-reading, such as “He only cares about one thing!”

The power of the list is that while each item is unimportant, false, overblown, or an obvious misinterpretation of intent, the sheer quantity of items makes it persuasive nonetheless. A list of five criticisms is better than three, and ten is better than five. It doesn’t much matter how solid any of the items are when viewed in isolation. Readers will remember the size of the list more than the items on it.

You see this method used with the Russian collusion narrative. Any one item on the list would mean little or nothing. It only looks persuasive because of quantity plus confirmation bias. Critics will chirp “With so much smoke, there must be fire!” But of course the critics and political enemies created the smoke, not the targeted politician.

I am often criticized for praising effective persuasion and leaving out the ethical dimension. I’ll do it again right here because I trust you to apply your own moral filter. I’m only here to tell you what works and what doesn’t. And this attack-list method totally works. President Trump isn’t the only persuader in the game. His opponents, collectively but not individually, have a great game too. Is their persuasion ethical and moral? I trust you to make that judgement without my assist.

I know most of you bristle at the thought that “the ends justify the means.” So don’t think of it that way. Think of it as benefits exceeding costs. And by that I mean I would lie to a terrorist to save your child’s life. I hope you would do the same for me.

We live in an imperfect world. It doesn’t help to pretend otherwise.

I started a Patreon account so my audience can influence my content — via micro-donations as low as one dollar.

Writing about persuasion and politics reduced my income by about 30-40% because of tribal effects. I took that risk with full understanding of the outcome because I thought it was worth educating the public on what they were witnessing.

Patreon funding will persuade me to express my opinions as often as practical without worrying about the sensibilities of sponsors, advertisers, or corporate bosses. I appreciate all of you who are making this happen.

 

The post How to Criticize a Political Opponent Using List Persuasion appeared first on Dilbert Blog.

Can Humans and Computers Mate and Have Babies?

Can humans have sex with machines and create digital offspring? Almost. Here are the components you need:

The computer needs artificial sex organs to serve as the “input” from a human male. We have that technology already. There are artificial male and female sex toys that seem to get the job done.
The computer needs to analyze the DNA of the human mate. That technology exists, but it will get more advanced in terms of figuring out what kind of humans come from what kinds of DNA.
Once the computer has analyzed the DNA sample, it adds its own digital DNA (conceptually speaking) and creates a simulated baby that lives in the “mother’s” computer software while it continues to learn from outside sources.
Someday, when the simulated baby is sufficiently educated, it can be freed from the mother computer’s “womb” and be ported to an actual robot that represents the mother’s “DNA,” in a conceptual sense, combined with the father’s human DNA. Remember, computers “evolved” as did humans. Any robot will be the result of that human-aided evolution. In other words, an advanced space alien could probably look at human technology samples and deduce which ones came earlier and which ones are the more evolved versions.

Humans are the result of more than DNA. We become who we are through experience as well. The human-computer offspring would be no different. To the father, the child would perhaps remind him of himself but the simulation would have different life experiences informing its pattern-recognition circuitry. You would not end up with a copy of the father any more than you would if he cloned himself in a biological way and raised a baby with identical DNA. Experiences plus DNA make us who we are. The robot would be its own person.

There you have it. Humans can literally have sex with machines and produce robot babies. Most of the parts you need for that to happen already exist. It just doesn’t exist in a packaged form. At least not yet.

I started a Patreon account to fund — via micro-donations as low as one dollar — the expansion of my Periscope content on the topic of persuasion, usually about politics. Step One involves converting my Periscope videos into audio-only podcast form for greater reach. (Almost ready on that.) That work is in progress. I’ll work on topic indexes next, and perhaps topic summaries in text form. YouTube is a lower priority because fans already post my Periscopes there. At some point I might do that myself.

Patreon funding will motivate me to express my opinions as often as practical without worrying about the sensibilities of sponsors, advertisers, or corporate bosses. I appreciate all of you who are making this happen.

The post Can Humans and Computers Mate and Have Babies? appeared first on Dilbert Blog.

What if the News Reported Only Facts?

The common view we see from the mainstream media is that President Trump is a monster and there is no doubt about it. In support of that view, they offer plenty of evidence. And by evidence, I mean they hallucinate they can read minds.

Pundit creates news by reading minds

One of the biggest illusions of life is that we humans are good at deducing the inner thoughts of both strangers and loved ones based on observing their actions. The truth is that we are terrible at knowing what others are thinking. We just think we are good at it. No one is good at it. No one.

Need proof of that claim?

Think about the last disagreement you had with a romantic partner. There’s a high likelihood that one of you was incorrectly interpreting the thoughts of the other. And a big cause of that wrongness is the illusion that people make decisions based on one variable. We don’t. Our decisions are based on lots of variables — so many, in fact, that often we are not entirely aware of why we make our own decisions, much less why others do.

The business model of the news media has moved away from hard reporting and toward punditry and opinion. Viewers enjoy opinion-driven content and it costs a lot less to produce than hard news. And that means the news industry has moved from factual reporting to — for all practical purposes — some form of imaginary mind reading to fill the hours.

I’ll need some examples to make my point. Below I will imagine how several headline stories about President Trump could have been reported factually without the mind reading. I include the mind reading interpretations for contrast.

Birtherism

Factual Report: Donald Trump exploited doubts within the Republican base about President Obama’s birth certificate to gain a political advantage. This is a common political tactic. Candidate Trump used the same strategy against Ted Cruz, who was born in Canada but is an American citizen.
Mind Reading: We can read Trump’s inner racist mind and we know the real reason he was involved with birtherism is to send a silent dog whistle to the racists in the Republican party.

Some illegal Mexican immigrants are criminals and some are not

Factual Report: Donald Trump announced his candidacy for President with a speech in which he noted that some illegal immigrants from Mexico are criminals.
Mind Reading: Candidate Trump secretly believes all Mexicans are rapists. We know that to be true because he said “some” illegal immigrants from Mexico he assumes are “good people.” That is a clear sign that he is thinking no one from Mexico is a good person, even though “some” is not an indication of percentage.

Charlottesville

Factual Report: President Trump said there were “fine people” on both sides of the Charlottesville protests. When asked to clarify if that meant the racists with tiki torches were fine people, the President clarified that he disavowed that group and was talking about non-racists who might have been there to support keeping historical Civil War statues that many believe are offensive.
Mind Reading: Even though President Trump clarified that he disavows the racists, we can read his inner thoughts and it is clear he thinks racists are fine people because he knows he is one.

KKK Disavowal

Factual Report: In a CNN interview with Jake Tapper, candidate Trump did not take the opportunity Tapper repeatedly gave him to denounce the KKK and David Duke. President Trump said he had some audio problems and didn’t hear the question properly. He clarified the next day that he does disavow the KKK and David Duke, as he has several times in the past.
Mind Reading: President Trump is secretly fond of the KKK and David Duke and was sending a secret dog whistle to racists. That’s why he refused to disavow them until he was badgered into it. But his disavowals were dishonest because he secretly supports them.

Judge Curiel

Factual Report: Candidate Trump employed a common legal strategy by questioning the objectivity of the judge for the Trump University trial. The strategy was a solid one because it biased the judge to rule favorably for Trump to avoid the appearance of bias. As it turned out, the judge scheduled the trial for after the election, which was unnecessarily generous to Trump. A more normal schedule would have put the trial before election. The potential bias Trump called out was that because of his immigration plan, Trump was deeply unpopular with Americans of Mexican heritage. Lawyers routinely consider that sort of potential bias.
Mind Reading: Trump is racist against people with Mexican heritage and believes they can’t be good judges.

Shithole Countries

Factual Reporting: In a non-public meeting with other politicians, President Trump used strong language (shithole countries) to question why our immigration policies allow in so many people from economically disadvantaged countries instead of economically advanced countries such as Norway.
Mind Reading: President Trump called black and brown countries “shitholes” because he is a racist.

My interpretation of what we all have watched for the past two-and-a-half years is that the anti-Trump media created the “monster” version of Trump based on mind-reading punditry. Factual reporting would not have created that impression in the public’s mind. The public had to be primed, and it had to be reminded every day by the mind-reading pundits that Trump was a monster.

The mind-reading pundits have done a horrible disservice to the country, although I suspect most were operating under the illusion they can accurately read the mind of strangers. And in one of the most successful persuasion plays in history, the anti-Trump media pinned the blame for rising racial tensions on Trump. To be fair, he made it easy. Even I graded him an F in race relations. But not because I can read his mind. I just think he could have done a lot more to persuade-away the Trump-monster illusion created by his detractors.

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I started a Patreon account to fund — via micro-donations as low as one dollar — the expansion of my Periscope content on the topic of persuasion, usually about politics. Step One involves converting my Periscope videos into audio-only podcast form for greater reach. That work is in progress. I’ll work on topic indexes next, and perhaps topic summaries in text form. YouTube is a lower priority because fans already post my Periscopes there. At some point I might do that myself.

Patreon funding will motivate me to express my opinions as often as practical without worrying about the sensibilities of sponsors, advertisers, or corporate bosses. I appreciate all of you who are making this happen.

The post What if the News Reported Only Facts? appeared first on Dilbert Blog.

The Charlottesville Fake News Was the Best Persuasion Play of the Past Year

Now that some time has passed, and emotions have subsided a bit, I can tell you about the best persuasion play of the past year. The credit goes to the anti-Trump media. They convinced much of the world that the President of the United States referred to a bunch of racists with tiki torches in Charlottesville as “fine people.”

What President Trump did say is that some “fine people” were at the event. I see only two ways to interpret that statement. One interpretation is completely ordinary and the other is batshit crazy. The batshit crazy interpretation is the one the anti-Trump media persuaded you is the real one. They would have you believe that the President of the United States publicly and unabashedly sided with self-labelled racists who were chanting anti-Jewish slogans. We are asked to believe President Trump took sides with the anti-semitic chanters despite having a Jewish daughter, Jewish grandkids, Jewish son-in-law, and several Jewish top advisors. We also know President Trump is so popular in Israel that they are considering naming a train station after him. And Netanyahu gets along with President Trump great. Probably has something to do with President Trump’s decision to move the American embassy to Jerusalem.

Amazingly, the anti-Trump media successfully persuaded half the public in this country that President Trump intentionally and publicly took sides with racists who have intense hatred for his family and close advisors. President Trump clarified soon after his first statement on Charlottesville that he disavowed the racists. But the haters didn’t believe it. They were locked in their hallucination bubble.

Let’s compare two interpretations of President Trump’s “fine people” statement.

Batshit Crazy Interpretation: President Trump is so dumb, and so racist, that he decided to publicly side with racists against his own family and his closest advisors. And yet, while being so dumb, he somehow succeeded in multiple fields and became President of the United States with no prior experience. This interpretation also requires that Israel, his family, and his closest advisors are so dumb that they haven’t noticed how racist President Trump is against them.

or…

Totally Ordinary Interpretation: President Trump assumed there were some non-racist Republicans at the event for their own reasons, such as supporting historical landmarks, or supporting free speech no matter how awful it is. And he was right, although there were not many of them. Here’s a clip of some “fine people” who were in attendance. They say they like free speech and they hate racists.

We all know President Trump has a track record of speaking out on a variety of topics without having all the details. That’s one of the few things that both his supporters and his detractors can agree on. So compare the hypothesis that he decided to side with racists against the interests of his own family, in public, while President, to the hypothesis that he thought (correctly) that some non-racist Republicans were also in attendance.

Which of those two versions of events seems most likely to you?

Is it even close?

Man tries to distinguish an apple from a banana and fails

I don’t blame the public for falling for this well-orchestrated persuasion scheme by the anti-Trump media. Their collective persuasion on this point has been solid. Lately, the people opposing Trump simply list Charlottesville as one of the many “proofs” of his racism, as if no further explanation is needed. I can’t tell if the pundits believe their own interpretations or if they simply think the public will. It would look the same.

I propose a test to see if anti-Trump news professionals and pundits who consider Charlottesville as proof of President Trump’s racism will commit to their positions in public. You can test this at home with your Trump-hating friends. Simply print out my blog post and ask them to read the two interpretations I listed and ask them to tell you which one seems most likely. If your subject tries to change the topic, you have your answer.

I predict that 100% of people who believe President Trump called racists “fine people” will change the subject as soon as you make them read the two competing interpretations of events in close proximity. That’s your tell.

And if you want to rub it in, ask your Trump-hating subjects if they believe President Trump would NOT have pursued the birther issue against a white opponent if the opportunity had been the same. Remind your subject that President Trump uses every weapon available to him, all the time, no matter what. He not only accused Ted Cruz of being born in Canada but he suggested Cruz’ father might have been in on assassinating Kennedy.

I tested the birther argument today on Twitter when a critic brought it up. He changed the subject.

Enjoy!

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I started a Patreon account to fund — via micro-donations as low as one dollar — the expansion of my Periscope content on the topic of persuasion, usually about politics. Step One involves converting my Periscope videos into audio-only podcast form for greater reach. That work is in progress. I’ll work on topic indexes next, and perhaps topic summaries in text form. YouTube is a lower priority because fans already post my Periscopes there. At some point I might do that myself.

Patreon funding will motivate me to express my opinions as often as practical without worrying about the sensibilities of sponsors, advertisers, or corporate bosses. I appreciate all of you who are making this happen.

The post The Charlottesville Fake News Was the Best Persuasion Play of the Past Year appeared first on Dilbert Blog.

Persuasion Reading List – Updated 1/18

Update: New Book added: Win Bigly – By Scott Adams

Readers of this blog have been asking me to update my persuasion reading list. If you wonder why people are asking a cartoonist about persuasion, it is because I am a trained hypnotist, and mention that skill often in the context of blogging and Periscoping. I have also studied the various tools of persuasion for years because they are helpful in my job as a writer. In my New York Times best selling book Win Bigly I teach you President Trump’s world-class persuasion techniques that you can use for your work or personal life.

I recommend reading these books in the order listed. If you decide to skip a few, I strongly recommend reading the first book on the list, Influence, as a grounding for the rest.

Influence – by Robert B. Cialdini PhD

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life – by Scott Adams

Win Bigly – By Scott adams (Persuasion Tips based on the 2016 election)

Impossible to Ignore – Dr. Carmen Simon

Trump: The Art of the Deal – Donald J. Trump

What Every BODY is Saying – by Joe Navarro

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business – by Charles Duhigg

Thinking, Fast and Slow – by Daniel Kahneman

Salt Sugar Fat – by Michael Moss

Pre-Suasion – By Robert B. Cialdini PhD

Win Your Case: How to Present, Persuade, and Prevail–Every Place, Every Time  – by Gerry Spence

How to Win Friends & Influence People – by Dale Carnegie

The Design of Everyday Things – by Don Norman

How to Write a Good Advertisement – by Victor O. Schwab

The Secret to Selling Anything – by Harry Browne

The One Sentence Persuasion Course – 27 Words to Make the World Do Your Bidding – by Blair Warren

Note: I removed several books from earlier versions of the list to give it some focus. I also removed the books about hypnosis because you can’t effectively learn that sort of skill from books.

 

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I started a Patreon account to fund — via micro-donations as low as one dollar — the expansion of my Periscope content on the topic of persuasion, usually about politics. Step One involves converting my Periscope videos into audio-only podcast form for greater reach. That work is in progress. I’ll work on topic indexes next, and perhaps topic summaries in text form. YouTube is a lower priority because fans already post my Periscopes there. At some point I might do that myself.

Patreon funding will motivate me to express my opinions as often as practical without worrying about the sensibilities of sponsors, advertisers, or corporate bosses. I appreciate all of you who are making this happen.

The post Persuasion Reading List – Updated 1/18 appeared first on Dilbert Blog.

How to Make Your Opponents Try (and fail) to Prove a Negative

Sometimes you can prove an alleged event did happen, but you generally can’t prove something did not happen. For example, if police have clear video footage of a crime in progress, several direct witnesses, and DNA evidence too, you can say they proved the defendant did the crime. But if your neighbor says an angel visited him in his bedroom at night, and there were no witnesses or physical traces left behind, you can’t prove it didn’t happen. All you can say for sure is that you don’t have any evidence of it happening.

So if you want to drive a political opponent crazy, allege that he or she did something evil, provide no direct evidence, and force them to do the impossible: Prove it didn’t happen.

Consider the Russian collusion investigation. We have seen no conclusive evidence that President Trump colluded with Russia to win the election. But the mere existence of an investigation into the allegations, along with lots of “Russia, Russia, Russia” news coverage on tangential topics, primes us to think “Where there is this much smoke, there must be fire.” To escape this trap, President Trump would need to do the impossible. He would need to prove he didn’t collude with Russia in some secret way that left no evidence behind. And you can’t prove a negative, as the saying goes.

So how do you defend yourself when you can’t prove something didn’t happen? One way is to turn the same trick against your attackers. An emerging story this week is that Republican Representative Devin Nunes wrote a secret memo detailing alleged various abuses to the FISA system that are somehow related to the same FBI and DOJ players who worked on the Russian collusion case. The public hasn’t seen the memo, politicians are barred from discussing it in detail, and there’s a good chance we will never see it in its full context. The longer we hear about the secret memo without knowing its contents, and the more speculation that gathers around it, the more the public will be thinking “Where there is this much smoke, there must be fire.”

You can’t prove a negative. But you can return the favor and put your opponent in the same position.

 

 

The post How to Make Your Opponents Try (and fail) to Prove a Negative appeared first on Dilbert Blog.

Are the Fake News Awards Persuasive?

By now you know President Trump announced his winners for the Fake News Awards. You can see them here. Let’s talk about what he got right in terms of persuasion.

The very idea of a Fake News Award is unusual and provocative. That guarantees attention. Getting attention is step one in any persuasion play. Nearly everyone who cares about American politics is aware of the story. I’m no historian, but I doubt any prior president has combined theater and politics so ambitiously and so effectively. President Trump is intentionally and deftly “bringing the show” on this topic and lots of others. If you don’t understand persuasion, you might think he is just being crazy or narcissistic or authoritarian or some other misdiagnosis. But if you know that attention and memory are the primary levers of persuasion, and you see how often he commands both, you might recognize that you are seeing something special here in terms of a talent stack. (A talent stack is a combination of skills that are designed to work well together, such as the collective sub-talents for persuasion, theater, and politics.)

President Trump didn’t need to announce the Fake News Awards ahead of time. He could have simply put together the list and tweeted it any time he wanted. But he knows anticipation controls attention, and it amps up the perceived importance of whatever follows. He primed us. His supporters were salivating for the “good stuff” to come, while his detractors in the anti-Trump press probably hoped they didn’t make the top ten. (Then they did.)

Many of you wonder why he didn’t do a televised awards event. I’m sure the idea was considered. But in my view, that would have been a step too far. The Fake News Awards are, by design, supposed to be humorous without being funny. By that I mean the situation itself is funny. And that’s the perfect “light touch” for a Modern Presidential event. If it had been a televised event with some glitz, you would have wondered if that was a good use of your tax dollars.

President Trump also had what I call the comparison problem. We all hold in our minds a standard for what an awards event should look like. A simple press event would have been disappointing because we would imagine how it could be more like the Golden Globes, and we would reflexively judge it to be underwhelming. And if he matched the production quality of a traditional awards show, critics would say he isn’t focused on the job of governing. A live awards event would have seemed to viewers, because of the comparison problem, either too little or too much. There was no “just right” to be had with that model. But a tweeted list of winners gets the point across without risk. It was the right choice.

One of President Trump’s biggest persuasion challenges is that critics accuse him of being authoritarian when it comes to pushing back at the press. They tell us that only a dictator — or wannabe dictator — tries to muffle a free press. But at the same time, 90% of press coverage of this president is negative, and a shocking percentage of it is inaccurate. The pundits are far worse than the standard “news” professionals, of course, willing to pedal speculation as pre-facts. It’s a legitimate problem for this president, and he wanted to address it without going full-dictator. He needed a light touch that was so obviously not-a-dictator-thing-to-do that critics would have to use pretzel logic to say it was. (Which they are, adding to the humor of the situation.)

When you do a Fake News Award, you’d better have your facts and your sources straight, and you’d better show them. President Trump did that. Had the President simply declared a story to be fake, we might wonder if he was exaggerating or lying. But when you see the story and the correction right in front of you, it’s hard to argue he got any of it wrong. And you know the press was salivating to say he did.

A live awards event also would have provided the anti-Trump press and pundits a visual weapon to use against him. We humans are visual creatures, and we reflexively conflate situations that look similar. If President Trump had held the stage for an hour complaining about the free press, that looks dictatorish no matter how you try to soften it. But a tweet that has nothing but facts and sources gives critics no visual fodder with which to counter-persuade. All they have are the visuals from the fake news stories themselves.

Normally it is good persuasion technique to lead with strong visuals. But in this situation, it would have been a mistake to give the critics easy visual targets.

I’ve taught you about pacing and leading in this blog, and in my book, Win Bigly. The technique involves agreeing with a subject you want to persuade (pacing) until it seems you are both on the same page. Once you have paced, you can lead. In this case, the President listed ten Fake News winners we can clearly see were fake (or at least wrong). Then he added an eleventh item that claims the Russia Collusion story is fake because it has produced no evidence the President was involved in any sort of crime. As you know, a lack of evidence is not proof of innocence. But after reading ten indisputable fake news examples in a row, your mind is primed to lump the eleventh with the first ten. That is solid persuasion technique. (A persuasion rookie might have put the Russia story first on the list because of its relative importance to the presidency.)

Overall, I’d give this an A+ for persuasion technique. President Trump made his points without going over the top, and without giving his critics fodder for counter-persuasion. Considering all the ways this could have gone wrong, it’s impressive how many traps he avoided while hitting his targets. This is the sort of persuasion you only see from a very stable genius.

For more lessons on presidential persuasion, see my book, Win Bigly.

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